Tiago Cardoso

Nowadays technology follows us everywhere. However, it is often overlooked when dealing with social issues, despite how easily it might improve the life of countless handicapped individuals. In other words, small pieces of software, under the form of games, can help the individual remain focus and go through treatments and therapies effortlessly. But game development is tricky because simply adopting a software development approach is not enough, as it assumes that games as a software can be developed through the commonly used systematic processes, yet these do have specific requirements. This paper proposes a new game development model to successfully deliver a quality serious game, towards social causes, bearing in mind the specific aspects both from games as a special kind of software and from the target players introducing a therapeutic/clinical perspective in the games development model.

The introduction of new courses on virtual organizations at the engineering education level is an important element for the broad acceptance of this new paradigm. This article summarizes the experience with an initiative of teaching Virtual Enterprises / Virtual Organizations subjects to Electrical and Computer Engineering students. The course structure, both in its lecture and lab work components, is described. Finally, some lessons learned with two editions of this course are presented.

An increasing number of our interactions are mediated through e-technologies. In order to enhance the human’s feeling of presence into these virtual environments, also known as telepresence, the individual is usually embodied into an avatar. The natural adaptation capabilities, underlain by the plasticity of the body schema, of the human being make a body ownership of the avatar possible, in which the user feels more like his/her virtual alter ego than himself/herself. However, this phenomenon only occurs under specific conditions. Two experiments are designed to study the human’s feeling and performance according to a scale of natural relationship between the participant and the avatar. In both experiments, the human-avatar interaction is carried out by a Natural User Interface (NUI) and the individual’s performance is assessed through a behavioural index, based on the concept of affordances, and a questionnaire of presence The first experiment shows that the feeling of telepresence and ownership seem to be greater when the avatar’s kinematics and proportions are close to those of the user. However, the efficiency to complete the task is higher for a more mechanical and stereotypical avatar. The second experiment shows that the manipulation of the viewpoint induces a similar difference across the sessions. Results are discussed in terms of the neurobehavioral processes underlying performance in virtual worlds, which seem to be based on ownership when the virtual artefact ensures a preservation of sensorimotor contingencies, and simple geometrical mapping when the conditions become more artificial.

Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) is a key topic on the Accessibility area, namely in what concerns a Smart-City environment, where humans have to interact with artefacts spread all around one particular city. In the last decade HCI has experienced a significant evolution towards a desired fully natural user interface, for example in what concerns the ability to recognize a wide range of hand gestures in real-time. Some efforts have lately been made in the hardware sector in order to deploy sensors that may gather information about the human body movements, as detailed as possible. One example of this effort is the Kinect Sensor from Microsoft. Nevertheless, although these solutions provide a solution for the body movement, they lack on the details, namely the hands, given their small dimension compared to the body as a whole. In other words, the SDKs provided by the vendors of these devices usually lack on the needed details concerning hand movements that would be needed for an accurate hand gesture recognition implementation. This paper presents an extension to the Kinect SDK based on a contour analysis for the estimation of the hand position. This algorithms are then used to provide the creation of a gesture library that might be used afterwards.

The design and development of a transparent, easy to use and affordable ICT infrastructure is a key pre-requisite for the effective large-scale implementation of the collaborative network organizations such as virtual organizations, professional virtual communities, e-science communities, etc. This chapter introduces an overview of the main classes of infrastructures required by different types of virtual organizations and summarizes the main approaches followed by a number of research projects in the area.

Service orientation is a main trend in the development of support infrastructures for collaborative networks, namely in the manufacturing sector. Nevertheless, a literature review still shows the lack of a common understanding of the service concept, namely when we compare the software and business perspectives. As a contribution towards the integration of these two perspectives, this article introduces a conceptual framework based on the notion of representation of services in an ambassador-like manner through the introduction of a proactiveness mechanism. An example scenario and results with a prototype implementation are also discussed.

