cometadata/datacite-rtg-text-other-reclassification-records huggingface dataset:
Designing and experimenting coordination primitives for service oriented computing
Creators: name: Strollo, Daniele
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2009
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services (WS) are becoming a widely accepted device for designing and implementing distributed systems. SOAs have given an important contribution to software engineering providing  a model where applications are defined by assembling  together certain functionalities, called services, possibly provided by remote suppliers. The characterizing issue of SOAs consists of defining common principles to make services accessible and usable regardless their execution context. Nevertheless, the architectural specification is far from giving a complete reference application model on which systems should rely on. The specification just includes principles for achieving interoperability and reusability of services; other aspects are left to the implementing platforms. As a consequence, it is understood how services are specified in isolation and how their functionalities are made available to the requesters, but the definition of languages for describing service composition are far from being widely accepted and reveals to be an impelling challenge. In the last years, several solutions have been proposed for describing aggregated  services. However, they often lack a formally defined semantics. Moreover, these solutions are often specific for a platform (e.g. WSs) and are difficult to adapt to other platforms since they rely on low level assumptions that are out of the SOA specifications. This thesis aims at providing new methodologies for implementing the coordination of services. Our framework proposes to be flexible enough to support high level languages and to provide reliable tools for testing correctness of implementation. Our approach relies on a formal model that takes the form of a process calculus specifically designed to deal with services and their coordination. The process calculus has been the main tool driving the specification issues as well the implementation issues. Indeed, it acts as a bridge between the high level specification language and the run-time environment. A distinguished feature of our proposal is that our formal model, i.e. the process calculus, describes distributed processes relying on an event notification mechanism as machinery for interactions. Services are represented by certain components that embody local computations and react to changes of the overall  environment in which they are involved. The adoption of event notification results particularly fashionable for tackling service coordination. The principles studied  at specification level are from one side understood within a theoretical framework that provides instruments for checking correctness of interaction policies and from the other side offers the core model for implementing and  experimenting a programming middleware.
Impact of Solidification on Inclusion Morphology in ESR and PESR Remelted Martensitic Stainless Steel Ingots
Creators: name: Persson, Ewa Sjöqvist
name: Brorson, Sofia
name: Mitchell, A. (Alec)
name: Jönsson, Pär G.
Publisher: name: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Year: 2021

description: This study focuses on the impact of solidification on the inclusion morphologies in different sizes of production-scale electro-slag remelting (ESR) and electro-slag remelting under a protected pressure-controlled atmosphere, (PESR), ingots, in a common martensitic stainless steel grade. The investigation has been carried out to increase the knowledge of the solidification and change in inclusion morphologies during ESR and PESR remelting. In order to optimize process routes for different steel grades, it is important to define the advantages of different processes. A comparison is made between an electrode, ESR, and PESR ingots with different production-scale ingot sizes, from 400 mm square to 1050 mm in diameter. The electrode and two of the smallest ingots are from the same electrode charge. The samples are taken from both the electrode, ingots, and rolled/forged material. The solidification structure, dendrite arm spacing, chemical analyzes, and inclusion number on ingots and/or forged/rolled material are studied. The results show that the larger the ingot and the further towards the center of the ingot, the larger inclusions are found. As long as an ingot solidifies with a columnar dendritic structure (DS), the increase in inclusion number and size with ingot diameter is approximately linear. However, at the ingot size (1050 mm in diameter in this study) when the center of the ingot converts to solidification in the equiaxial mode (EQ), the increase in number and size of the inclusions is much higher. The transition between a dendritic and an equiaxial solidification in the center of the ingots in this steel grade takes place in the region between the ingot diameters of 800 and 1050 mm.
