Asteroseismology of red giants as a tool for studying stellar
  populations: first steps
  The detection of solar-like oscillations in G and K giants with the CoRoT and
Kepler space-based satellites allows robust constraints to be set on the mass
and radius of such stars. The availability of these constraints for thousands
of giants sampling different regions of the Galaxy promises to enrich our
understanding on the Milky Way's constituents. In this contribution we briefly
recall which are the relevant constraints that red-giant seismology can
currently provide to the study of stellar populations. We then present, for a
few nearby stars, the comparison between radius and mass determined using
seismic scaling relations and those obtained by other methods.
