Abstract
The index-guiding PCF basic structure is a solid core surrounded by a microstructured cladding. Owing to the presence of air holes, the effective refractive index of the cladding is below that of the core and the light is guided along the core by the principle of total internal reflection. Several authors have presented different geometries for this type of fibre and one of them is the suspended-core structure, where relatively large holes surround the fibre core that looks suspended along the fibre axis by small width silica walls. The chapter is divided in two parts. The first is about the fabrication of suspended core fibre and the second part is about the main applications of this type of fibres as interferometers.

Abstract
Two new configurations of high-birefringent fiber loop mirror with an output port probe are proposed. The two configurations used two couplers spliced between them with unbalanced arms and one output port is used as the probe sensor. The difference between them is that the section length of high-birefringent fiber is located between the two couplers (first new configuration) or spliced in the output port probe (second new configuration). The second new configuration presents great advantage, especially for remote sensing using only one fiber to the sensing head. The two new configurations were compared with the conventional high-birefringent fiber loop mirror when strain is applied and showed similar sensitivities. The first new configuration is studied as an optical refractometer.

Abstract
Requirements defects have a major impact throughout the whole software lifecycle. Having a specific defects classification for requirements is important to analyse the root causes of problems, build checklists that support requirements reviews and to reduce risks associated with requirements problems. In our research we analyse several defects classifiers; select the ones applicable to requirements specifications, following rules to build defects taxonomies; and assess the classification validity in an experiment of requirements defects classification performed by graduate and undergraduate students. Not all subjects used the same type of defect to classify the same defect, which suggests that defects classification is not consensual. Considering our results we give recommendations to industry and other researchers on the design of classification schemes and treatment of classification results.

Abstract
News can contain information which may provide an indication of the future direction of a share or stock market index. The possibility of predicting future stock market prices has attracted an increasing numbers of industry practitioners and academic researchers to this area of investigation. Popular approaches have relied upon either: models constructed from manually selected training or manually constructed dictionaries. A potential flaw of manually selecting data is that the effectiveness of the trained model is dependent upon the ability of the human annotator. An alternative approach is to align news stories with trends in a specific market. A negative story is inferred if it co-occurs with a market losing value where as positive story is associated with a rise. This approach may have its flaws because news stories may co-occur with market movements by chance and consequently may inhibit the construction of a robust classifier with data gathered with this method. This paper presents a strategy which combines a: rule classifier, alignment strategy and self-training to induce a robust model for classifying news stories. The proposed method is compared with several competing methodologies and is evaluated with: estimated F-Measure and estimated trading returns. In addition the paper provides an evaluation of classifying a news story with it's: headline, description or story text. The results demonstrate a clear advantage for the proposed methodology when evaluated by estimated F-Measure. The proposed strategy also produces the highest trading returns. In addition the paper clearly demonstrates that a news story's headline provides the greatest assistance for classification. The models induced from headlines gained the highest estimated F-Measure and trading returns for each strategy with the exception of the alignment method which performed uniformly poorly. © 2011 AISTI.

Abstract
Electricity markets are complex environments, involving a large number of different entities, playing in a dynamic scene to obtain the best advantages and profits. MASCEM is a multi-agent electricity market simulator to model market players and simulate their operation in the market. Market players are entities with specific characteristics and objectives, making their decisions and interacting with other players. MASCEM provides several dynamic strategies for agents' behavior. This paper presents a method that aims to provide market players with strategic bidding capabilities, allowing them to obtain the higher possible gains out of the market. This method uses a reinforcement learning algorithm to learn from experience how to choose the best from a set of possible bids. These bids are defined accordingly to the cost function that each producer presents. © 2011 IEEE.

Abstract
The explosive growth of the Internet has revolutionized the way of conducting business in several areas, acting nowadays as an important channel of communication and for the trading of goods and services. Therefore, electronic commerce (EC), defined as the execution of transactions of goods and services which rely on computers mediated by informatics networks, assumes particular importance due to the benefits that it may imply for companies. In this chapter we focus on a particular type of electronic commerce: business to business (B2B). B2B describes electronic commerce associated to operations of buying and selling products and services through the Internet or through the use of private networks shared between business partners, thus replacing the physical process around commercial transactions. This type of EC facilitates conducting electronic transactions between companies. There are several B2B solutions that enable companies to make transactions from buying and selling goods and services, to participating in auctions. The analysis of such solutions enabled us to verify that there are big differences in the amount of the supported functionalities, and significant opportunities for development, with the aim of helping companies to evaluate their electronic commerce solutions and to conceive new and more complete systems. In this chapter, a new model of functionalities for the development of B2B EC solutions is presented. © 2011, IGI Global.