For a period of 12 months starting in June/2009 PSR financed a scientific research scholarship to the MSc student Vinicius Layter Xavier, as part of an agreement between PSR and COPPETEC Foundation.

The contemplated student is with the Program of Systems Engineering and Computation (PESC) of COPPE/UFRJ, which was evaluated with the highest degree (7) by CAPES in 2010.

The topic of his thesis is Hyperbolic Smoothing Clustering, supervised by Prof. Felipe Maia Galvão França. During the scholarship period he published the paper:

XAVIER, A. E. ; XAVIER, V. L. , Solving the minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem by hyperbolic smoothing and partition into boundary and gravitational regions, Pattern Recognition , v. 44, p. 70-77, 2011.