Abstract
Nowadays, the virtual worlds provide the users a high level of immersion, being a stage for new concepts such as "virtual life". It seems that the only and real world is already not sufficient, and many people feel the necessity to belong to different worlds where they can move in space and in the time, advancing and retreating inside a virtual extended attractive space not to obey to the same rules and laws as the real world. The real and the virtual worlds get confused in a hybrid fusion of concepts. In this context the present paper aims to contribute to an increasing use of these environments, which we can stimulate the knowledge, including the development of learning to learn autonomy. Our research provides a definition of virtual 3D Virtual worlds, distinguish the different types of social virtual worlds (Second Life, Active Worlds and There) and makes a comparative analysis between them, based on the matrix developed by Manninen in 1999, which includes a set of measures chosen according the differences and distinctions technical and user interface criteria. Finally, we discuss the potential of three dimensional social virtual worlds for educational purposes. In the future, these worlds may provide a set of services educational including e-learning materials, course module materials, assignments and class sessions, communications between tutors and learners and e-assessment. However most of today's educational institutions will be challenged to encompass the informal and holistic learning scenario

Abstract
Software development is a social activity. Teams of developers join together to coordinate their efforts to produce software systems. This effort encompasses the development of a shared understanding surrounding multiple artifacts throughout the process. Frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but its complexity makes them hard to understand and learn how to use. Developers resort to their colleagues for help and insight, at the expense of time and intrusion, as documentation is often outdated and incomplete. This paper presents an approach to harness this collective knowledge of the team through a collaborative environment. Teams can share, rank and recommend their learning knowledge without too much intrusion and follow best practices of framework understanding.

Abstract
The method of seismic refraction is widely used in many applied Geology fields and problems today. Although it has some limitations, in the case of detecting a lower velocity bounded layer, this method is well tailored to a crystalline environments where, more often, weathering degree is highest on the surface and gradually decreases in depth and thus can aid in associating the weathering degree to velocity. Some relationships have been made to establish a connection between velocities and the elastic properties of rocks. In recent years seismic refraction methods have evolved in terms of improved equipment, especially by means of better seismographs, but particularly due to better inversion techniques that consider the subsurface as a more heterogeneous environment. The later are commonly known as travel time tomography techniques. In crystalline environments this is useful due to the occasional heterogeneity of the near surface but also because of the gradual character of velocity change as opposed to sudden velocity breaks at boundaries that were associated with intercept time methods and even GRM. With this in mind we sought, over the years, to apply this method to projects throughout Portugal. In the northern part it is even more adequate due to the dominant granitic and schistose environments that we encounter. In the past few years High Speed railway networks have been planned to integrate with the European network, already existing in some countries namely Spain and France among others. The project requires detailed planning for excavation in hilly and mountainous terrain due to both engineering and environmental considerations. We had access to a seismic refraction dataset, acquired by a local geophysical company, comprising of around a 190 individual 60m profiles and we interpreted them with a travel time tomography technique. Each section easily permits the filtering of velocity domains and we considered the 800m/s as an empirical limit to separate geotechnical soil from soft rock. Afterwards, by georeferencing in GIS every test over the corresponding lithology, we were able to establish, through simple descriptive statistical parameters, defining characteristic relationships between each lithological group and the geophysical results. These relationships could surely be useful for the sustainable development of the project in this highly variable geologic environment.

Abstract

Abstract
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are becoming increasingly important in embedded and high-performance computing systems. They allow performance levels close to the ones obtained from Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), while still keeping design and implementation flexibility. However to efficiently program FPGAs, one needs the expertise of hardware developers and to master hardware description languages (HDLs) such as VHDL or Verilog. The attempts to furnish a high-level compilation flow (e.g., front C programs) still have open issues before efficient and consistent results can be obtained. Bearing in mind the FPGA resources, we have developed LALP, a novel language to program FPGAs. A compilation framework including mapping capabilities supports the language. The main ideas behind LALP is to provide a higher abstraction level than HDLs, to exploit the intrinsic parallelism of hardware resources, and to permit the programmer to control execution stages whenever the compiler techniques are unable to generate efficient implementations. In this paper we describe LALP, and show how it can be used to achieve high-performance computing solutions.

Abstract
Information overload is a major concern that retrieval systems face. Information is ubiquitous and information resources are frequently used as educational resources, available from many distinct sources. The main issue is to get just the right piece of information that might satisfy our specific needs. Many of these sources organize their resources on a given ontology. However, these are static and do not allow for personalization. This fact degrades the value of the service if there is no easy mental mapping between user specific needs and the general source ontology. Organizing educational resources according to particular needs might increase users' satisfaction and save their time. In this paper we present a methodology to filter and organize information resources according to users' interests, based on content text, granting users with a personalized edition of the resource, especially tailored towards their specific needs. Our experimental results confirm that it is possible to automatically personalize document resources with high precision at a reduced editor workload. We believe that the application of this methodology in an educational setting might contribute to build - or complement - and maintain educational resources and greatly improve their usefulness. Our methodology may be applied to explore and organize a repository of learning objects, according to specific objectives, thus working as a courseware semi-automatic editor. Students themselves might use such a tool to build a course on a specific competence; or to help them collect a set of learning objects that might help in understanding a given concept or how to apply a given technique. Whenever a user, or group of users, wants to be kept informed on some topic, an automatic resource compilation system can be of great value. We may imagine some potential interested parties: organizations, associations and specific interest groups, commercial companies trying to gather information on their market, news wire services, students interested in some subject, to name a few. Nowadays the problem is not to obtain information but to organize it and to extract its intrinsic value in due time. An automatic system, which adapts to user information needs, may be very valuable and potentially interesting to private as well as to professional users. In our work we pretend to automate the content retrieval task in order to reduce editorial effort while improving end-user satisfaction.