Background. This review studies technology-supported interventions to help older adults, living in situations of reduced mobility, overcome loneliness, and social isolation. The focus is on long-distance interactions, investigating the (i) challenges addressed and strategies applied; (ii) technology used in interventions; and (iii) social interactions enabled. Methods. We conducted a search on Elsevier’s Scopus database for related work published until January 2020, focusing on (i) intervention studies supported mainly by technology-mediated communication, (ii) aiming at supported virtual social interactions between people, and (iii) evaluating the impact of loneliness or social isolation. Results. Of the 1178 papers screened, 25 met the inclusion criteria. Computer and Internet training was the dominant strategy, allowing access to communication technologies, while in recent years, we see more studies aiming to provide simple, easy-to-use technology. The technology used was mostly off-the-shelf, with fewer solutions tailored to older adults. Social interactions targeted mainly friends and family, and most interventions focused on more than one group of people. Discussion. All interventions reported positive results, suggesting feasibility. However, more research is needed on the topic (especially randomized controlled trials), as evidenced by the low number of interventions found. We recommend more rigorous methods, addressing human factors and reporting technology usage in future research.

A great deal of researches in the area of agent-oriented software engineering focuses on proposing methodologies for agent systems, i.e., on identifying the guidelines to drive the various phases of agent-based software development and the abstractions to be exploited in these phases. However, very little attention has been paid so far to the basic issue of engineering the process subjacent the development activity, i.e., of disciplining the execution of the different phases involved in the software lifecycle. In this paper, we focus on process models for software development and put these in relations with current researches in agent-oriented software engineering. First, we introduce the key concepts and issues related to software processes and present the various process models currently adopted in mainstream software engineering. Then, we survey the characteristics of a number of agent-oriented methodologies, as they pertain to software processes. In particular, for each methodology, we analyze which process model it (often implicitly) underlies and which phases of the process are covered by it, thus enabling us to identify some key limitations of currently methodology-centered researches. On this base, we eventually identify and analyze several open issues in the area of process models for agent-based development, calling for further researches and experiences.

This study presents MoWebA, a navigational role-centric model driven development (MDD) proposal for web applications development. The approach was conceived considering a previous study of web methods and analysing some open issues. This article presents the fundamentals of the proposal; the methodological aspects for modelling and transformation processes; and the defined notations/techniques for modelling and transformation tasks, including their abstract and concrete syntax definitions. We include a summary of the validation experiences and main results, and a comparison against other related proposals, in order to highlight the main contributions of MoWebA.Keywords: model driven architecture; MDA; model driven development; MDD; web application; web methodologies; navigational models.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: González, M., Cernuzzi, L. and Pastor, O. (2016) 'A navigational role-centric model oriented web approach -MoWebA', Int.

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Highlights d A matrix decomposition model for repurposing broadspectrum antivirals d A graph kernel approach to model perturbations induced by drugs on the interactome d Graph kernels can integrate transcriptomics data to improve drug repurposing d CoREx: a free online tool to formulate hypothesis for drug repurposing for COVID-19

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