Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by social interaction and communication difficulties, along with narrow and repetitive interests. Being a spectrum disorder, ASD affects individuals with a large range of combinations of challenges along dimensions such as intelligence, social skills, or sensory processing. Hence, any computer-based technology for ASD ought to be customizable to fit the particular profile of each individual that uses it. The main goal of our survey is to collect and characterize the customization support that has been researched for these technologies, which we analyze along clinical and technological dimensions. Our survey revealed that despite its importance, customization support for these technologies remains a subject largely unexplored. Furthermore, we propose alternatives on how to address the limitations identified.

The research about the use of technology for persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has rapidly increased in the last decade. This fact has accompanied with the sharp development and use of apps for mobile devices by these people and their caregivers. The election of the adequate apps for persons with autism is a very difficult task, with many variables involved with the person with ASD, the family, the practitioners and the community where they live. This paper describes a recommendation system that reuse an ontology, which supports the information about the apps and all the variables previously cited. The data about the apps are automatically obtained from recognized web repositories and reports published on Facebook/Twitter from experts. This hybrid recommendation system gets the data from the ontology, in order to score the technology and to recommend the best set of apps for the studied person1.

We focused on the joint exploitation of satellite and ground-based technologies in order to understand the kinematic behavior of landslides and subsidence phenomena relevant to different test sites in Europe. In this context, we efficiently exploited C-band and X-band satellite and ground-based SAR data for the investigation of the temporal and spatial pattern of ground deformations caused by natural and human-induced hazards. The present work has been conducted within the FP7-EU DORIS project.

This paper presents an analysis of the performance of TerraSAR-X for subsidence monitoring in urban areas. The city of Murcia has been selected as a test-site due to its high deformation rate and the set of extensometers deployed along the city that provide validation data. The obtained results have been compared with those ob-tained from ERS/ENVISAT data belonging to the same period and validated with the in-situ measurements.

Tim Berners-Lee claimed in 2001 that “the power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect”. A considerable amount of work has been done to make the web accessible to those with sensory or motor disability, with an increasing number of government and enterprise intranet webs being “accessible”, and also with some consortiums and groups seriously approaching this commitment. Some authors, such as Harrysson, have already highlighted the need for a cognitively accessible web. However, in spite of good intentions, there has been little work to date that has tackled this task. At least until now, the existing WAI and NI4 recommendations about cognitive disability are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to test, as they are only general recommendations. This article explains an alternative Web that has been constructed and tested on a sample of participants with cognitive disabilities (N = 20) with positive results encouraging us to dedicate more effort to fine tune their requirements regarding specific cognitive deficits and automating the process of creating and testing cognitively accessible web content. This alternative web implies the use of a simplified web browser and an adequate web design. Discussion of the need to have several levels of cognitive accessibility, equivalent (although not identical) content for this collective and the need for testable protocols of accessibility that support these people's needs is also included. This article finishes with conclusions about the potential impact of accessible pages in the daily life of people suffering from cognitive deficits, outlining the features to be considered within a user profile specification that support cognitive difficulties and with reflections about the suitability of Semantic Web Technologies for future developments in this field.