Roberto Scopigno, leader of the Visual Computing Lab of ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy, has been elected Chair of the Eurographics Association for the period 2009-2010. Roberto is a member of the Executive Committee of Eurographics since 2001 and has served as Vice-Chair for the last four years.

"Software-Intensive Systems and New Computing Paradigms - Challenges and Visions", edited by Martin Wirsing, Jean-Pierre Banâtre, Matthias Hölzl and Axel Rauschmayer, and published by Springer in the "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" series vol. 5380, presents the results of the INTERLINK Working Group on software-intensive systems and novel computing paradigms. INTERLINK is a 'Coordinated Action', managed by ERCIM and funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Unit of the European Commission, to identify emergent trends, their impact on the information society in the next 10-15 years, and the challenges they present to computing, software engineering, cognition and intelligence. The objective of the working group was to imagine the landscape in which the next generations of software-intensive systems will operate. To this end three workshops were organized on this topic to which over 30 leading researchers from Europe, Asia, Australia, USA and Canada were invited to present and discuss future R&D directions, challenges, and visions in this emerging area.

While biological data exhibits a formidable diversity, the past two decades have seen the advent of massive data produced either by high throughput experiments or by measurement devices of increasing accuracy at very different scales ranging from nano to macro. Handling these massive and complex data within a virtuous cycle linking modelling and measurements is one of the major challenges in Computational Biology.