Abstract
Automatic pectoral muscle removal on mediolateral oblique view of mammogram is an essential step for many mammographic processing algorithms. However, the wide variability in the position of the muscle contour, together with the similarity between in muscle and breast tissues makes the detection a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a two step procedure to detect the muscle contour. In a first step, the endpoints of the contour are predicted with a pair of support vector regression models; one model is trained to predict the intersection point of the contour with the top row while the other is designed for the prediction of the endpoint of the contour on the left column. Next, the muscle contour is computed as the shortest path between the two endpoints. A comprehensive comparison with manually-drawn contours reveals the strength of the proposed method.

Abstract
An all fibre Mach-Zehnder interferometric configuration based on a suspended twin-core fibre is described. Due to the birefringence of the fibre cores, two interferometers were obtained by illuminating the fibre with polarized light. Applying strain, curvature and temperature to the sensing head, different sensitivities were observed, which permits the use of the matrix method to discriminate these three measurands.

Abstract
The aim of sound morphing is to obtain a result that falls perceptually between two (or more) sounds. In order to do this, we should be able to morph perceptually relevant features of sounds instead of blindly interpolating the parameters of a model. In this work we present automatic timbral morphing techniques applied to musical instrument sounds using high-level descriptors as features. High-level descriptors are measures of the acoustic correlates of salient timbre dimensions derived from perceptual studies, so that matching the descriptors becomes the goal itself to render the results more perceptually meaningful.

Abstract
In this paper a lumped transfer function (TF) model is derived for High Pressure Natural Gas Pipelines. Departing from a nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) model a high order continuous state space (SS) linear model is obtained using a finite difference method. An infinite order TF is calculated from the SS representation and finally is approximated by a compact non-rational function. This model is compared with SIMONE(R), a commercial simulator of gas transport and distribution, using a case study, and both exhibit a similar accuracy.

Abstract
In this poster we describe a work in progress aimed at using a variant of specification-based slicing to improve the reuse of annotated software components, developed under the so called design-by-contract approach. We have named this variant as contract-based because we use the annotations, more precisely the pre and post-conditions, to slice programs intra and inter-procedures. The idea, expressed in the poster, is to take the pre-condition of the reused annotated component as slicing criterion, and slice backward the program where the component is called. In that way, we can isolate the statements that have influence on the variables involved on the pre-condition and check if it is preserved by that invocation, or not. © 2010 IEEE.

Abstract
We introduce a model of tourism choice where we consider that the choice of a tourism resort by a tourist, depends not only on the characteristics of the product offered by the resort but depends also on certain characteristics -crowding types- of the other tourists that have chosen the same resort. To get insights about the effect of crowding types in the allocation of tourists across resorts we exploit a club formation approach and model the framework by means of a Nash game. We establish existence of strategic equilibrium and characterize relevant equilibria.