A proactive project is proposed which aims at the development of Pattern Recognition (PR) techniques and at studying

the impact of the application of these techniques to a wide range of of practical problems with great industrial or

commercial interest. PR is a well established field in Science and Engineering for more then 20 years, with applications

in most productive sectors. The present project explicitly focus on this multiplicity of areas in which clear benefits can be

obtained through the use of common PR techniques. The consolidated experience of the teams which participate in this

project guarantees the correct use, adaptation and/or development of those techniques which are most

appropriate for each application. Main PR technologies to be developed include Feature Selection and

Transformation and both

Supervised and Un-supervised (“Clustering”) Classification techniques. In all cases, the project will mainly focus on

approaches which, while being relatively simple, are proving extremely useful in practice. In particular, all the distance- based techniques are worth mentioning. These techniques are quite flexible and general, since they do not even require

a vector representation of the objects involved. With regard to applications, eight specific practical problems are

considered: handwritten text recognition (OCR), prospective analysis of massive data sets (“Data Mining”), quality

control of ceramics,

fruit classification, marble classification, quality control of sole shoes, music analysis and medic applications.