Abstract
It is understood that Collaborative Work plays an important role in today's organizations lift cycle. On the other hand, any decision that may involve a set of decision makers is, by itself, quite complex. It is under this umbrella that it will be presented the VirtualECare project, that contemplates art intelligent multi-agent system able to monitor, interact and serve its customers in need of (health)care services. We will center our attention oil the system group decision and argumentation modules, which use idea generation techniques and resort to argumentation to exchange and justify belief and choice. At the end, a prototype will be presented.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Communication networks have been developed based on two networking approaches: bridging and routing. The convergence to an all-Ethernet paradigm in Personal and Local Area Networks and the increasing heterogeneity found in these networks emphasizes the current and future applicability of bridging. When bridging is used, a single active spanning tree needs to be defined. A Minimum Routing Cost Tree is known to be the optimal spanning tree if the probability of communication between any pair of network nodes is the same. Given that its computation is a NP-hard problem, approximation algorithms have been proposed. We propose a new approximation Minimum Routing Cost Tree algorithm. Our algorithm has time complexity lower than the fastest known approximation algorithm and provides a spanning tree with the same routing cost in practice. In addition, it represents a better solution than the current spanning tree algorithm used in bridged networks.

Abstract
The impact of climatic changes can be evaluated by analysing the long-trends of plant phenological events. The airborne pollen sampling and the study of Apis mellifera L. (honeybee) collected pollen are two methodologies that can be used to survey the date of occurrence of the flowering phase. The aim of the present work was to compare the anemophilous and entomophilous pollen flows of Castanea sativa (chestnut tree) in two regions of the north-west of Portugal. The synchronism between the airborne samples and the honeybee samples was confirmed by the significant positive correlation between them. The inter-annual variations in the beginning and peak dates of pollen flows were very similar although an anticipation was observed in the honeybees.

Abstract
In this paper, a TDMA-based mechanism is proposed for IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs. This mechanism prioritizes real-time traffic in IEEE 802.11 networks, allowing the coexistence of standard stations with modified (real-time) stations in the same network-domain. The worst-case timing analysis of the TDMA-based mechanism shows that the service interval is upper-bounded, even when the communication medium is shared with timing unconstrained stations.