Abstract
Here we present the first results from a MUSE/X-Shooter study of the jet from the classical T Tauri star TH 28. The combination of MUSE and X-Shooter enables us to take advantage of both spectro-imaging and broadband spectroscopy to comprehensively investigate the TH 28 jet. We present a MUSE spectro-image and PV plot of the Ha emission line and use flux ratios from the X-Shooter spectrum to estimate the mass accretion rate at log(?acc) = -9.4. Future work will focus on diagnostic analyses on both sets of data, including estimating the mass outflow rate (?out) and the extinction of the jet. © SAIt 2017.

Abstract
Assessing the quality of aperture synthesis maps is relevant for benchmarking image reconstruction algorithms, for the scientific exploitation of data from optical long-baseline interferometers, and for the design/upgrade of new/existing interferometric imaging facilities. Although metrics have been proposed in these contexts, no systematic study has been conducted on the selection of a robust metric for quality assessment. This article addresses the question: what is the best metric to assess the quality of a reconstructed image? It starts by considering several metrics and selecting a few based on general properties. Then, a variety of image reconstruction cases are considered. The observational scenarios are phase closure and phase referencing at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), for a combination of two, three, four and six telescopes. End-to-end image reconstruction is accomplished with the MIRA software, and several merit functions are put to test. It is found that convolution by an effective point spread function is required for proper image quality assessment. The effective angular resolution of the images is superior to naive expectation based on the maximum frequency sampled by the array. This is due to the prior information used in the aperture synthesis algorithm and to the nature of the objects considered. The l(1)-norm is the most robust of all considered metrics, because being linear it is less sensitive to image smoothing by high regularization levels. For the cases considered, this metric allows the implementation of automatic quality assessment of reconstructed images, with a performance similar to human selection.

Abstract
We present the disparity map computation core of a hardware system for isolating foreground objects in stereoscopic video streams. The operation is based on the computation of dense disparity maps using block-matching algorithms and two well-known metrics: sum of absolute differences and Census transform. Two sets of disparity maps are computed by taking each of the images as reference so that a consistency check can be performed to identify occluded pixels and eliminate spurious foreground pixels. Taking advantage of parallelism, the proposed architecture is highly scalable and provides numerous degrees of adjustment to different application needs, performance levels and resource usage. A version of the system for 640 x 480 images and a maximum disparity of 135 pixels was implemented in a system based on a Xilinx Virtex II-Pro FPGA and two cameras with a frame rate of 25 fps (less than the maximum supported frame rate of 40 fps on this platform). Implementation of the same system on a Virtex-5 FPGA is estimated to achieve 80 fps, while a version with increased parallelism is estimated to run at 140 fps (which corresponds to the calculation of more than 5.9 x 10(9) disparity-pixels per second).

Abstract
Smart grids aim at ensuring a secure, reliable and efficient operation of power systems and for that purpose they need communications infrastructures capable of meeting different requirements. Current and emerging wireless multi-hop solutions based on standard technologies are strong candidates for communications networks associated and integrated with electric distribution grids but a suitable methodology to evaluate and deploy them is missing. This paper presents a holistic methodology supported by contextual information used to generate different scenarios of distribution grids and to evaluate and deploy wireless communications networks for smart grids. Simulation results show that the methodology is suitable for the evaluation of wireless multi-hop networks in the smart grid context and prove that the performance of such networks meets the expected requirements of different applications.

Abstract
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and Remotely Operated Vehicles are useful in industries such as offshore Oil and Gas, deep sea mining, and aquaculture, where inspection missions are frequent. While underwater communications are mainly done using acoustic links, retrieving data from these devices to shore is still an open issue, especially when we consider the high cost of satellite communications. In this paper, using ns-3 simulations, we evaluate the ability of the communications solution being developed in the BLUECOM+ project to enable real-time marine data transfer at remote ocean areas. Through the usage of tethered balloons, TV white spaces frequencies, and multi-hop communications, the BLUECOM+ solution enables cost-effective, broadband connectivity to the Internet at remote ocean areas, using standard access technologies such as GPRS/UMTS/LTE and Wi-Fi. Simulation results show an expected range exceeding 100 km from shore using only two nodes at sea, with bitrates over 1 Mbit/s.

Abstract
In this paper we assess the influence of the conductivity of the medium on the radiation characteristics and input impedance of a loop antenna designed for underwater communications. The initial study is based on simulation of the antenna characteristics using FEKO electromagnetic (EM) software. Additionally, an equivalent circuit model of the antenna is also obtained and simulation of the input impedance on ADS software shows good agreement with the EM simulator. It is found that the radiation pattern, of the loop antenna changes significantly with the conductivity of the medium, from freshwater to seawater. The loop antennas were built with baluns and tested in freshwater, where the insertion loss between two identical antennas and the radiation pattern of one of them were also measured. The results show good agreement with the simulations.