Chiara Brombin is Assistant Professor in Statistics at the Faculty of Psychology (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milano) and national coordinator of the research project FIRB 2012 (RBFR12VHR7) "Interpreting emotions: a computational tool integrating facial expressions and biosignals based on shape analysis and Bayesian networks". Her research interests focus on applied statistics and include nonparametric permutation tests, statistical shape analysis, multivariate statistics, linear mixed-effect models, joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data. Luigi Salmaso is Full Professor of Statistics at the Department of Management and Engineering at University of Padova. His research interests include biostatistics, statistical methods for marketing research, design of experiments, nonparametric statistics and agricultural statistics. Specific topics of interests include permutation tests, resampling techniques and ranking and selection methods. Luigi Ippoliti is an Associate Professor in Statistics at the University "G. d'Annunzio"of Chieti Pescara, Italy. His research activity is mainly focused on the analysis of multivariate processes with temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal structures with interests in economic, environmental and Neuro-Physiological applications.  Specific topics of interests include hierarchical spatio-temporal models, image processing, functional data analysis and dynamic shape analysis. Lara Fontanella is a Researcher in Statistics at the University G. d'Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Her research interests focus mainly on Latent Variable models and Statistical Analysis of Dynamic Shapes, with applications to environmental, neuro-physiological, social and economic data. Caterina Fusilli holds a Bachelor's Degree in Statistics and Information Technologies and a Master Degree in Statistics for Biomedicine, Environment and Technology from the University "La Sapienza" of Rome. She also received the Ph.D degree in Economics and Statistics from the University "G. d'Annunzio" of Chieti - Pescara. She is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Bioinformatic unit at the IRCCS Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza - Mendel Institute (Rome). Her research interests include the Next-Generation Sequencing, Bioinformatics, Shape Analysis, Cluster Analysis and Finite Mixture Models.