First and foremost, I am grateful to my wife, Elen, for the love and patience during all these years of hard work. Many thanks to my family, especially my mother, for the love, support and encouragement.I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Prof. Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza, for the dedication, insight, patience and for the always sharp comments, suggestions and questions about my work. I am also grateful to her for willing to advise me when I was already in the course of my PhD years. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to work closely with such an awarded researcher and, as the PhD years showed me, a remarkable person.I am grateful to Prof. Renato Cerqueira for his special collaboration to this work and for advising me in the first half of the course. I also thank him for inviting me to apply for the PhD at PUC-Rio, after receiving my MSc degree in 2008, when he was my advisor.Special thanks to my friends at 3Elos, Marcelo Duarte and Marcelo Pettengill, for supporting my academic endeavor.I would also like to thank the people from the Semiotic Engineering Research Group (SERG), for the many discussions over the course of our workshops
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