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 large part of the software development effort is typically spent on maintenance and evolution, namely on adding new and unanticipated features. As aspect-oriented programming (AOP) can be easily used to compose software in non-planned ways, many researchers are investigating AOP as a technique that can play an important role in this particular field. However, unexpected interactions between aspects are still a major problem that compromise AOP's applicability, especially in large projects where many developers, often including new team members, are involved in the process. This paper addresses the issues of aspect conflicts and interactions and proposes a technique to help compose aspects in a disciplined way using a test-driven development approach. A simple example for a banking system helps on illustrating the technique. © 2008 ACM.

Abstract
This paper presents a joint coding scheme for multiple H.264/AVC video programs. Channel bandwidth is divided among different programs according its complexity. Several complexity metrics are assessed. Initial results are presented and discussed.

Abstract
This study provides some empirical insight on the barriers that chief information officers face in their Job. The findings of the survey we conducted directed to the chief information officers of the 500 large Portuguese companies by gross revenue, suggest; three main barriers: the lack of time to think and define strategies, the overwhelming backlog of requests and projects and inadequate budgets. The knowledge and understanding of the identified barriers contributes to the characterization of chief information officer role state of the art and should be useful for practitioners, who may use it as a basis for developing solutions in order to overcome these barriers.

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
In vivo observation of cells in the Arabidopsis thaliana root, by time-lapse confocal microscopy, is central to biology research. The research herein described is based on large amount of image data, which must be analyzed to determine the location and state of individual cells. Automating the process of cell tracking is an important step to create tools which will facilitate the analysis of cells' evolution through time. Here we introduce a confocal tracking system designed in two stages. At the image acquisition stage, we track the area under analysis based on point-to-point correspondences and motion estimation. After image acquisition, we compute cell-to-cell correspondences through time. The final result is a temporal structured information about each cell.