Sequence alignment techniques have been widely studied and applied mainly in bioinformatics, where pairs of sequences (dna bases, aminoacid, etc.) must be compared. These techniques assume that one-to-one correspondences between the symbols of the two sequences are implicitly determined simply by identity. In this seminar we consider the application of alignment techniques to more heterogeneous contexts, where this assumption does not hold. We introduce the concept of “blind” alignment, in which finding the best mapping between symbols becomes part of the alignment problem. Several applications to wireless sensors networks and biomedical imaging will be also presented.
