Invasive species cause huge amounts of environmental, economic, social and cultural damage in Europe and worldwide. Improving measures to control them is an ongoing challenge, and mathematical modeling and optimization are becoming increasingly popular as a tool to assist management (1; 2; 4). We analyse an optimal control model for the control of invasive species which aims to find the best temporal resource allocation strategy for the population reduction, under a budget constraint (3).

Bioventing is a technology used to abate the presence of pollutants in the subsoil. Microorganisms biodegrade the pollutant but the biochemical reaction requires oxygen and so an airflow is induced in the subsoil by means of injection and/or extraction wells. Costs, final result and decontamination time are reliant on contaminant type, soil permeability and several other factors, but oxygen subsoil concentration plays a very important role.

In a computer-aided system for skin cancer diagnosis, hair removal is one of the main challenges to face before applying a process of automatic skin lesion segmentation and classification. In this paper, we propose a straightforward method to detect and remove hair from dermoscopic images. Preliminarily, the regions to consider as candidate hair regions and the border/corner components located on the image frame are automatically detected. Then, the hair regions are determined using information regarding the saliency, shape and image colors.

Mathematical models for subsoil decontamination by biological techniques