Abstract
The development of an underwater wireless communication systems is becoming a research and a technological priority due to the increasing demand for exploring the potential of oceans in fields such as pharmaceutics, oil, minerals, environmental and biodiversity. However, underwater wireless communications still fail to ensure high data-rate connections which support real time applications. In this work a low power high data-rate acoustic modem is presented, based on a piezoelectric poly (vinylidene fluoride) polymer as a transducer and a Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that can be programmed to work with different types of modulations. The system has been validated by the implementation of a full duplex point-to-point communication at 1 Mbps using On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation with a 1 MHz single carrier and it represents a major advance in the state of the art and a breakthrough in underwater acoustic communications, being the first to show the possibility to achieve data rates up to 1Mbps. It was successfully tested with a 1 Mbps rate, achieving a 3x10(-3) Bit Error Rate (BER) using just 1.4 mu W of power consumption per bit.

Abstract
Underwater wireless communication systems are becoming a priority in terms of research and technological development due to the increasing demand for exploring the oceans in areas such as pharmaceutical, oil, minerals, environmental and biodiversity. This demand is increasing exponentially with the need for high data rate and near-real-time communications. In this work an underwater low power acoustic modem to operate over tens of meters, achieving a maximum data rate of 1 Mbps, is presented. This solution allows for reprogramming the digital signal processing block enabling the use of different types of digital modulations in order to improve the modem's performance. The system is based on a poly(vinylidene fluoride) PVDF ultrasonic emitter transducer which is capable of sending high quality signals needed for digital modulations with high symbol rates per carrier period. BPSK, BFSK and OOK modulations have been tested. The results registered were 3x10(-3) BER with 1 Mbps OOK, 2.3x10-5 with 512 kbps and 1x10-8 with 256 kbps.

Abstract
This paper describes the development and testing of a robotic capsule for search and rescue operations at sea. This capsule is able to operate autonomously or remotely controlled, is transported and deployed by a larger USV into a determined disaster area and is used to carry a life raft and inflate it close to survivors in large-scale maritime disasters. The ultimate goal of this development is to endow search and rescue teams with tools that extend their operational capability in scenarios with adverse atmospheric or maritime conditions.

Abstract
The genetic algorithm (GA) is an optimization metaheuristic that relies on the evolution of a set of solutions (population) according to genetically inspired transformations. In the variant of this technique called cellular GA, the evolution is done separately for subgroups of solutions. This paper describes a hardware framework capable of efficiently supporting custom accelerators for this metaheuristic. This approach builds a regular array of problem-specific processing elements (PEs), which perform the genetic evolution, connected to shared memories holding the local subpopulations. To assist the design of the custom PEs, a methodology based on highlevel synthesis from C++ descriptions is used. The proposed architecture was applied to a spectrum allocation problem in cognitive radio networks. For an array of 5x5 PEs in a Virtex-6 FPGA, the results show a minimum speedup of 22x compared to a software version running on a PC and a speedup near 2000x over a MicroBlaze soft processor.

Abstract
This chapter describes a series of experiments aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the REFLECT design-flow in terms of ease of use and quality of the generated designs. In these experiments, we exercised the use of LARA to control and guide the REFLECT design-flow components, such as the Harmonic weaver, the CoSy-based compilers, and the back-end Molen/ML510 toolchain. Various research results have been presented in previous publications focusing on specific aspects of the REFLECT design-flow [1], including strategies for optimizing hardware/software systems [2], strategies for optimizing hardware synthesis [3], strategies for hardware/software specialization [4], strategies for resource efficiency [5], and strategies addressing safety requirements [6, 7]. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013. All rights are reserved.

Abstract
This paper describes the results of AcousticRobot'13 - a noise measurement campaign that took place off the Portuguese Coast in May 2013, using two high endurance autonomous vehicles capable of silent operation (an underwater glider and an autonmomous sailing vessel) equipped with hydrophones, and a moored hydrophone that served as reference. We show that the autonomous vehicles used can provide useful measurements of underwater noise, and describe the main advantages and shortcomings that became evident during the campaign.