The design of optimal mating schemes is a mean to improve farm animal performances. During the last decades, breeding strategies and techniques addressing both genetic improvement and inbreeding control have been well documented and applied in several countries. The detrimental effects of inbreeding have been reported in farm animals and, in the recent years, many selection and mating strategies were proposed to restrict inbreeding in selection programmes....

In this Chapter, we present some interesting properties of quantum walks on the line. We concentrate our attention in the emergence of invariance and provide some insights into the ultimate origin of the observed behavior. In the first part of the Chapter, we review the building blocks of the quantum-mechanical version of the standard random walk in one dimension. The most distinctive difference between random and quantum walks is the replacement...

Excerpt In this chapter a particular image processing problem existing in quality assurance for steel industry is addressed. Since the quality standards in steel industry are ever increasing, even steel industry starts to use machine vision systems to monitor their product quality. In case of steel coils a particular figure of merit in quality is the roundness (ellipticity) or lack thereof of the coil. Book chapter in Image Processing edited by...