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This paper looks over the perpetual fight that low density regions must face in what regards the emergence of economic opportunities, employment, income and production growth. It is known that tourism demand for nature and protected areas is increasing in this more and more urban world, what can open some doors for innovation to take place. The project we’ve been working on is focused on sustainable tourism practices in a protected area (Malcata Mountain Reserve), via electric mobility, which is known for its zero emission, non-polluting and noise free travelling. A broader study is taking place under the Interreg Funding Program, known as Moveletur Project. Our goals are to sponsor a model of sustainable and green tourism for visitors of natural areas, to produce a network of green tourism itineraries linking places of natural and/or cultural value using rechargeable vehicles and to encourage tourism sector entrepreneurs with a new service for their activity. Combined work with other natural areas is essential to increase outcomes. After the conclusion of project (by the end of 2018) there will be better information concerning natural and cultural values that natural areas hold and that can be used for tourists’ pleasure, there will be a more dutiful way of doing tourism in natural areas, expectantly it will address job creation and improved territorial competitiveness, tourism experiences will have more quality and, finally, using technological features, will support smart villages further development.

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Experiences with online learning in higher education are increasing in number. This is due to advancements in technology, technological savviness of teachers and students, evolution of teaching practices, and changes in student expectations. That is why understanding learners’ and teachers’ needs, expectations, and perceptions of their proficiency and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is critical to the success of the integration of technologies in higher education. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on teachers’ needs and expectations about ICT adoption in higher education, based on the results of a questionnaire, applied in a Portuguese university. The questionnaire explores what motivates teachers to use ICT tools in the context of teaching in higher education. It also intended to reveal which tools are most used from the ones available, as well as the needs and requirements that are not covered by the existing tools and services provided. The results allowed to analyze the usefulness of the measures implemented for teachers and consider new ones, more appropriate to the reality in permanent change by the constant evolution of the technologies used in the pedagogical practices. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.

Abstract
Infantile Hemangiomas (IH) make up the most common type of benign vascular tumors affecting children. They can grow for several months until beginning to involute. In present-day clinical practice there's no objective monitoring protocol. For more objective measures, an automatic evaluation system (CAD system) is needed to aid clinicians in assessing the effectiveness of a given patient's response to a treatment. One of the stages of these systems is the lesion segmentation. This work addresses the automatic segmentation of lesions in IH. Acknowledging that the methods in the literature for IH lesion segmentation lag behind the state-of-the-art in the image segmentation community, we conduct a comparison of various methodologies for the segmentation of the IH, including both shallow and deep methodologies. Acknowledging the lack of data in the field for a robust learning of deep models, we also evaluate transfer learning techniques to benefit from knowledge extracted in other skin lesions. The best results were obtained with the shortest path method and a multiscale convolutional neural network that merges two pipelines working at different scales. Although promising, the results put in evidence the need for better databases, collected under suitable acquisition protocols.