Abstract
This paper presents a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithm for the container loading problem. The algorithm combines a constructive procedure based on the concept of maximal-space, with five new movements defined directly on the physical layout of the packed boxes, which involve insertion and deletion strategies. The new algorithm is tested on the complete set of Bischoff and Ratcliff problems, ranging from weakly to strongly heterogeneous instances, and outperforms all the reported algorithms which have used those test instances.

Abstract
Wireless networks are starting to be populated by interconnected devices that reveal remarkable hardware and software differences. This fact raises a number of questions on the applicability of available results on dependability-related aspects of communication protocols, since they were obtained for wireless networks with homogeneous nodes. In this work, we study the impact of heterogeneous communication and computation capabilities of nodes on dependability aspects of diffusion protocols for wireless networks. We build a detailed stochastic model of the logic layers of the communication stack with the SAN formalism. The model takes into account relevant real-world aspects of wireless communication, such as transitional regions and capture effect, and heterogeneous node capabilities. Dependability-related metrics are evaluated with analytical solutions techniques for small networks, while simulation is employed in the case of large networks. © 2010 IEEE.

Abstract
The amount of information available in the MEDLINE database makes it very hard for a researcher to retrieve a reasonable amount of relevant documents using a simple query language interface. Automatic Classification of documents may be a valuable technology to help reducing the amount of documents retrieved for each query. To accomplish this process it is of capital importance to use appropriate pre-processing techniques on the data. The main goal of this study is to analyse the impact of pre-processing techniques in text Classification of MEDLINE documents. We have assessed the effect of combining different pre-processing techniques together with several classification algorithms available in the WEKA tool. Our experiments show that the application of pruning, stemming and WordNet reduces significantly the number of attributes and improves the accuracy of the results.

Abstract
Mining meaningful data from complex biological networks is a critical task in many areas of research. One important example is calculating the frequency of all subgraphs of a certain size, also known as the sub graph census problem. This can provide a very comprehensive structural characterization of a network and is also used as an intermediate step in the computation of network motifs, an important basic building block of networks, that try to bridge the gap between structure and function. The subgraph census problem is com-putationally hard and here we present several parallel strategies to solve this problem. Our initial strategies were refined towards achieving an efficient and scalable adaptive parallel algorithm. This algorithm achieves almost linear speedups up to 128 cores when applied to a representative set of biological networks from different domains and makes the calculation of census for larger subgraph sizes feasible.

Abstract
Breast Cancer Conservative Treatment (BCCT) is considered the gold standard of breast cancer treatment. However, the aesthetic outcome is diverse and very difficult to evaluate in a consistent way partly due to the weak reproducibility of the subjective methods in use. T his motivated the research on the objective methods. BCCT.core is a very recent software that objectively and automatically evaluates the aesthetic outcome of BCCT. However, as in other approaches, the system only uses frontal patient information, disregarding volumetric perception on lateral measurements. In the current work we investigate the improvement of the BCCT.core model by introducing lateral information extracted from patients images. We compare the performance of the model currently used on BCCT.core with the model developed in this study. Experimental results suggest that with lateral measurements the model presents better performance, however improvements are not significant. We can conclude that is essential to use robust models on the BCCT, and the input of 3D models will probably help to obtain better results. © 2010 IEEE.

Abstract
Despite its huge success and increasing incorporation in complex, industrial-strength applications, open source software, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed development model, is hard to assess and certify in an effective, sound and independent way. This makes its use and integration within safety or security-critical systems, a risk. And, simultaneously an opportunity and a challenge for rigourous, mathematically based, methods which aim at pushing software analysis and development to the level of a mature engineering discipline. This paper discusses such a challenge and proposes a number of ways in which open source development may benefit from the whole patrimony of formal methods.