Date: January 28, 2009
Location: Room 2077 of the UFMG Institute of Exact Sciences

Speaker: Prof. João Cândido Portinari, Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT – and current General Director of the Portinari Project.

The Portinari Project, based at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, has been dedicated, since 1979, to collecting, cataloguing, researching and making available data about the work, life and times of the Brazilian artist Cândido Portinari.

For the implementation of its hypermedia database, as well as its needs in the area of ​​attribution of authorship of paintings, and in the activities that seek to provide access to these contents, the Portinari Project developed, adapted and applied cutting-edge technologies in the areas of processing digital images, classification, indexing and cataloging of heterogeneous objects, non-conventional databases, automatic classification of objects, neural networks, etc., with the collaboration of the departments of mathematics, physics, IT and engineering at PUC-Rio.

Summary: In this presentation, professor João Cândido Portinari used multimedia resources to show some results and perspectives of the Portinari Project, especially in relation to the fascinating challenge of distributing this highly structured and interrelated information, with an appropriate hypermedia interface, to an audience that ranges from the primary school network – over the last 7 years the Project has developed an increasingly significant educational action – to specialists in all areas involved.