Ontology-driven knowledge discovery
Creators: name: Furletti, Barbara
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2009
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: The problem of Knowledge Discovery has always attracted  many researchers and continues to be of great relevance to the computer science community in the branch of learning. This thesis aims to contribute to this topic, getting hints from the Ontology and Data Mining environments. We investigate a method for extracting new implicit knowledge  directly from an ontology by using an inductive/deductive  approach. By giving a sort of Bayesian interpretation to relationships that already exist in an ontology, we are able to return the extracted knowledge in form of Influence Rules. The idea is to split the extraction process in two separate phases by exploiting the ontology peculiarity of keeping metadata (the schema) and data (the instances) separate. The deductive process draws inference from the ontology structure, both concepts and properties, by applying link analysis techniques and producing a sort of implications (rules schemas) in which only the most important concepts are involved. Then an inductive process, realized by a data mining algorithm, explores the ontology instances for enriching the implications and building  the final rules. A final rule has a form like $$$$ where premise and consequence refer to the class names, and values to their datatype properties, while w, the weight, measures the strength of the influence. An example of a final rule is: $$Manager.hasAge < 45 \rightarrow^{0.80} Project.hasDegreeOfSuccess = good$$. This can be read as, in 80% of the cases, whenever a manager of a company is less then 45 years old, then the project he manages has a good degree of success. feasibility of the project, is that the approach allows us to extract “higher level” rules w.r.t. classical knowledge discovery techniques. In fact, ontology metadata gives a general view of the domain of interest and supplies information about all the elements apart from the fact that they are included as instances in the collected data. The technique is completely general and applicable to each domain. Since the output is a set of “standard” Influence Rules, it can be used to integrate existing  knowledge or for supporting any other data mining process.  The thesis includes the following chapters: Chapter 1 contains a brief introduction of the work, focusing on the main questions that have to be addressed. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the context of research in which the thesis is part of: data mining and ontologies. Chapter 3 explores the literature dealing with the open questions raised in chapter 1. Chapter 4 is the core section; it discusses the proposed solutions and presents all the phases of the extraction process as well as the algorithms and the proofs.  Chapter 5 describes an application of the methodology in the  context of MUSING, a European project in the field of business intelligence. Chapter 6 ends this thesis with final considerations and future possible works.
A Voronoi based framework for the definition of P2P distributed virtual environments
Creators: name: Genovali, Luca
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2009
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: The diffusion of wide area networks has lead to the definition of novel applications such as the Distributed Virtual Environments (DVE), for instance massively multiplayer games, militar or civil distributed simulations. In a DV E a set of active entities (avatars), interact with each other and with a set of passive objects located in their surroundings. While most DV E are currently still managed according to the client server model, the P2P model has recently been investigated, even if the killer application for P2P has been till now the file sharing one. This thesis investigates the feasibility of a P2P architecture for Distributed Virtual Environments. Locality of DV E interactions, modeled through the notion of Area of Interest, AOI of each entity, is properly exploited by the P2P communication support to reduce the amount of messages exchanged through the P2P overlay. Furthermore, a mechanism to dynamically acquire knowledge of the state located beyond the AOI and a strategy to preserve consistency of the replicated state is defined. We propose to model a DV E by a Voronoi Tessellation, where the sites correspond to peers and the Delaunay triangulation links define the topology of the P2P overlay. Different solutions for the definition of the overlay network and a set of protocols for the propagation of the  heartbeats and the management of the passive objects have been formally defined, implemented and evaluated with respect to consistency and scalability. Finally, this thesis investigates the definition of a hybrid P2P support for the development of a DV E, where a hierarchy of peers is defined according to their computational/communication power. The resulting overlay is modeled through a Weighted Voronoi Diagram.
Fundamentals of entrepreneurship
Creators: name: Kumar, Munish
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: Many scholars are of the opinion that entrepreneurship as a field, even though has grown but there is lack of progress in the field. This haphazard growth has led to a situation where it is very difficult to develop a good theory on entrepreneurship. Inability to develop theory in the field of entrepreneurship has been attributed to many factors that include definitional issues in the area of entrepreneurship, the scope of entrepreneurial activities, relevance and measurement of various constructs used in entrepreneurship to describe the phenomenon. Besides these issues, unit of analysis and lack of longitudinal studies are further impediments to the development of entrepreneurship as a field.
