Computer-based pre-diagnosis of diseases through medical imaging is a task worked on for many years. The so-called fundus images stand out since they do not have uniform illumination and are highly sensitive to noise. One of the diseases that can be pre-diagnosed through fundus images is age-related macular degeneration, which initially manifests as the appearance of lesions called drusen. Several ways of pre-diagnosing macular degeneration have been proposed, methods based entirely on the segmentation of drusen with prior image processing have been designed and applied, and methods based on image pre-processing and subsequent conversion to feature vectors, or patterns, to be classified by a Machine-Learning model have also been developed. Finally, in recent years, the use of Deep-Learning models, particularly Convolutional Networks, has been proposed and used in classification problems where the data are only images. The latter has allowed the so-called transfer learning, which consists of using the learning achieved in the solution of one problem to solve another. In this paper, we propose the use of transfer learning through the Xception Deep Convolutional Neural Network to detect age-related macular degeneration in fundus images. The performance of the Xception model was compared against six other state-of-the-art models with a dataset created from images available in public and private datasets, which were divided into training/validation and test; with the training/validation set, the training was made using 10-fold cross-validation. The results show that the Xception neural network obtained a validation accuracy that surpasses other models, such as the VGG-16 or VGG-19 networks, and had an accuracy higher than 80% in the test set. We consider that the contributions of this work include the use of a Convolutional Neural Network model for the detection of age-related macular degeneration through the classification of fundus images in those affected by AMD (drusen) and the images of healthy patients. The performance of this model is compared against other methods featured in the state-of-the-art approaches, and the best model is tested on a test set outside the training and validation set.

Software engineering (SE) has been defined as the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software. Enhancement is a type of software maintenance. SE involves software planning (SP), and SP includes prediction. In this study, we propose the application of two types of support vector regression (SVR) termed ε-SVR and ν-SVR to predict the duration of the software enhancement. A SVR is a type of support vector machine, which is a machine learning technique. Two data sets of software projects were used for training and testing the ε-SVR and ν-SVR. The prediction accuracy of the SVRs was compared to that of a statistical regression. Based on statistical tests, results showed that a ε-SVR with linear kernel was statistically better than that of a statistical regression model when software projects were enhanced on Mid Range platform and coded in programming languages of third generation.

Productivity prediction of a software engineer is necessary to determine whether corrective actions are needed and to identify improvement options to produce better results. It can be performed from abstraction levels such as organisation, team project, individual project, or task. Software engineering education and training has approached its efforts at individual level. In this study, the authors propose the application of a data mining technique named support vector regression (SVR) to predict the productivity of individuals (i.e. graduate students). Its prediction accuracy was compared with that of a statistical regression model, and with those of two neural networks. After applying a Wilcoxon statistical test, results suggest that an SVR with linear kernel using new and changed lines of code, and programming language experience as independent variables, could be used for predicting the individual productivity of a higher education graduate student, when software projects coded in either Java or C++ programming languages, have been developed by following a disciplined process specifically proposed for academic environments.

Social networking potentially offers improved distance learning environments by enabling the exchange of resources between learners. The existence of properly classified content results in an enhanced distance learning experience in which appropriate materials can be retrieved efficiently; however, for this to happen, metadata needs to be present. As manual metadata generation is time-costly and often eschewed by the authors of the social web resources, automatic generation is a fertile area for research as several kinds of metadata, such as author or topic, can be generated or extracted from the contents of a document. In this paper we propose a novel metadata generation system aimed at automatically tagging distance learning resources. This system is based on a recently-created intelligent pattern classifier; specifically, it trains on a corpus of example documents and then predicts the topic of a new document based on its text content. Metadata is generated in order to achieve a better integration of the web resources with the social networks. Experimental results for a two-class problem are promising and encourage research geared towards applying this method to multiple topics.