Abstract
The increasing demand for human activity analysis on surveillance scenarios has been provoking the emerging of new features and concepts that could help to identify the activities of interest. In this paper, we present a context-based descriptor to identify individual profiles. It accounts with a multi-scale histogram representation of position-based and attention-based features that follow a key-point trajectory sampling. The notion of profile is expressed by a new semantic concept introduced as an adjective for action recognition. We also identify a very rich dataset, in terms of intensity and variability of human activity, and extended it by manual annotation to validate the introduced concept of profile and test the descriptor's discriminative power. High rates of recognition were achieved.

Abstract

Abstract
The recent burst of R&D activity in Plasmonics, associated with the possibility of materials nanostructuring which enables the access to metamaterials, has been strongly impacting many branches of optics such as imaging, data recording and sensing. This talk details the factors that turned the combination Plasmonics and Metamaterials a huge opportunity to optical sensing.© OSA 2014.

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Abstract
This paper proposes new clustering criteria for distinguishing Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) strains using their spectrometric signature. These criteria are introduced in an agglomerative hierarchical clustering context, and consist of: (a) minimizing the total volume of clusters, as given by their respective convex hulls; and, (b) minimizing the global variance in cluster directionality. The method is deterministic and produces dendrograms, which are important features for microbiologists. A set of experiments, performed on yeast spectrometric data and on synthetic data, show the new approach outperforms several well-known clustering algorithms, including techniques commonly used for microorganism differentiation.

Abstract
The traveling tournament problem is a sports scheduling problem that includes two major issues in creating timetables: home/away pattern feasibility and travel distance. In this problem, the schedule must be compact: every team plays in every time slot. However, there are some sports leagues that have both home/away pattern restrictions and distance limits, but do not require a compact schedule. In such schedules, one or more teams can have a bye in any time slot. This leads us to a variant of the problem: the relaxed traveling tournament problem. We present a complete search method to solve this problem based on branch-and-bound, metaheuristics and dynamic programming. © 2013, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and EURO - The Association of European Operational Research Societies.