Tensegrity structures are prestressed and self-stable pin-connected frameworks built up mainly from two kind of elements, in compression (bars) and in tension (tendons). It has been 75 years since the first official appearance of tensegrity, although the present paper includes proof that states that they are in fact more than 100 years old. Throughout these years, tensegrity structures have been capturing engineers’, architects’ and artists’ attention with their peculiar properties. In the last decade, new applications have been found based on tensegrity, although there are not any compilations about them. This paper aims to fill this gap by giving an overview of all the recent real applications that tensegrity has had during its short life, at the same time exposing its potential in all the fields it has contributed to (AEC, robotics, space, etc.) The methodology for performing this review has been revisiting the most relevant publications in several scientific databases. This has led to a new discovery: the first cable-dome by Snelson. As a conclusion, tensegrity has been providing useful solutions to previous problems since they have appeared, but their potential can still grow in an exponential way due to the new technologies and discoveries of the last decade.

Bibliometrics and citation analysis have become an important set of methods for library and information science, as well as an exceptional source of information and knowledge for many other areas. Their main sources are citation indices, which are bibliographic databases like Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, etc. However, bibliographical databases lack perfection and standardization. There are several software tools that perform useful information management and bibliometric analysis importing data from them. A comparison has been carried out to identify which of them perform certain pre-processing tasks. Usually, they are not strong enough to detect all the duplications, mistakes, misspellings and variant names, leaving to the user the tedious and time-consuming task of correcting the data. Furthermore, some of them do not import datasets from different citation indices, but mainly from Web of Science (WoS).\ud A new software tool, called STICCI.eu (Software Tool for Improving and Converting Citation Indices - enhancing uniformity), which is freely available online, has been created to solve these problems. STICCI.eu is able to do conversions between bibliographical citation formats (WoS, Scopus, CSV, BibTex, RIS), correct the usual mistakes appearing in those databases, detect duplications, misspellings, etc., identify and transform the full or abbreviated titles of the journals, homogenize toponymical names of countries and relevant cities or regions and list the processed data in terms of the most cited authors, journals, references, etc

This paper concerns several important topics of the Symmetry journal, namely, computer-aided design, computational geometry, computer graphics, visualization, and pattern recognition. We also take advantage of the symmetric structure of the tensor-product surfaces, where the parametric variables u and v play a symmetric role in shape reconstruction. In this paper we address the general problem of global-support parametric surface approximation from clouds of data points for reverse engineering applications. Given a set of measured data points, the approximation is formulated as a nonlinear continuous least-squares optimization problem. Then, a recent metaheuristics called Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) is applied to compute all relevant free variables of this minimization problem (namely, the data parameters and the surface poles). The method includes the iterative generation of new solutions by using the Lévy flights to promote the diversity of solutions and prevent stagnation. A critical advantage of this method is its simplicity: the CSA requires only two parameters, many fewer than any other metaheuristic approach, so the parameter tuning becomes a very easy task. The method is also simple to understand and easy to implement. Our approach has been applied to a benchmark of three illustrative sets of noisy data points corresponding to surfaces exhibiting several challenging features. Our experimental results show that the method performs very well even for the cases of noisy and unorganized data points. Therefore, the method can be directly used for real-world applications for reverse engineering without further pre/post-processing. Comparative work with the most classical mathematical techniques for this problem as well as a recent modification of the CSA called Improved CSA (ICSA) is also reported. Two nonparametric statistical tests show that our method outperforms the classical mathematical techniques and provides equivalent results to ICSA for all instances in our benchmark.