Abstract
Visual impairment and blindness caused by infectious diseases has been greatly reduced, but increasing numbers of people are at risk of age-related visual impairment. Visual information is the basis for most navigational tasks, so visually impaired individuals are at disadvantage because appropriate information about the surrounding environment is not available. With the recent advances in inclusive technology it is possible to extend the support given to people with visual impairment during their mobility. In this context we propose a system, named SmartVision, whose global objective is to give blind users the ability to move around in unfamiliar environments, whether indoor or outdoor, through a user friendly interface. This paper is focused mainly in the development of the computer vision module of the SmartVision system.

Abstract
Regular video cameras shoot normally at 25/30 frames per second (fps). Actually there are available in the market equipments that allow us to acquire video at 1.000.000 fps. When we observe a video sequence it becomes noticeable that great part of the information remains unchanged regardless of the bit rate or frame rate used. One origin of discontinuity in video signals is directly related to movement. Several areas use high frame rate images to analyze and comprehend certain events or effects, biomechanical engineering is one of them. Biomechanics engineering studies the mechanics of a living body, especially the forces exerted by muscles and gravity on the skeletal structure. Some examples are athlete assessment, were images are capture and then the acquired parameters are analyzed. This article describes a new methodology to decrease the space needed to store high frame rate image sequences in the specific case of biomechanical related areas.

Abstract
With the recent expansion of services available in the Web, the Internet is becoming more and more a network of services, at a global scale. These services cover the majority of business areas, such as: bank account management, trip reservation, hotel bookings, information search portals, social networks, etc. A related subarea is the georreferencing of objects and people. The appearance of services like Google Earth and Virtual Earth has created enormous Web based service creation opportunities, allowing the interconnection of the digital and real worlds. In this work we present a project intended for locating the physical places associated with a person, based on his email address. This project implements a search portal that associates a user to an email and a set of user defined locations.

Abstract
Nowadays, Universities and other Training Institutions need to clearly identify the Information Technology (IT) skills that companies demand from IT practitioners. This is essential not only for offering appropriate and reliable university degrees, but also to help future IT professionals on where to focus in order to achieve better job positions. In an attempt to address this issue, this study rely on 102 Chief Information Officers, from Iberian large companies, to characterize current IT professionals and what is expected from future hirings. Results revealed that IT Technicians and Senior Analysts are the predominant positions and also that future hiring will request candidates with at least two to five years of work experience. The two most important skills found were core functions at the IT department: business knowledge and user support. In contrast, traditional competences such as web development and management of emerging technologies were less demanded. © 2010, IGI Global.

Abstract
As we observe society in our days, we can see that people live longer; this means that we have an older population, more likely to have health issues. The special needs presented by the elderly are becoming a major concern for all of us, along with the lack of time demonstrated by society as a whole and, as a consequence, the lack of time is seen when families are not able to take care of their own elders. Many solutions are being presented in order to solve this problem. Some of them are taking advantage of the new technological developments in the body sensor networks area. In this paper we propose the architecture of a system called Elder Care. The Elder Care solution has two primary goals: monitoring vital signs, sending alerts to family and to specialized help and providing a social network in order to help end the elderly's social isolation. © Copyright by authors.

Abstract
Computed tomography (CT) can contribute to the early detection of lung diseases like emphysema, a chronic and progressive disease. Texture-based methods can be explored to classify regions of interest (ROI's) into emphysematous areas and normal areas. In this work we evaluated the importance of a set of parameters in the classification of lung CT images, such as the size of the ROIs, the quantization level, and textural features used in classification. A support vector machine was used as classifier. The performance of the designed classifier was evaluated using a 10-fold cross validation method and the results compared based on overall accuracy, sensibility and specificity. This study shows that textural features have a good discriminatory power in the classification of lung emphysema in CT images.