Abstract
Femtosecond laser (300 fs, 500 kHz, 522 nm) fabrication of optical waveguides in bulk silica glass is extended to waveguide retarders. We study the merits of nanograting orientation (perpendicular or parallel to the waveguide) for generating high and low birefringence waveguides. This is used together with other exposure condition to control the waveguide birefringence between 10(-5) and 10(-4) permitting for the simultaneous fabrication of the waveguides and the tuning of the retardance demonstrating quarter and half-wave retarders in the 1200 nm to 1700 nm spectrum. The wavelength dependence of the birefringence is also characterized over a range of exposure conditions. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America

Abstract
In this paper we introduce new phase-related features denoting the delay between the harmonics and the fundamental frequency of a periodic signal, notably of voiced singing. These features are identified as Normalized Relative Delay (NRD) and denote the phase contribution to the shape invariance of a periodic signal. Thus, NRDs are amenable to a physical and psychophysical interpretation and are structurally independent of the overall time shift of the signal, an important property that is shared with the magnitude spectrum in the case of a locally stationary signal. We describe the NRD and report on preliminary studies testing the discrimination capability of NRDs applied to singing signals.

Abstract
This paper describes an approach based on the shortest path method for the detection and tracking of vibrating lines. The detection and tracking of vibrating structures, such as lines and cables, is of great importance in areas such as civil engineering, but the specificities of these scenarios make it a hard problem to tackle. We propose a two-step approach consisting of line detection and subsequent tracking. The automatic detection of the lines avoids manual initialization - a typical problem of these scenarios - and favors tracking. The additional information provided by the line detection enables the improvement of existing algorithms and extends their application to a larger set of scenarios.

Abstract
This paper presents a generation adequacy evaluation based on analytical calculation, considering electric vehicles. The scenarios used are exploring electric vehicles penetrations in six different European countries, in order to assess their impact on the security of supply. An analytical method is developed to perform this evaluation. Afterwards, a discussion about the accuracy of this methodology is done and the differences between this approach and a flexible Sequential Monte Carlo Simulation are identified © 2011 IEEE.

Abstract
Sea port container terminals play an important role in the national and regional economy. The integrated scheduling of handling equipment has been recently investigated in literature to improve the performance of the container terminals. In this paper, an integrated scheduling of quay cranes and automated guided vehicles is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. This model minimizes the makespan of all the loading and unloading tasks for a set of cranes in a scheduling problem. Based on the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, a scheduling method is proposed to solve the problem in a relatively short period of time. Comparison of the respective results of the mathematical model and the SA algorithm evidently shows acceptable performance of the proposed SA algorithm in finding good solutions for practical scheduling problems. Moreover, the effects of three cooling processes and two sets of control parameters on the best solution of the SA are investigated. © 2011 Academic Journals.

Abstract
Assistive technology enables people to achieve independence in the accomplishment of their daily tasks and enhance their quality of life. Visual information is the basis for most navigational tasks, so visually impaired individuals are at disadvantage due to the lack of information or given insufficient information about their surrounding environment. With the recent advances in inclusive technology it is possible to extend the support given to people with visual disabilities during their mobility. In this context we propose a new algorithm to recognize landmarks suitably placed on sidewalks. The proposed algorithm uses a combination of Peano-Hilbert Space Filling Curves for dimension reduction of image data and Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) to pre-process the image, resulting on a fast and efficient recognition method and revealing a promising solution.