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Abstract-Recent natural disasters have revealed that emergency networks presently cannot disseminate the necessary disaster information, making it difficult to deploy and coordinate relief operations. These disasters have reinforced the knowledge that telecommunication networks constitute a critical infrastructure of our society, and the urgency in establishing protection mechanisms against disaster-based disruptions.Hence, it is important to have emergency networks able to maintain sustainable communication in disaster areas. Moreover, the network architecture should be designed so that network connectivity is maintained among nodes outside of the impacted area, while ensuring that services for costumers not in the affected area suffer minimal impact.As a first step towards achieving disaster resilience, the RE-CODIS project was formed, and its Working Group 1 members conducted a comprehensive literature survey on "strategies for communication networks to protect against large-scale natural disasters," which is summarized in this article.Index Terms-vulnerability, end-to-end resilience, natural disasters, disaster-based disruptions.

Wireless video communications promote promising opportunities involving commercial applications on a grand scale as well as highly specialized niche markets. In this regard, the design of efficient video coding systems, meeting such key requirements as low power, mobility and low complexity, is a challenging problem. The solution can be found in fundamental information theoretic results, which gave rise to the distributed video coding (DVC) paradigm, under which lightweight video encoding schemes can be engineered. This article presents a new hashbased DVC architecture incorporating a novel motion-compensated multi-hypothesis prediction technique. The presented method is able to adapt to the regional variations in temporal correlation in a frame. The proposed codec enables scalable Wyner-Ziv video coding and provides state-of-the-art distributed video compression performance. The key novelty of this article is the expansion of the application domain of DVC from conventional video material to medical imaging. Wireless capsule endoscopy in particular, which is essentially wireless video recording in a pill, is proven to be an important application field. The low complexity encoding characteristics, the ability of the novel motion-compensated multi-hypothesis prediction technique to adapt to regional degrees of temporal correlation (which is of crucial importance in the context of endoscopic video content), and the high compression performance make the proposed distributed video codec a strong candidate for future lightweight (medical) imaging applications.

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This paper presents and analyses a set of data that reveal secondary education students' stance on the educational activities that were realised during a UMI (ubiquitous, mobile computing and the Internet of Things) Summer School. This Summer School deals with an IoT based recycling management application development and is part of UMI-Sci-Ed project that provides a training framework on UMI learning, for students aged between 14-16, with the use of properly designed educational scenarios and communities of practice (CoP) by setting UMI technologies as learning means and learning outcomes, simultaneously. The analysis focuses on the students' satisfaction and engagement (observed through a set of questionnaires) in relation with students' potential to follow the activities, the perceived, by the students, easiness, enjoyment and usefulness while setting as parameters the student gender and age. The results clearly show high student acceptability and engagement with the designed IoT-driven activities and reveal certain differentiations with respect to gender and age in these aspects. These findings, together with the observations that high student satisfaction does not translate to equally high engagement and that enjoyment is a critical factor, provide a basis for future adjustment of the educational scenarios and activities scope and design in order to enhance the UMI-Sci-Ed impact on student preference for a future career in the UMI technologies domain.