Abstract: In real-life logistics and distribution activities it is usual to face situations in which the distribution of goods has to be made from multiple warehouses or depots to the nal customers. This problem is known as the Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP), and it typically includes two sequential and correlated stages: (a) the assignment map of customers to depots, and (b) the corresponding design of the distribution routes. Most of the existing work in the literature has focused on minimizing distance-based distribution costs while satisfying a number of capacity constraints. However, no attention has been given so far to potential variations in demands due to the tness of the customerdepot mapping in the case of heterogeneous depots. In this paper, we consider this realistic version of the problem in which the depots are heterogeneous in terms of their commercial oer and customers show dierent willingness to consume depending on how well the assigned depot ts their preferences. Thus, we assume that dierent customer-depot assignment maps will lead to dierent customer-expenditure levels. As a consequence, market-segmentation strategiesneed to be considered in order to increase sales and total income while accounting for the distribution costs. To solve this extension of the MDVRP, we propose a hybrid approach that combines statistical learning techniques with a metaheuristic framework. First, a set of predictive models is generated from historical data. These statistical models allow estimating the demand of any customer depending on the assigned depot. Then, the estimated expenditure of each customer is included as part of an enriched objective function as a way to better guide the stochastic local search inside the metaheuristic framework. A set of computational experiments contribute to illustrate our approach and how the extended MDVRP considered here diers in terms of the proposed solutions from the traditional one.

Abstract: In this paper we present a study on the use of Action Units as mid-level features for automatically recognizing basic and subtle emotions. We propose a representation model based on mid-level facial muscular movement features. We encode these movements dynamically using the Facial Action Coding System, and propose to use these intermediate features based on Action Units (AUs) to classify emotions. AUs activations are detected fusing a set of spatiotemporal geometric and appearance features. The algorithm is validated in two applications: (i) the recognition of 7 basic emotions using the publicly available Cohn-Kanade database, and (ii) the inference of subtle emotional cues in the Newscast database. In this second scenario, we consider emotions that are perceived cumulatively in longer periods of time. In particular, we Automatically classify whether video shoots from public News TV channels refer to Good or Bad news. To deal with the different video lengths we propose a Histogram of Action Units and compute it using a sliding window strategy on the frame sequences. Our approach achieves accuracies close to human perception.

Abstract: Dominance is referred to the level of influence that a person has in a conversation. Dominance is an important research area in social psychology, but the problem of its automatic estimation is a very recent topic in the contexts of social and wearable computing. In this paper, we focus on the dominance detection of visual cues. We estimate the correlation among observers by categorizing the dominant people in a set of face-to-face conversations. Different dominance indicators from gestural communication are defined, manually annotated, and compared to the observers' opinion. Moreover, these indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analyses showed a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.