Abstract
Aging is a natural process during which a person's physical and mental condition will degrade, imposing limitations on their lifestyle. The consequences of aging can be aggravated when the elderly permanently move to an elderly care center, causing a decline in social relations and contact with family and friends, with negative effects on the person's well-being. Therefore, it is important to act to maintain these relationships in the later stages of life. In this work we propose a roadmap to introduce and evaluate the usage of telepresence robots in elderly care centers, so that family and friends can interact with the elderly more often and with better quality. The proposal defines a set of steps to introduce the robots into the care center environment, as well as an evaluation methodology to assess the success of implementing the roadmap.

Abstract
Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) is a remote sensing technique very effective for the measurement of small displacements of the Earth's surface over large areas at a very low cost in comparison with conventional geodetic techniques. Advanced InSAR time series (Multi-Temporal InSAR or MT-InSAR) algorithms for monitoring and investigating surface displacement on Earth are based on conventional radar interferometry. These techniques allow us to measure deformation with uncertainties of one millimeter per year, interpreting time series of interferometric phases at coherent point scatterers (PS) without the need for human or special equipment presence. By applying InSAR processing techniques to a series of radar images over the same region, it is possible to monitor large areas and detect vertical displacements of ground, and infrastructures on the ground, and therefore identify abnormal or excessive movements indicating potential problems requiring detailed ground investigation. In this paper, we apply the PS-InSAR technique to a dataset of ERS-1/2 and Envisat radar images covering the period 1993-2010, to monitor the northern sector of the Valencia basin (Valencia city and its surroundings). Some subsiding areas were detected, with rates up to -5 mm/yr, whose causes are being investigated.

Abstract
Our department has long been an advocate of the functional-first school of programming and has been teaching Haskell as a first language in introductory programming course units for 20 years. Although the functional style is largely beneficial, it needs to be taught in an enthusiastic and captivating way to fight the unusually high computer science drop-out rates and appeal to a heterogeneous population of students. This paper reports our experience of restructuring, over the last 5 years, an introductory laboratory course unit that trains hands-on functional programming concepts and good software development practices. We have been using game programming to keep students motivated, and following a methodology that hinges on test-driven development and continuous bidirectional feedback. We summarise successes and missteps, and how we have learned from our experience to arrive at a model for comprehensive and interactive functional game programming assignments and a general functionally-powered automated assessment platform, that together provide a more engaging learning experience for students. In our experience, we have been able to teach increasingly more advanced functional programming concepts while improving student engagement.

Abstract
This paper presents a novel descriptive model for agency in videogames as communication. Literature pertaining to interactive works including videogames has identified the need to overcome dyadic perspectives of communication in such works. Research specifically to do with agency has called for agency to no longer be confused with freedom of action, for an integrated perspective of the player and the system, and for that relationship to be viewed as a conversation. The transactional model in this paper achieves this by proposing a nested hierarchy of levels of communication that operate as an implicit contract, negotiated between the system and the player, where the object of the transaction is bio-costs, effected through the signalling of the attainability of understandings. The paper describes research antecedents, a research agenda, the basis for the model, the model itself, examples of how the model can be used to describe videogame designs, and future research.

Abstract
Currently the breakthroughs in most computer vision problems have been achieved by applying deep learning methods. The traditional methodologies that used to successfully discriminate the data features appear to be overwhelmed by the capabilities of learning of the deep network architectures. Nevertheless, many recent works choose to integrate the old handcrafted features into the deep convolutional networks to increase even more their impressive performance. In fingerprint recognition, the minutiae are specific points used to identify individuals and their extraction is a crucial module in a fingerprint recognition system. This can only be emphasized by the fact that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sets as a threshold for a positive identification a number of 8 common minutiae. Deep neural networks have been used to learn possible representations of fingerprint minutiae but, however surprisingly, in this paper it is shown that for now the best choice for an automatic minutiae extraction system is still the traditional road map. A comparison study was conducted with state-of-the-art methods and the best results were achieved by handcraft features. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
Microscopic examination is the reference diagnostic method for several neglected tropical diseases. However, its quality and availability in rural endemic areas is often limited by the lack of trained personnel and adequate equipment. These drawbacks are closely related with the increasing interest in the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems, particularly distributed solutions that provide access to complex diagnosis in rural areas. In this work we present our most recent advances towards the development of a fully automated 3D-printed smartphone microscope with a motorized stage, termed mu SmartScope. The developed prototype allows autonomous acquisition of a pre-defined number of images at 1000x magnification, by using a motorized automated stage fully powered and controlled by a smartphone, without the need of manual focus. In order to validate the prototype as a reliable alternative to conventional microscopy, we evaluated the mu SmartScope performance in terms of: resolution; field of view; illumination; motorized stage performance (mechanical movement precision/resolution and power consumption); and automated focus. These results showed similar performances when compared with conventional microscopy, plus the advantage of being low-cost and easy to use, even for non-experts in microscopy. To extract these results, smears infected with blood parasites responsible for the most relevant neglected tropical diseases were used. The acquired images showed that it was possible to detect those agents through images acquired via the mu SmartScope, which clearly illustrate the huge potential of this device, specially in developing countries with limited access to healthcare services.