Soft constraint tools for quality aspects: language, frameworks and aggregation schemes
Creators: name: Santini, Francesco
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2009
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: The term “quality” as it is commonly understood in the context of Quality of Service (QoS) is “something” by which a user of the service (in a very large meaning) will judge how good the service is. In this research project we mainly focus our attention to three areas related with QoS: i) Networks, ii) Web Services and iii) Trust Management (TM).  As defined in (CNRS98), QoS is “a set of service equirements  to be met by the network while transporting a flow”, where a  flow is “a packet stream from source to a destination (unicast or multicast) with an associated Quality of Service (QoS)”. To be implemented and subsequently satisfied, network requirements have to be expressed in some measurable QoS metrics: well-known metrics include bandwidth, hops, delay, jitter, cost and loss probability. With Constraint-Based Routing (CBR) (YF03) we refer to a class of routing algorithms that base path selection decisions on a set of requirements or constraints, in addition to the destination. The main objectives are to meet the QoS requirements of applications and to optimize  the global network resource usage. Web Services (WS) are maturing as a technology that allows for the integration of applications belonging to different administrative domains, enabling much faster and efficient businessto- business arrangements. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an agreement regarding the guarantees of a WS: it defines mutual understandings and expectations of a service between the service provider and service consumers, and clearly involves many QoS indications and requests about the traded service (LJJJP03). Trust and Reputation Systems represent a significant trend in decision support for Internet mediated service provision (JIB07). The basic idea is to let parties rate each other, for example after the completion of a transaction, and use the aggregated ratings about a given party to derive a trust or reputation score, which can assist other parties in deciding whether or not to transact  with that party in the future. Trust describes how much the  reliability in the service is rated, and therefore we can easily consider it as a QoS feature. The aim of my PhD thesis is to provide expressive means (e.g. languages) in order to model and solve these frameworks with the help of Soft Constraints (Bis04), benefiting from Artificial Intelligence background to tackle this kind of optimization problems. Soft constraints will represent the needs of the parties on the traded resources and the consistency value of the store represents a feedback on the current agreement. Using soft constraints gives to the service provider and the clients more flexibility in expressing their requests w.r.t. crisp constraints, and therefore there are more chances to reach a shared agreement. Moreover, the cost model is very adaptable to the specific  problem, since it is parametric with the chosen semiring  (Bis04).
Novel approaches to in-network processing for the reduction of energy consumption in wireless sensor networks
Creators: name: Vecchio, Massimo
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2009
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are currently an active research area mainly due to the potential of their applications. However, the deployment of a large scale WSN still requires solutions to a number of technical challenges that stem primarily from the features of the sensor nodes such as limited computational power, reduced communication bandwidth and small storage capacity. Further, sensor nodes are typically powered by batteries with limited capacity which do not guarantee an attractive nodes’ lifetime unless adequate power saving policies are undertaken. Since the radio is the main cause of power consumption in a sensor node, most of the energy conservation schemes proposed in the literature have focused on minimizing the energy consumption of the communication unit. To achieve this objective, two main approaches have been followed: power saving through duty cycling and in-network processing. Duty cycling schemes define coordinated sleep/wakeup schedules among nodes in the network. On the other hand, in-network processing consists in reducing the amount of information to be transmitted by means of aggregation and/or compression  techniques. This thesis focuses on the latter approach and proposes a novel distributed method to data aggregation and two algorithms to compress data locally on the sensor node.  The distributed data aggregation technique is based on fuzzy  numbers and weighted average operators to reduce data communication in WSNs when we are interested in the estimation of an aggregated value such as maximum or minimum temperature measured in the network. The first compression algorithm is a simple lossless entropy compression algorithm which can be implemented in a few  lines of code, requires very low computational power, compresses data on the fly and uses a very small dictionary whose size is determined by the resolution of the analog-to-digital converter. The second compression algorithm tackles the problem of noisy sampling by performing lossy compression on single node based on a differential pulse code modulation scheme with quantization of the differences between consecutive samples. Since different combinations of the quantization process parameters determine different trade-offs between compression performance and information loss, we exploit a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to generate a set of combinations of these parameters corresponding to different optimal trade-offs. The user can therefore choose the combination with the most suitable trade-off for the specific application.
