Abstract
The last decade brought about several virtual communities spread all over the world composed of thousands of people with different ages and social, cultural and physical characteristics. These communities enable users to communicate and share information, often with the aim of achieving a common goal. Due to the vast diversity of users there's often a need,to control the activities that occur inside the virtual environment to avoid inappropriate behaviors. However, this control can cause a feeling of digital surveillance, but an appropriate design of the interface can help minimize its impact, becoming an important success factor for the community. For this purpose we analyzed a selection of virtual environments, conducted a survey on users' preferences and analyzed the corresponding results. From these activities we defined a set of requirements to build a 3D interface for a regulated virtual environment.

Abstract
A Social Networking System was developed for Academic Collaboration across international Projects. The system was implemented using Java Server Pages. This paper discusses the development of this software, lessons learned and it gives suggestions for further work.

Abstract
Writing scientific publications is usually a challenging and complex activity, involving several authors. Despite the different natures of their contributions, this activity is clearly collaborative and the collaboration is usually achieved through face-to-face meetings and using email to exchange the documents. More recently the availability of collaborative editors introduced a further step in the collaboration, but none of the existing solutions contemplate some specific issues like referencing and publishing adequately. This fact motivated us to conduct a study to evaluate the requirements for a platform that integrates in a single solution the three main functionalities required: a text editor, a reference manager and a connector to scientific digital repositories.

Abstract
The preservation of many music works produced in the past entails their digitalization and consequent accessibility in an easy-to-manage digital format. Carrying this task manually is very time consuming and error prone. While optical music recognition systems usually perform well on printed scores, the processing of handwritten musical scores by computers remain far from ideal. One of the fundamental stages to carry out this task is the staff line detection. In this paper a new method for the automatic detection of music staff lines based on a connected path approach is presented. Lines affected by curvature, discontinuities, and inclination are robustly detected. Experimental results show that the proposed technique consistently outperforms well-established algorithms.

Abstract
Many music works produced in the last century still exist only as original manuscripts or as photocopies. Preserving them entails their digitalization and consequent accessibility in a digital format easy-to-manage which encourages browsing, retrieval, search and analysis while providing a generalized access to the digital material. The manual process to carry out this task is very time consuming and error prone. Automatic optical music recognition (OMR) has emerged as a partial solution to this problem. However, the full potential of this process only reveals itself when integrated in a system that provides seamless access to browsing, retrieval, search and analysis. We address this demand by proposing a modular, flexible and scalable framework that fully integrates the abovementioned functionalities. A web based system to carry out the automatic recognition process, allowing the creation and management of a music corpus, while providing generalized access to it, is a unique and innovative approach to the problem. A prototype has been implemented and is being used as a test platform for OMR algorithms.

Abstract
Many music works produced in the past are currently available only as original manuscripts or as photocopies. Preserving them entails their digitalization and consequent accessibility in a machine-readable format, which encourages browsing, retrieval, search and analysis while providing a generalized access to the digital material. Carrying this task manually is very time consuming and error prone. While optical music recognition (OMR) systems usually perform well on printed scores, the processing of handwritten music by computers remains below the expectations. One of the fundamental stages to carry out this task is the detection and subsequent removal of staff lines. In this paper we integrate a general-purpose, knowledge-free method for the automatic detection of staff lines based on stable paths, into a recently developed staff line removal toolkit. Lines affected by curvature, discontinuities, and inclination are robustly detected. We have also developed a staff removal algorithm adapting an existing line removal approach to use the stable path algorithm at the detection stage, Experimental results show that the proposed technique outperforms well-established algorithms. The developed algorithm will now be integrated in a web based system providing seamless access to browsing, retrieval, search and analysis of submitted scores.