Abstract
Atmospheric Electric Potential Gradient (PG) measurements were carried out in three sites forming a triangular array in Southern Portugal. The campaign was performed during the summer, characterized by Saharan dust outbreaks; 16th-17th July 2014 dust event is considered. Short time-scale oscillations of the PG at two of the stations and a mid time-scale suppression of the PG in the three stations are found. Results are interpreted as evidencing long-range dust electrification; attributed to the air-Earth electrical current creating a bipolar charge distribution inside of the dust layer. The relevance of using arrays of sensors, instead of single sited, is highlighted.

Abstract
Our goal is the provide a tour of recent progress towards rendering Kalman filters suitable for driving astronomical adaptive optics with increasing numbers of degrees of freedom and discuss the prospects to port them to the foreseen real-time architectures.

Abstract
Novel input modalities such as touch, tangibles or gestures try to exploit human's innate skills rather than imposing new learning processes. However, no work has been reported that systematically evaluates how these interfaces influence users' performance, that is, assesses if one interface can be more or less appropriate for interaction regarding: (1) different age groups; and (2) different basic tasks, as content insertion or manipulation. This work presents itself as an exploratory evaluation about whether or not the users' efficiency is indeed influenced by different input modalities and age. We conducted a usability evaluation with 60 subjects to understand how different interfaces may influence the speed and accuracy of three specific age groups (children, young adults and older-adults) when dealing with a basic content insertion task. Four input modalities were considered to perform the task (keyboard, touch, tangibles and gestures) and the methodology was based on usability testing (speed, accuracy and user preference). Overall, results show that there is a statistically significant difference in speed of task completion between the age groups, and there may be indications that the type of interface that is used can indeed influence efficiency in insertion tasks, and not so much other factors like age. Also, the study raises new issues regarding the "old" mouse input versus the "new" input modalities.

Abstract

Abstract
A fundamental problem in the management of an automated guided vehicle system (AGVS) is the determination of the load to be transported and the vehicle to transport it. The time for the loading and unloading of pallets must be specified as soon as possible. Typical objectives are minimization of travel times and costs by the reduction of the number of vehicles required to fulfill a given transportation order. This article presents a methodology for the estimation the minimum number of AGVs (considering all the available ones at the shop floor level) required to execute a given transportation order within a specific time-window. A comparison is made between the algorithms Shortest Job First and meta-heuristic Tabu Search (applied to an initial solution) for a task assignment. An enhanced Dijkstra algorithm is used for the conflict-free routing task. The number of vehicles is estimated so as to provide an efficient distribution of tasks and reduce the operational costs of the materials handling system. Simulation results of two typical industrial warehouse shop floor scenarios are provided. Although the study focuses on pre-planning of order fulfillment of materials handling, the proposed methodology can also be utilized as an important tool for investment analysis of the warehouse layout design and for estimating the ideal number of AGVs.

Abstract
This paper introduces the science software of HARMONI. The Instrument Numerical Model simulates the instrument from the optical point of view and provides synthetic exposures simulating detector readouts from data-cubes containing astrophysical scenes. The Data Reduction Software converts raw-data frames into a fully calibrated, scientifically usable data cube. We present the functionalities and the preliminary design of this software, describe some of the methods and algorithms used and highlight the challenges that we will have to face.