Flexible signalling strategies by victims mediate post-conflict interactions in bonobos
Creators: name: Heesen, Raphaela
name: Austry, Diane
name: Upton, Zoe
name: Clay, Zanna
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: 60801 Animal Behaviour
subject: FOS: Biological sciences

description: Contains video and audio files demonstrating communication in bonobo conflicts, as well as the data and R code supporting the article to be published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Auctions and mechanisms in keyword-based advertising
Creators: name: Budinich, Michele
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2011
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: Today most of search engines’ profits come from advertising, and in particular from sponsored search. In sponsored search, advertisement slots next to search results are sold. When a query is made, besides processing the query results themselves, the search engine selects ads  relevant to that query. Two of the main characteristics of this form of advertising are that advertisers are billed only when a click on their ad is made, and that prices are computed using an auction. In this thesis we consider some generalizations of the sponsored search auction model presented in the literature. In particular we account for  the fact that the search engines have a great control over the order in which advertisers are ranked. In fact search engines assign quality scores to each advertiser, and, prior to sorting, scale all bids by such factors. We show how this changes the main properties of the equilibria  in these auctions, and that in particular, the efficiency directly depends on how the search engine sets the quality scores. We then analyze some strategic behaviors in this environment, showing how their properties can differ from other classical auction models. In a second part of this thesis we present some experimental results. These were obtained with a large scale sponsored search simulator developed for this thesis. To realistically simulate such environments new algorithms and techniques were developed that partially overcome the lack of publicly available information, by effectively estimating many hidden parameters, such as click through rates. The experimental results presented focus on the global effects on the market when a fraction of the advertising agents engage in strategic behaviors. In particular we focus on two cases. In the first agents start to optimize their set of keywords using a custom build set of available synonyms. The second  behavior we consider is one in which an agent changes his bid, with the objective of increasing costs for his opponents. Interestingly we show that this technique is not always profitable. The fact that, in sponsored search, agents might not have access to all the necessary information to compute their optimal bids, marks a significant departure from the theoretical models, that instead assume full knowledge of the environment. The field that studies models in which agents’ capabilities are limited is called bounded rationality. The final chapters of this thesis are dedicated to work done by the author during his visiting period at Northwestern University, Evanston U.S.A., under the supervision of prof. Lance Fortnow. The focus is on bounded rationality, and two problem that directly expose the role of computational  limitations in game theory are analyzed.
Situation awareness in mobile recommendation systems
Creators: name: Ciaramella, Alessandro
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2011
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: Nowadays, a huge quantity of resources for mobile users is made available on the most important marketplaces. Further, handheld devices can accommodate plenty of these resources, such as applications, documents and web pages, locally. Thus, to search for resources suitable for specific circumstances often requires a considerable effort and rarely brings to a completely satisfactory result. Moreover, mobile users are likely to devote only partial attention and time to the devices while using them, because the primary task is interacting with the reality, e.g. moving, chatting or even driving a car. A tool able to recommend suitable resources at the right time in each  situation would be of great help for the mobile users and would make the use of the handheld devices less boring and more attractive. To this aim, new levels of granularity, together with some degree of selfawareness, are needed to assist mobile users in managing and using resources. Situation awareness can provide a powerful mechanism to  identify the user needs at a certain time, enhancing the device usage. However, determining the correct user situation is not a trivial task, due to imperfect domain knowledge, uncertainty in data, and changing user behaviors.  In this thesis, we propose a situation-aware resource recommender, which helps mobile users to timely locate resources proactively. Situations are determined by a semantic reasoner that exploits domain knowledge expressed in terms of ontologies and semantic rules. This reasoner works in synergy with a fuzzy engine, which is in charge of  handling the vagueness of some conditions in the semantic rules, computing a certainty degree for each inferred situation. These degrees are used to rank the situations and consequently to assign a priority to the resources associated with the specific situations. Moreover, in order  to adapt the situation recognizer to the specific user, the system collects data during the interaction of the user with the mobile device. This context history is exploited by genetic algorithms to learn user habits and adapt accordingly the meaning of the linguistic values used in the  fuzzy engine. The proposed framework is evaluated by means of real case studies concerning resource recommendations, and experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach.
Generalized discrimination discovery on semi-structured data supported by ontology
Creators: name: Luong Thanh, Binh
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2011
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: Recently, data mining has been deemed to be an effective  means for disclosing evidences and hidden causes of discrimination. If data mining succeeds in finding associations proving the fact that discriminatory treatments has strong relations with sensitive attributes, discrimination is obviously irrefutable. In this thesis, I propose a modified approach of the traditional data mining process to unveil and represent discrimination in a “rich semantic” form for semi-structured business data with multiple-valued treatments based on support from ontology. First, input data are preprocessed to be well-structured with semantic relations, which considerably support discrimination exploration later. The framework then seeks possibly discriminatory relations between the unequal treatments and protected-by-law attributes, e.g., race, religion, sex. These discriminatory relations will be represented in the form of association rules through the notion of matching pairs of itemsets with different sensitive attributes and equal non-sensitive ones that are subject to different treatments. By combining data mining and reasoning service over the ontology, the achieved rules are semantically enriched by object properties between classes (concepts). Thus, they are more valuable and interesting than the flat association rules. In order  to address the drawback of local knowledge, the solution  of “kNN as Situation Testing” is provided. Besides, a number  of measures of discrimination are provided for the purpose  of quantifying the level of discrimination to obtain a precise vision of how different sensitive attributes negatively affect the decision and even on each other. Experimental results confirm the potential and flexibility of the approach.
