In this paper, we develop and apply a genetic algorithm to solve surgery scheduling cases in a Mexican Public Hospital. Here, one of the most challenging issues is to process containers with heterogeneous capacity. Many scheduling problems do not share this restriction; because of this reason, we developed and implemented a strategy for the processing of heterogeneous containers in the genetic algorithm. The final product was named “genetic algorithm for scheduling optimization” (GAfSO). The results of GAfSO were tested with real data of a local hospital. Said hospital assigns different operational time to the operating rooms throughout the week. Also, the computational complexity of GAfSO is analyzed. Results show that GAfSO can assign the corresponding capacity to the operating rooms while optimizing their use.

‘El Diario de Juárez’ is a local newspaper in a city of 1.5 million Spanish-speaking inhabitants that publishes texts of which citizens read them on both a website and an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) service. This research applies natural-language-processing and machine-learning algorithms to the news provided by the RSS service in order to classify them based on whether they are about a traffic incident or not, with the final intention of notifying citizens where such accidents occur. The classification process explores the bag-of-words technique with five learners (Classification and Regression Tree (CART), Naïve Bayes, kNN, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM)) on a class-imbalanced benchmark; this challenging issue is dealt with via five sampling algorithms: synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), borderline SMOTE, adaptive synthetic sampling, random oversampling, and random undersampling. Consequently, our final classifier reaches a sensitivity of 0.86 and an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.86, which is an acceptable performance when considering the complexity of analyzing unstructured texts in Spanish.