The effective search for the missing and identification of persons, alive or dead, are core components in the prevention and in resolving the issue of Missing Persons. Despite the growing literature on this topic, there is still a lack of publications describing the Search as a process that includes different phases inherently composed of forensic investigative and identification principles for both living and deceased missing persons. This paper is the result of discussions between the Forensic Unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and members of its external Forensic Advisory Board. It aims to present the Search process as an overarching concept that includes the investigation and identification phases of the missing in any state (dead or alive), in any scenario (with or without bodies), with an integrated, multidisciplinary, and multiagency approach for implementation by all actors involved in the investigation and identification phases of missing persons.

Image convolution operations in digital computer systems are usually very expensive operations in terms of resource consumption (processor resources and processing time) for an efficient Real-Time application. In these scenarios the visual information is divided into frames and each one has to be completely processed before the next frame arrives in order to warranty the real-time. A spike-based philosophy for computing convolutions based on the neuro-inspired Address-Event-Representation (AER) is achieving high performances. In this paper we present two FPGA implementations of AER-based convolution processors for relatively small Xilinx FPGAs (Spartan-II 200 and Spartan-3 400), which process 64x64 images with 11x11 convolution kernels. The maximum equivalent operation rate that can be reached is 163.51 MOPS for 11x11 kernels, in a Xilinx Spartan 3 400 FPGA with a 50MHz clock. Formulations, hardware architecture, operation examples and performance comparison with frame-based convolution processors are presented and discussed.

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En este trabajo se muestra los resultados de un estudio derivado de una experiencia cuyo objetivo es analizar el desarrollo del entorno personal de aprendizaje (PLE) de estudiantes universitarios de primer año. El colectivo participante queda compuesto por 96 estudiantes matriculados en el curso de Recursos Tecnológicos de Bachillerato en Orientación de la Universidad Nacional (Costa Rica). Tanto el diagnóstico inicial como la valoración final se obtienen por medio de un cuestionario en línea. De los principales resultados se deriva el poco desarrollo del PLE del estudiantado en el momento de ingresar a la universidad, la valoración positiva que realizan de desarrollo del PLE al finalizar el curso, así como la alta previsión de uso de las diferentes herramientas tanto a nivel personal como profesional.

A Greenhouse is an indoor covered place where plants are grown and cultivated. In the agriculture field, the crops into greenhouse are highly used due that they provide a little micro-environment that can be easier controlled. At this same context, there are some important parameters that should be monitored at a greenhouse in order to achieve good results at the end of the agricultural production. Two of these parameters are precisely the temperature and humidity that are been commonly measured with manual methods. The wireless sensors networks (WSN) are defined as the collection of sensor nodes that perform a specific task and they are representing one of the technological solutions to automatize and improve the management of crops. This paper summarizes the work carried out to provide an efficient control mechanism of microclimate into greenhouses through the implementation of an infrastructure of Wireless Sensors Network to control environmental parameters. It was possible to probe the effectiveness of this mechanism through the comparative analysis of measures taken using both (1) traditional manual mechanism and (2) automatized with sensors mechanism. A crop of tomato was selected as a case study in which a physic network topology was deployed. Additionally, a management data application was developed taking into account usability parameters in order to create a tool easily accepted by the future users.