title: Prediction of Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Effects on Entropy Generation in a Monolithic Catalytic Converter Using Large-Eddy Simulation
Creators: name: Li, Yongxiang
name: Rico Cortes, Luis Felipe
name: Hamel, Hardy
name: Nishad, Kaushal
name: Biondo, Luigi
name: Ries, Florian
Publisher: name: MDPI
Year: 2022

description: In the present work, heat transfer and fluid flow and their effects on entropy generation in a realistic catalytic converter of a Lada Niva 21214 vehicle are studied using large eddy simulation. At first, the pressure drop over the catalytic converter is measured for dry air at constant temperature (T=298 K), different volumetric flow rates, and extrapolated to large volumetric flow rates for dry air (T=298 K) and for the exhaust gas under realistic engine conditions (T=900 K) using the Darcy–Forchheimer relation. Then, coupled heat and fluid flow phenomena inside the catalytic converter are analyzed for nonreacting isothermal conditions and nonreacting conditions with conjugate heat transfer by using the large-eddy simulation. The predicted pressure drop agrees well with the measured and extrapolated data. Based on the obtained numerical results, the characteristic flow features are identified, namely: the impinging flow with stagnation, recirculation, flow separation and laminarization within the fine ducts of the monolith, which depends on the heat transfer through temperature-dependent thermophysical properties of exhaust gas. Moreover, due to high-velocity gradients at the wall of the narrow ducts in the monolith, entropy production by viscous dissipation is observed predominantly in the monolith region. In contrast, entropy production due to heat transport is relatively small in the monolith region, while it overwhelms viscous dissipation effects in the pipe regions.
ТИПОЛОГИЯ ПОВЕСТВОАТЕЛЬНЫХ ФОРМ В ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОМ ТЕКСТЕ
Creators: name: Бекниезова, Бону
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025

description: Статья посвящена анализу типологии повествовательных форм в художественном тексте. В центре внимания — формы авторского и персонажного повествования, особенности их взаимодействия и художественные функции. Исследование опирается на труды отечественных и зарубежных теоретиков повествования (М. М. Бахтина, Б. Успенского, Ж. Женетта и др.) и включает сопоставительный анализ различных повествовательных стратегий. Особое внимание уделяется роли повествователя в формировании читательского восприятия, степени его участия в тексте и характеру речевой организации.
title: Die zentrale Rolle der Hebammen für ein positives Geburtserleben
Creators: name: Batram-Zantvoort, Stephanie
name: Miani, Celine
Publisher: name: DuEPublico
Year: 2025
Subjects: classificationCode: 5
subject: FOS: Social sciences
classificationCode: 3
subject: FOS: Medical and health sciences

description: Die Gesundheitsforschung im Bereich der geburtsbezogenen Gesundheit hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten stark weiterentwickelt. Der Fokus verlagerte sich von objektiven Kennzahlen wie Sterblichkeitsraten und Kaiserschnittquoten hin zu einer verstärkten Berücksichtigung subjektiver Geburtserfahrungen und der Rechte von Gebärenden. In diesem Beitrag stellen wir einige aktuelle Erkenntnisse aus der Forschung zur Qualität der geburtshilflichen Versorgung aus Sicht von Gebärenden dar und beschreiben die zentrale Rolle, die Hebammen für ein positives, integritätswahrendes Geburtserleben einnehmen.
title: The Exergy Losses Analysis in Adiabatic Combustion Systems including the Exhaust Gas Exergy
Creators: name: Agrebi, Senda
name: Dreßler, Louis
name: Nishad, Kaushal
Publisher: name: MDPI
Year: 2022

description: The entropy generation analysis of adiabatic combustion systems was performed to quantify the exergy losses which are mainly the exergy destroyed during combustion inside the chamber and in the exhaust gases. The purpose of the present work was therefore: (a) to extend the exergy destruction analysis by including the exhaust gas exergy while applying the hybrid filtered Eulerian stochastic field (ESF) method coupled with the FGM chemistry tabulation strategy; (b) to introduce a novel method for evaluating the exergy content of exhaust gases; and (c) to highlight a link between exhaust gas exergy and combustion emissions. In this work, the adiabatic Sandia flames E and F were chosen as application combustion systems. First, the numerical results of the flow and scalar fields were validated by comparison with the experimental data. The under-utilization of eight stochastic fields (SFs), the flow field results and the associated scalar fields for the flame E show excellent agreement contrary to flame F. Then, the different exergy losses were calculated and analyzed. The heat transfer and chemical reaction are the main factors responsible for the exergy destruction during combustion. The chemical exergy of the exhaust gases shows a strong relation between the exergy losses and combustion emission as well as the gas exhaust temperature.
