Tiago Cardoso

A sociedade organizou-se para fazer frente a necessidades como o tratamento e acompanhamento de crianças ou jovens com Síndrome de Down, Surdez, Autismo, entre outras patologias. Como resultado, surgiram distintas organizações com o objetivo de lidar com estes casos, compostas por médicos, terapeutas, psicólogos, sociólogos e outros profissionais, mas excluindo profissionais dedicados ao desenvolvimento de novas tecnologias. Por outro lado, alunos finalistas de cursos tecnológicos desenvolvem normalmente um projeto tecnológico do início na disciplina final dos seus cursos - Projeto/Dissertação de fim de curso. Este artigo propõe um método para aplicar o esforço e entusiasmo de tais alunos às causas sociais mencionadas através do desenvolvimento de Jogos.

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.

he service concept is widely used in distinct research and application areas. Particularly in Collaborative Networks, Service Orientation represents a main trend in the development of support platforms. Nevertheless, a literature review shows that it does not gather a common understanding, namely from the software and business perspectives. This paper proposes a conceptual framework aiming at contributing to make these two perspectives come closer, through a refinement of the Service concept itself and the usage of Pro-Activeness.

The society has organized itself towards facing existing social needs like the care for children with Down syndrome, Deafness or Autism Spectrum Disorders, among several other pathologies. As a result, several organizations emerged towards handling these issues, composed of doctors, therapists, psychologists, among other professionals, but excluding technology experts. On the other hand side, the finalist students from technology universities usually have a final course where they have to create a complete project from scratch. This article proposes a method for applying the effort and enthusiasm of such students in the above mentioned social causes through games’ development.

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.

Sign language is the hearing impaired form of communicating with other people, including listeners. Most cases, impaired people have learned sign language form childhood. The problem arises when a listener comes in contact with an impaired person. For instances, if a couple has a child which is impaired, the parents find a challenge to learn the sign language. In this article, a new playful approach to assist the listeners to learn sign language is proposed. This proposal is a serious game composed of two modes: School-mode and Competition-mode. The first offers a virtual school where the user learns to sign letters and the second offers an environment towards applying the learned letters. Behind the scenes, the proposal contains a sign language recognition system, based on three modules: 1 – the standardization of the Kinect depth camera data; 2 – a gesture library relying on the standardized data; and 3 – the real-time recognition of gestures. A prototype was developed – Kinect-Sign – and tested in a Portuguese Sign-Language school and on eNTERFACE’13 resulting in a joyful acceptance of the approach.

Electronic procurement of partners is an important functionality during the life cycle of a virtual enterprise. A prototype implementation, featuring selection based on both internal or Internet-based suppliers’ directories, is discussed. The generation of call for tenders and support for management of received bids is introduced and directions for contract negotiation and decision support system are discussed.

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.

Partners search and selection is an important activity in the life cycle of a Virtual Enterprise. Among other factors, the commitment of the potential partners to fulfil quality requirements is a major decision criterion during the selection phase. An approach to search suppliers in suppliers’ directories available on Internet is presented and the major negotiation steps leading to an adequate selection of partners are introduced. The quality-related information management functionalities required in a virtual enterprise support platform are also discussed.

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.

The practical implantation of the concept of dynamic virtual enterprise is still far from expectations due to a number of factors such as the lack of appropriate interoperable infrastructures and tools, lack of common ontology, and the socio-organizational difficulties. However, the creation of industry clusters supported by advanced information and communication tools can meanwhile provide a basis for the rapid creation of dynamic virtual enterprises in response to the market opportunities. A federated service management approach is introduced in this context and its application to the tourism industry is discussed. Finally, the support for the aggregation of simpler services into value-added services, implemented by distributed business processes within different organizations, is presented.

A proposal for a reference curriculum for teaching Collaborative Networks at university level is introduced. This curriculum is based on the experience of the authors in teaching and disseminating corresponding concepts in the context of several international projects as well as on the findings of a survey conducted worldwide. A set of teaching units and the corresponding content are introduced. Guidelines for the application of the curriculum are given. A set of experiments and projects are also suggested as a support for the accompanying hands-on lab work. Finally, one concrete experience of application of the proposed curriculum is described.

Nowadays there is a clear increase of products or tailored solutions with the goal of better adept to the needs of
clients. In another context there is a wide growth of computers’ presence in the class rooms, in order to assist
the teacher to captivate and motivate the students using educational games. However not all teachers have the
advanced computer knowledge that would allow them to personalize games, which would benefit children by
providing tailored solutions to their specific needs. Having this problem into consideration it was designed/idealized a system that relies on a framework of game creation that allows a user with less informatics skills to create a game based on a model. Although there are many games of this type it would be useful and innovative for a teacher to be able to create a game that is personalized to the students’ needs and according to the skills that they wish to develop. This system consists in an interface where the user has to follow some established steps, in order to achieve a file containing all the game features, which is later imported to
a framework. That system allows the creation of different games, as long as these games come under the same game mechanics.