The Royal Institute Elcano † (Real Instituto Elcano) in Spain is a prestigious independent political institute whose mission is to comment on the political situation in the world focusing on its relation to Spain. As part of its dissemination strategy it operates a public website. The online content can be accessed by navigating through categories or by a keyword-based, full text search engine. The work described in this paper aims at improving access to the content. We describe an approach, tools and techniques that allow building a semantic portal, where access is based on the meaning of concepts and relations of the International Affairs domain. The approach comprises an automatic ontology-based annotator, a semantic search engine with a natural language interface, a web publication tool allowing semantic navigation, and a 3D visualization component. The semantic portal is currently being tested by the Institute.

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a hybrid clinic plus home based intervention targeting Latino children to improve obesity outcomes. The intervention applies motivational game based learning and behavior change theories during design. Latino American children are the main target group for this study as they have significantly high obesity rates due to socioeconomic conditions and lack of awareness. There have been several interventions that have targeted game based strategies in the clinic to promote health outcomes and some have even targeted obesity problems, however to our knowledge this is the first effort that adds an inhome component to the clinical intervention. We discuss in detail the challenges faced while designing and implementing this hybrid clinical trial. Finally, we present the evaluation results from a randomized clinical trial that recruited 101 children.

Obesity among children and adolescents is increasingly becoming a major public health problem, Poverty and lower socioeconomic status as well as lack of parental awareness regarding a balanced diet and adequate exercise all contributes towards high overweight and obesity rates among Latino American children. Access and affordability of smartphones and mobile internet devices provide an opportunity to create nutritional educational interventions that can significantly impact and change attitude and knowledge regarding healthy diet and exercise. In this paper we present the design of a comic book style interactive storytelling mobile application that creates multiple cause and effect scenarios that the child can role play and learn from. The novelty and innovation lies in the design of the application to begin at a clinical setting while requiring completion at home and involving significant participation by the parent and the child.

The Royal Institute Elcano 1 (Real Instituto Elcano) in Spain is a prestigious independent political institute whose mission is to comment on the political situation in the world focusing on its relation to Spain. As part of its dissemination strategy it operates a public website. In this paper we present and evaluate the application of a semantic search engine to improve access to the Institute's content: instead of retrieving documents based on user queries of keywords, the system accepts queries in natural language and returns answers rather than links to documents. Topics that will be discussed include ontology construction, automatic ontology population, semantic access through a natural language interface and a failure analysis.

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