Local Amenity Societies - Participation and Power: A case study on the St Marylebone Society 1948 - 2021
Creators: name: Higgs, Gabrielle
Publisher: name: University of Westminster
Year: 2021

description: This research evidences the power and influence local amenity societies have had on planning policy, conservation and townscape since World War II. It is based on a single case study of the St Marylebone Society (SMS), an amenity society founded in 1948 to protect the townscape of Marylebone in central London. It describes how they established, increased membership and linked with organisations to increase their network power, evolving and adapting to operate effectively within changing planning policy frameworks over the ensuing decades to the present day. Their involvement at four sites in Marylebone, considered at different time periods, assesses the outcomes to evidence their acquisition and use of both overt and covert power, as identified by Lukes (2005). The strategies and tactics they employed to exercise their power are considered in detailed historical narratives, with reference to Flyvjberg’s (1998) theories relating to power, rationality, rationalization and how long-standing personal relationships are instrumental to decision-making at local level. Today amenity societies are embedded within the planning system and integral to political ambition to increase public participation and engender social capital, as legislated by Neighbourhood Planning. However, they are essentially self-elected volunteers, dominated by a homogenous demographic, raising issues of equity and representation in an increasingly complex, culturally diverse and politically divided society. The benefits of their long-term activism and knowledge risk being lost by declining membership and broken networks. This research identifies that amenity societies must protect their valuable cumulative phronetic knowledge, adapt to embrace technology and policies to encourage wider participation and optimise their network power for positive townscape, neighbourhood and community outcomes.
Wireless sensing devices: from research to real applications in logistics and healthcare
Creators: name: Abbate, Stefano
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2012
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: Wireless Sensor Networks have the potential to enable design of innovative applications and reinvent existing ones. To this effect, the scientific community has made many contributions. However many researchers relied on strong assumptions leading to existing gaps between theory  and practice. Many of the proposed solutions can work only in a laboratory setting. This thesis provides two examples on how to bridge this gap by developing two distinct real world applications in the fields of logistics and healthcare; the first application overcomes the limits of rangefree localization techniques, whereas the second application provides a solution for efficiently monitoring human movements and includes a usability study. In logistics, the problemof localization of shipping containers  is phased starting from the description of currently adopted systems along with their limits. Sensing nodes are placed on containers to detect the signal strength and thus the presence, of other nodes placed on other containers. The system exploits geometrical constraints and an integer  linear programming solution to localize even in presence of real faulty nodes. The sensor network’s functional and their non-functional issues, such as energy consumption, scalability and fault tolerance are studied. In the healthcare application, sensors are used in a monitoring system to detect falls among elderly. The approach starts from a survey of fall detection techniques to the design of our fall-detection algorithm which reduces false positives. A conceptual, minimally invasive monitoring sensor platform and reusable architecture is designed for the deployment  and testing of the algorithm. The usability and acceptability study of this application in our test sites revealed some interesting insights about human aspects and time of adaptation to the technology.
Big data and the web: algorithms for data intensive scalable computig
Creators: name: De Francisci Morales, Gianmarco
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2012
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: This thesis explores the problem of large scale Web mining  by using Data Intensive Scalable Computing (DISC) systems.  Web mining aims to extract useful information and models from data on the Web, the largest repository ever created.  DISC systems are an emerging technology for processing huge  datasets in parallel on large computer clusters. Challenges arise from both themes of research. The Web is heterogeneous: data lives in various formats that are best  modeled in different ways. Effectively extracting information requires careful design of algorithms for specific categories of data. TheWeb is huge, but DISC systems offer a platform for building scalable solutions. However, they provide restricted computing primitives for the sake of performance. Efficiently harnessing the power of parallelism offered by DISC systems involves rethinking traditional algorithms. This thesis tackles three classical problems in Web mining. First we propose a novel solution to finding similar items in a bag of Web pages. Second we consider how to effectively distribute content from Web 2.0 to users via graph matching. Third we show how to harness the streams from the real-time Web to suggest news articles. Our main contribution lies in rethinking these problems in the context of massive scaleWeb mining, and in designing efficient MapReduce and streaming algorithms to solve these problems on DISC systems.
