Abstract
Roads have multiple effects on wildlife; amphibians are one of the groups more intensely affected by roadkills. Monitoring roadkills is expensive and time consuming. Automated mapping systems for detecting roadkills, based on robotic computer vision techniques, are largely necessary. Amphibians can be recognised by a set of features as shape, size, colouration, habitat and location. This species identification by using multiple features at the same time is known as "jizz". In a similar way to human vision, computer vision algorithms must incorporate a prioritisation process when analysing the objects in an image. Our main goal here was to give a numerical priority sequence of particular characteristics of roadkilled amphibians to improve the computing and learning process of algorithms. We asked hundred and five amateur and professional herpetologists to answer a simple test of five sets with ten images each of roadkilled amphibians, in order to determine which body parts or characteristics (body form, colour, and other patterns) are used to identify correctly the species. Anura was the group most easily identified when it was roadkilled and Caudata was the most difficult. The lower the taxonomic level of amphibian, the higher the difficulty of identifying them, both in Anura and Caudata. Roadkilled amphibians in general and Anura group were mostly identified by the Form, by the combination of Form and Colour, and finally by Colour. Caudata was identified mainly on Form and Colour and on Colour. Computer vision algorithms must incorporate these combinations of features, avoiding to work exclusively in one specific feature.

Abstract
Herdade da Contenda (HC), located in Moura municipality, Beja district (Alentejo province) in the south of Portugal (southwestern Iberia Peninsula), is a national hunting area with 5270ha. The development of an integrated system that aims to make the management of the natural and cultural heritage resources will be very useful for an effective management of this area. This integrated system should include the physical characterization of the territory, natural conservation, land use and land management themes, as well the cultural heritage resources. This paper presents a new tool for an integrated environmental management system of the HC, which aims to produce maps under a GIS open source environment (QGIS). The application is composed by a single button which opens a window. The window is composed by twelve menus (File, DRASTIC, Forest Fire Risk, Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), Bioclimatic Index, Cultural Heritage, Fauna and Flora, Ortofoto, Normalizes Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Digital Elevation Model (DEM), Land Use Land Cover Cover (LULC) and Help. Several inputs are requires to generate these maps, e.g. DEM, geologic information, soil map, hydraulic conductivity information, LULC map, vulnerability and economic information, NDVI. Six buttons were added to the toolbar which allows to manipulate the information in the map canvas: Zoom in, Zoom out, Pan, Print/Layout and Clear. This integrated and open source GIS environment management system was developed for the HC area, but could be easily adapted to other natural or protected area. Despite the lack of data, the methodology presented fulfills the objectives.

Abstract
Recent embedded processor architectures containing multiple heterogeneous cores and non-coherent caches renewed attention to the use of Software Transactional Memory (STM) as a building block for developing parallel applications. STM promises to ease concurrent and parallel software development, but relies on the possibility of abort conflicting transactions to maintain data consistency, which in turns affects the execution time of tasks carrying transactions. Because of this fact the timing behaviour of the task set may not be predictable, thus it is crucial to limit the execution time overheads resulting from aborts. In this paper we formalise a FIFO-based algorithm to order the sequence of commits of concurrent transactions. Then, we propose and evaluate two non-preemptive and one SRP-based fully-preemptive scheduling strategies, in order to avoid transaction starvation.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper presents a framework for management of flexible energy loads in the context of the Internet of Things and the Smart Grid. The framework takes place in the European project Arrowhead, and aims at taking advantage of the flexibility (in time and power) of energy production and consumption offered by sets of devices, appliances or buildings, to help at solving the issue of fluctuating energy production of renewable energies. The underlying concepts are explained, the actors involved in the framework, their incentives and interactions are detailed, and a technical overview is provided. An implementation of the framework is presented, as well as the expected results of the pilots.

Abstract
The Arrowhead project [1] considers to normalize all interactions involving embedded systems by mediating them through services. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is applied to both the interactions that provide the service requested by the user, and other support actions such as the authentication and registration of the devices, and the services they provide, the look-up of devices and service provided, and orchestration of services for creation of more complex services. To this purpose, services are divided into Core Services, which are present in every environment supporting Arrowhead applications, and user services that implement the applications. The Core Services set comprises, at least, Authentication Service, Registration Service and Orchestration Service.