Abstract
Assistive technology enables people to achieve independence in the accomplishment of their daily tasks and enhance their quality of life. Navigation systems to assist visually impaired people that use computer vision techniques are very resource intensive and as such, not suitable for mobile devices. This work describes a computer vision algorithm intended to reduce processing demands with possible application in portable devices. The model proposed employs 2D-Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (2D-EEMD) in order to reduce the problem complexity. It uses a combination of Peano-Hilbert space filling curves as a dimension reduction of image data and EEMD to implement a fast algorithm. Tests results have shown that Peano-Hilbert EEMD exhibits substantially reduced processing power compared with 2D-EEMD approaches, enabling new opportunities for its use in portable applications on low computer power devices.

Abstract
According to the World Health Organization in 2002 more than 161 million people were visually impaired [1]. The mobility of the visually impaired reveals itself to be a rather complex task, even with the support of inclusive technologies. Currently, the most widespread and used means by the visually impaired people are the white stick and the guide dog, however both show some difficulties in their mobility. The white stick only detects obstacles at the ground level, whilst obtaining a guide dog correctly trained in Portugal is an expensive and slow solution [2], given that the communication between the visually impaired person and the dog is limited. If the blind person had access to reliable information, and in real time, about the environment in which he lives, it certainly would be safer for him to move around it [3]. Thus, more and more, with the increasing development of the technologies, there is the possibility of creating systems that assist the visually impaired people in their task of detecting the obstacles and subsequent orientation. The objective of this article is to create a system that allows the capture of images in real time and that accomplishes the segmentation resorting to the information with disparity. Later on, the result of the image segmentation will be used in a system that offers the visually impaired person information on the environment that surrounds him. The image acquisition is done through a system of stereo vision that captures images from the surrounding environment as the user moves around.

Abstract

Abstract
IdSay is an open domain Question Answering (QA) system for Portuguese. Its current version can be considered a baseline version, using mainly techniques from the area of Information Retrieval (IR). The only external information it uses besides the text. collections is lexical information for Portuguese. It was submitted to the monolingual Portuguese task of the QA track of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum 2008 (QA@CLEF) for the first time, and it answered correctly to 65 of the 200 questions in the first answer, and to 85 answers considering the three answers that could be returned per question. Generally, the types of questions that are answered better by IdSay system are measure factoids, Count factoids and definitions, but there is still work to be done in these areas, as well as in the treatment of time. List questions, location and people/organization factoids are the types of question with more room for improvement.

Abstract
The World Wide Web technology, supported on Internet, is transforming all business activities into information-based activities. As a result, one can see a radical change in the traditional theoretical models and organisation. The small and medium enterprises (SME) are the type of enterprises that can reap more advantages with the usage of Internet for electronic business. We found that current methodologies present gaps which make them inadequate and unable to help the small and medium enterprises define an effective strategy and follow an plausible implementation path. This being so, we propose a methodology to support the complete implementation lifecycle of electronic business in small and medium enterprises. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.

Abstract
Considering that the capacity to innovate is increasingly becoming a decisive factor in the competition between organisations, the study and conception of systems that help the birth of new ideas, products and solutions is rising in importance. In this article, the authors consider the concept of Creative Information Systems and present a proposal for the development of architecture for such a system based on the creative technique of brute thinking.