Book excerpt: This volume contains a selection of papers on recent developments in fields such as stochastic processes, multivariate data analysis and stochastic models in operations research, earth and life sciences and information theory, from an applicative perspective. Some of them have been extracted from lectures given at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Granada for the past two years (Kai Lai Chung and Marcel F Neuts, among others). All the papers have been carefully selected and revised.