Abstract
Over the past few decades, information systems and technologies have taken on a wide variety of roles within organizations, ranging from operational support to the strategic support of the company. Therefore, there have been significant changes in the motives for their adoption that are vital to understand to guarantee that investment is properly managed. With the purpose of identifying and characterizing the motivations currently behind the adoption of information technologies in large Portuguese companies, which systems the companies have been implementing, in which systems they intend to invest in short-term, and what is the current role of information technology within the organization, we carried out a study with the participation of several chief information officers. The findings of this study reveal that the reasons for adoption and the role that information systems and technologies play is evolving in Portuguese companies and that the adoption of certain types of systems like Enterprise Resource Planning systems is now consolidated, whereas the adoption of other systems like Business Intelligence systems should increase significantly in the near future. Copyright © 2009, IGI Global.

Abstract
Organic-inorganic hybrids were tailored as transparent monoliths and as planar waveguides deposited on borosilicate substrates by the spin coating technique. Laser direct writing process was used to create monomode Y-splitters. The Y-splitter structures were designed and optimized for a coupling ratio of 50% using a beam propagation method (BPM) software.. The potential of these optical structures based on di-ureasil hybrids to be used as optical filters operating in the C+L telecommunication windows will be evaluated.

Abstract
In industry, spare equipments are often shared by many workplaces with identical equipments to assure the production rate required to fulfill delivery dates. These types of systems arc called "Maintenance Float Systems". The main objective of managers that deal with these types of systems is to assure the required capacity to deliver orders on time and at minimum cost. Not delivering on time has often important consequences; it call cause loss of costumer goodwill, loss of sales and call damage organization's image. Maintenance cost is the indicator more frequently used to configure maintenance float systems and to invest in maintenance workers or spare equipments. Once the system is configured, other performance indicators must be used to characterize and measure the efficiency of the system. Different improvement initiatives call be performed to enhance the performance of maintenance float systems: performing preventive maintenance actions, implementation of autonomous maintenance, improvement of equipments maintainability, increase of maintenance crews' efficiency etc. "Carrying out improvement based on facts" is a principle of Total Quality Management (TQM) in order to step to business excellence. It requires monitoring processes through performance measures. This work aims to characterize and highlight the differences and relationships between three types of performance measures-equipment availability, equipment utilization and workplace occupation, in the context of maintenance float system. Definitions and expressions of these three indicators are developed for maintenance float systems. The relationship between maintenance float systems efficiency and the referred indicators is shown. Other indicators are also proposed and compared with the first ones (number of standby equipments, queue length etc.).

Abstract

Abstract
In this work we present a possible "way-to-go" for all-optical processing, shortening the distance between typical all-optical scenarios and real standardized optical networks. This is based on the usage of dualpolarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-DQPSK) for transmission with subsequent conversion to amplitude shift-keying for optical processing in metro/access network scenarios. In the last years, a strong push towards 100 Gbit/s technology developments has been done by major operators. The achieved developments indicate that future for high bit rate transmission in long-haul networks is reserved for phase modulation formats (like DP-QPSK) with coherent detection and subsequent electronic processing to mitigate transmission impairments. As this is becoming obvious for long-haul networks where high performance in transmission is required, the same is not applied to metropolitan networks. First of all the push for 100Gbit/s in metro hasn't been as strong as in long-haul (but it will come soon) and second, metro networks are much more cost sensitive and need less transmission performance, therefore the price of coherent detection and electronic processing might be difficult to realize when 100 Gbit/s come to the metro region. It can, therefore, be expected that amplitude modulation (AM) formats will still domain the metro area. Typical all-optical processing use AM signals which means that for metro networks there may still be a role for it. Recently, a transparent node connecting regio/metro to metro/access network rings was successfully demonstrated [1], [2]. There, full mux/demux between optical time domain multiplexed (OTDM) signals in regio/metro ring and wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) signals in metro/access was shown using AM signals. This experiment showed the potential of all-optical processing in terms of performance, cost and power savings. All-optical conversion between phase modulated (PM) and AM signals was demonstrated both with semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) [3] and highly nonlinear fibres (HNLF) [4]. This means that, in principle, it is possible to merge the best of the two worlds; tight spectral occupation from long-haul DP- (D)QPSK and all-optical processing from AM signals in metro region. This might be the "way-to-go" for all optical processing. © 2009 IEEE.

Abstract
There are two principal notions of security for cryptographic systems. For a few systems, they can be proven to have perfect secrecy against an opponent with unlimited computational power, in terms of information theory. However, the security of most systems, including public key cryptosystems, is based on complexity theoretic assumptions. In both cases there is an implicit notion of average-case analysis. In the case of conditional security, the underlying assumption is usually average-case, not worst case hardness. And for unconditional security, entropy itself is an average case notion of encoding length. Kolmogorov complexity (the size of the smallest program that generates a string) is a rigorous measure of the amount of information, or randomness, in an individual string x. By considering the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity (program limited to run in time t(vertical bar x vertical bar)) we can take into account the computational difficulty of extracting information. We present a new notion of security based on Kolmogorov complexity. The first goal is to provide a formal definition of what it means for an individual instance to be secure. The second goal is to bridge the gap between information theoretic security, and computational security, by using time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity. In this paper, we lay the groundwork of the study of cryptosystems from the point of view of security of individual instances by considering three types of information-theoretically secure cryptographic systems: cipher systems (such as the one-time pad), threshold secret sharing, and authentication schemes.