A framework to support consistent design and evolution of adaptive systems
Creators: name: Mori, Marco
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2012
Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science

description: Nowadays software systems in the ubiquitous environment  have to consider variability as their main characteristic. The ever-changing environment affects these systems and their ability of satisfying functional and non-functional requirements. It is challenging to create and to support the variability of such applications taking into account different variability dimensions. Traditional software processes are not suited for adaptive applications since they consider a fixed definition of context and a clear division between design-time and runtime activities. Attempts to manage variability are only focused at specific phases of the process while it is missing a comprehensive process to face variability at all phases thus supporting the complete creation and the evolution of adaptive  applications. The thesis aims to give a possible solution to these problems by defining a new software lifecycle process for building and evolving adaptive applications in a consistent manner. A system is represented following a feature engineering perspective which considers together requirements and code artifacts. We have identified which are the inconsistencies for evolving a system and we have discovered that in order to keep the correctness of the evolution it is necessary to consider system models ranging from the model space to the solution space. The proposed process encompasses two different kinds of evolution: design-time and run-time evolutions. Design-time evolutions are planned before running the system by means of a set of variants whose behavior consistently fit a set of predefined contexts. These alternatives are checked for inconsistencies at design time whereas reconfiguration  decisions are taken at run-time based on the current context. Results shows that it is promising to consider predictive information for selecting the best reconfiguration especially in the presence of multiple competing objectives. Runtime evolutions are enacted by enhancing the system with new requirements that may be introduced by the user as a consequence of unpredicted context situations. In this case the consistency check for a new alternative behavior is performed directly at run-time. The proposed process is supported by an evolution framework. The framework is defined in terms of a generic definition and one possible instantiation. The generic interface architecture describes the interfaces that should be provided to support the software process for adaptive systems. A possible instantiation with current technologies shows the feasibility of supporting the process.
Has the excess risk of acute myocardial infarction in rheumatoid arthritis relative to the general population declined? A population study of trends over time
Creators: name: Yazdani, Kiana
name: Xie, Hui
name: Aviña-Zubieta, J. Antonio
name: Zheng, Yufei
name: Abrahamowicz, Michal
name: Lacaille, Diane
Publisher: name: Elsevier
Year: 2022

description: Objective: To evaluate secular trend in ten-year risk of incident acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in incident rheumatoid arthritis (RA) relative to the general population. Methods: We conducted a retrospective study of population-based incident RA cohorts with RA incidence from 1997 to 2004 in British Columbia, Canada, with matched general population comparators, using administrative health data. RA and their matched cohorts were divided according to the year of RA incidence, defined according to the first RA visit of the case definition. Incident AMI was defined as the first event occurring within 10 years from RA incidence. Secular trend was assessed using delayed-entry Cox models with an interaction term between the year of RA onset and indicator of RA vs. general population. Linear, quadratic and spline functions of year of RA onset were compared to assess possibility of nonlinear trends. The model with the lowest AIC was selected to interpret the results. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to account for potential effect of unmeasured (e.g. smoking) or partially measured (e.g. obesity) confounders in administrative data, on the interaction term. Results: Overall, 23,237 RA and 46,474 general population controls experienced 1,133 and 1,606 incident AMIs, respectively. A linear Cox model was selected as the model best fitting the AMI events. Overall, RA patients were found to have a 21 % higher risk of AMI than the matched general population controls [1.21 (1.10, 1.32); p < 0.001]. A significant linear decline in risk of AMI was observed in RA patients [0.94 (95% CI 0.91, 0.97) p = <.0001], and in the general population [0.93 (0.91, 0.95); p = <.0001]. The change in AMI risk over time did not differ in RA compared to the general population [p-value of interaction term=0.49]. Our results remained similar after adjusting for the potential effect of confounders on the interaction term, and no difference in the change in risk of AMI over time was observed between RA and the general population. Conclusion: Our findings suggest a decline in 10-year risk of AMI in RA, and in the general population. The decline in the risk of AMI over time did not differ between RA and the general population, such that the excess risk of AMI in RA relative to the general population, has remained the same.
