"Our research in attosecond science supported by the ERC advanced grant ALMA “Attosecond Control of Light and Matter”has led us to develop a simple technique to fully characterize and control ultrashort laser electric fields. The characterizationand subsequent control can be divided into two parts:- Measurement of the spectral phase of short light pulses by measuring second harmonic generation as a function ofdispersion introduced by e.g. a pair of glass wedges (""d-scan"" technique). From the “dispersion scans”, the spectral phaseof the pulse can be retrieved and then adjusted to perform compression of the laser pulses.- Ultrafast measurement of the Carrier Envelope Phase offset of amplified laser pulses (""Ultrafast CEP"" technique). It isbased upon interferometry, where the second harmonic of the red edge of an octave-spanning spectrum is spectrallyinterfered with the blue edge. In our implementation, the detector is a linear photodiode array and Field-Programmable GateArray based- electronics enables us to determine the CEP at a rate of up to 100 kHz.The d-scan technique was invented in Lund in 2011 as a collaborative project between the University of Porto and LundUniversity. An international patent application was filed on the 11th of October 2011 and published on the 18th of April 2013.The “Ultrafast-CEP” technique was invented in Lund in 2010 and nicely complements the “d-scan” technique.Our goal is to build a device for characterization and control of femtosecond pulses by combining both techniques and to commercialize it.Our characterization device will be useful for the ultrafast laser community. This includes university laboratories andresearch institutes in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine as well as biomedical and materials science industry."