The evolution of technology has risen new possibilities in the so called Natural User Interfaces research area. Among distinct initiatives, several researchers are working with the existing sensors towards improving the support to gesture languages. This article tackles the recognition of gestures, using the Kinect sensor, in order to create a gesture library and support the gesture recognition processes afterwards.

The use of mobile devices and their use for Internet access, for georeferentiation and services consumption had a huge increase.

Today, these devices ability to establish cooperation networks and to interact intelligently and cooperatively with the surrounding environment has growing importance.

In this paper, we propose a system, based on a model which uses the social paradigms in mobile ubiquitous interactions, capable to effectively connect and integrate these devices in order to improve the accessibility in the cities. The model is inspired in concepts from the theory of organizations and sociology, as the notions of “social role”, “ownership” and “responsibility”, to be incorporated in each device.

We present an example for applying the model in the context of accessibility in smart cities for the pedestrian traffic light automatic management.

The introduction of new courses on virtual organizations at the engineering education level is an important element for the broad acceptance of this new paradigm. This article summarizes the experience with an initiative of teaching Virtual Enterprises / Virtual Organizations subjects to Electrical and Computer Engineering students. The course structure, both in its lecture and lab work components, is described. Finally, some lessons learned with two editions of this course are presented.

Neste artigo é apresentado um jogo sério que visa auxiliar a iniciação da aprendizagem do Princípio Alfabético
(discriminação auditiva dos sons das vogais) em crianças com dificuldades na aprendizagem (em particular
com alterações na consciência fonológica). Para isso são estudados vários motores de jogo e o conceito de elearning. São mostrados os vários cenários do jogo bem como as suas funcionalidades e propósitos. Este jogo
foi criado para capacitar instituições de apoio a crianças com perturbações do neurodesenvolvimento.

This book contains the outcome of the 9th IFIP WG 5.5 International Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, eNTERFACE 2013, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July/August 2013. The 9 papers included in this book represent the results of a 4-week workshop, where senior and junior researchers worked together on projects tackling new trends in human-machine interaction (HMI). The papers are organized in two topical sections. The first one presents different proposals focused on some fundamental issues regarding multimodal interactions, i.e., telepresence, speech synthesis and interactive modeling. The second is a set of development examples in key areas of HMI applications, i.e., education, entertainment and assistive technologies.

Collaborative-Networks (CN) have experienced a fast evolution in the last two decades. The
collaboration among independent entities or professionals supported by Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) has attracted the research community to establish the
conceptual basis for this scientific discipline. Service Orientation has been one of the key selected
paradigms for that conceptual basis. Nevertheless, the service concept itself does not have a
common understanding in the Business and ICT worlds. In the former, client satisfaction,
resources management and business process models are some example concerns, whilst the later
deals with interoperability, remote function calling or communication protocols.
If for example an enterprise provides some service, it may hire specialists to wrap such
service into web-services, expecting to reach worldwide potential new clients. In fact, nowadays
Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are the technological elements most
commonly used. However, these are passive elements in the sense they do not perform any action
towards pursuing business interests, which constitute a limiting factor from a business
perspective. Another approach for the above mentioned enterprise is to follow the Multi-Agent
Systems (MAS) approach, as the pro-activity is a keyword in such contexts. Nevertheless, as
MAS approaches are not so commonly used and not so robust yet, the worldwide potential set of
new clients is reduced; which also constitutes an inhibitor factor from the business perspective.
This dissertation proposes a Pro-Active Services Ecosystem Framework, gathering
inspiration from both the SOA and MAS research areas, trying to bridge the business and ICT
worlds through the base concepts for the creation of a Services’ Ecosystem where business
services are represented in a pro-active manner towards pursuing business interests, like finding
collaboration opportunities or improving the chances each CN member has to see its services
selected among competitors, for example. This work also includes a prototype system applied /
validated in the area of a Professional Virtual Community of Senior Professionals.

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