D7.3 First set of recommendations for the development of future rural policies
Creators: name: Miller, David
name: Chartier, Olivier
name: Salle, Elodie
name: Zomer, Brigit
name: Irvine, Katherine
name: Schwarz, Gerald
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022

description: The aim of this Deliverable 7.2 is to summarise mechanisms by which SHERPA contributed recommendations for European Union (EU) policies, specifically on the EU Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas (LTVRA) and associated actions. The focus on this policy area was agreed with the EU, reflecting its relevance to the remit of SHERPA, and the timeliness of the evolution of the policy in relation to the operationalising of the SHERPA processes.
Non-local intuition: developing electro-physiological measures of decision making serial entrepreneurs
Creators: name: La Pira, Frank
name: Gillin, Murray
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: Understanding how and why entrepreneurs decide to pursue one venture as opposed to another has managed to elude entrepreneurship researchers for as long as entrepreneurship research has taken place. Understanding why entrepreneurs choose one venture as opposed to another is a central focus for this paper. Entrepreneurial activity is reflected in an adequate supply of opportunities therefore it is primarily concerned with the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities. Many researchers have written on the topic: discussions range from understanding the personality of the entrepreneur, the heuristics of the opportunity selection process to developing an understanding of the cognitive processes involved in opportunity recognition. By contrast, recently there has been an interest in the role and importance of intuition as an adjunct to the decision making process in business. A paper by Chell & Allinson (2000) proposed that entrepreneurs are more likely to resort to intuition in the opportunity selection process because of time pressures and the voluminous amount of information which contributes to the need to find an alternative approach to making decisions quickly. This paper argues that entrepreneurial alertness extends beyond the boundaries of conscious awareness of recognition, development and evaluation of opportunities. A recent experimental test (McCraty et al 2004) on a group of meditators, has found that the heart-autonomic nervous system appears to receive intuitive information before the brain actions the information and that intuition is not confined to cognitive based perception but involves the entire psychophysiological system, manifesting through a wide range of emotional feelings and physiological changes. The purpose of this paper is to both demonstrate and evaluate the significance of electro-physiological measures of intuition in the decision making processes of serial entrepreneurs.
Theoretical and experimental economic analysis of collusion
Creators: name: Bigoni, Maria
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2008
Subjects: HB Economic Theory

description: This research project consists in a theoretical and experimental study of oligopolistic markets. I believe that an experimental approach to this subject might help to understand the interplay of the many different factors that affect firms behavior in this context, and to analyze problems  which theory does not provide a clearcut answer to. My project develops into two main parts: the first concern how firms can learn to collude tacitly, the second studies deterrence of explicit collusion.
Essays on the dynamics of productivity at the firm level: the role of finance
Creators: name: D'Alfonso, Elena
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2009
Subjects: HB Economic Theory

description: During the last ten years, Italian growth has lagged behind  other European countries. This delay has been mainly attributed to a slowdown in Italian firms productivity. A large body of literature has deepened the role of finance, among other factors, in spurring economic growth. The present work investigates some of these processes, through three different frameworks. Chapter 1 is an application of the Rajan Zingales (1998) approach to the Italian case. In this application a proxy for financial development at regional levels was built up using qualitative information. The results point out that the Italian financial market is still segmented at regional levels, in particular for smaller firms that are more dependent on the proximity  of financial services. Moreover, it suggests that the effect of financial development could be even higher assuming the external dependence computed on German and not U.S. listed firms. Chapter 2 focuses on the effectiveness of financial systems in allocating the resources to the most efficient firms. In this chapter, we test whether firms’ financial strategies explain the distance of a sample of Italian firms to the efficiency frontier.  The results point out that a tighter relationship with banks or a higher contendibility of corporate control are correlated to a more efficient production. Chapter 3 focuses on the effects that different financial instruments  have on R&D strategies and on productivity. As the results suggest, in fact, the nature and duration of different financial instruments could have an impact on firm innovation strategies.
Biomolecular Basis of Cellular Consciousness via Subcellular Nanobrains
Creators: name: Baluška, František
name: Miller, William B.
name: Reber, Arthur S., 1940-
Publisher: name: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Year: 2021

description: Cells emerged at the very beginning of life on Earth and, in fact, are coterminous with life. They are enclosed within an excitable plasma membrane, which defines the outside and inside domains via their specific biophysical properties. Unicellular organisms, such as diverse protists and algae, still live a cellular life. However, fungi, plants, and animals evolved a multicellular existence. Recently, we have developed the cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) model, which proposes that all biological awareness, sentience and consciousness are grounded in general cell biology. Here we discuss the biomolecular structures and processes that allow for and maintain this cellular consciousness from an evolutionary perspective.