Bøger udgivet af Edizioni Accademiche Italiane

This book is focused on the analysis of the anomalies: an anomaly is something which is inconsistent with, or deviating from, what is usual, normal, or expected. The majority of the methods is based on a binary classification of data instances as either anomalous or not anomalous; this method creates levels of anomaly by the use ofa bayesian approach to assess the probability of occurrence of a particular data instance given a small history of data. An application of the method to returns of financial transactions is present: in this field having different degrees of anomaly can lead to bigger or smaller size for a position during high frequency trading leading to bigger profits and smaller losses.

Today, students need learning tools that use different communication codes, as they are less accustomed to abstraction. An increasingly interconnected and technological world requires students to have specific skills: knowledge of the disciplines founding cores in an interdisciplinary key is required, along with technical and technological skills, mastery of foreign languages, flexibility, attitude to teamwork, creativity and entrepreneurship. Scientific subjects, such as Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM subjects) need to be strengthened and studied through a laboratory approach. On the other hand, teachers need user-friendly teaching tools, which allow and promote teamwork, which allow the laboratory teaching and the CLIL approach.The aim of this work is to prove that it is possible to reconcile the needs of teachers to have user-friendly teaching materials, that do not require major adaptation, to the needs of students to have effective training.

The present book explores two different application areas of combinatorial optimization, the work presented here, indeed, is two fold, since it deals with two distinct problems, one related to data transfer in networks and the other to object recognition. Caching is an essential technique to improve throughput and latency in a vast variety of applications. The core idea is to duplicate content in memories distributed across the network, which can then be exploited to deliver requested content with less congestion and delay. Automatic object recognition has become, over the last decades, a central topic in the artificial intelligence research, with a significant burt over the last new year with the advent of the deep learning paradigm; the objective of the work discussed in the Part 2 of this book is an attempt at improving the performance of a natural images classifier introducing in the loop knowledge coming from the real world, expressed in terms of probability of a set of spatial relations between the objects in the images.

Clique counting is an important problem in a variety of network analytics applications. We provide an extensive literature review of subgraph enumeration, considering different problems associated to cliques, clique relaxations, and other kind of subgraphs. We then devise algorithms for the problems of enumerating k-cliques (i.e., complete subgraphs on k nodes) and one of their relaxations, called k-diamonds (i.e., cliques of size k with one missing edge). For the first problem we present simple and fast multicore parallel algorithms for counting the number of k-cliques in large undirected graphs, for any small constant k ¿ 4. Differently from existing solutions, which mainly target distributed memory settings (e.g., MapReduce), the proposed algorithms work on off-the-shelf shared-memory multicore platforms. For the second problem, we first devise a sequential algorithm for counting the number of k-diamonds in large undirected graphs, for any small constant k ¿ 4. A parallel extension of the sequential algorithm is then proposed, developing a MapReduce-based approach.

The shrinking of the population and consequently of the national workforce caused by negative demographic changes, namely, birth rates decline, aging population, and rising life expectancy, have pushed China, South Korea, and Japan to think long and hard about ways to cope with the issue. After careful examination they have started adopting policies to welcome immigration flows; and yet, realities that are present in these countries show trends going the opposite direction. Very strong national identities are at play and risk to undermine efforts to uplift the national demographic scenario.

This book is a guide to the city of Oxford. The origin of this city and its famous university has ancient but interesting and unexpected roots. Three of its oldest and most famous colleges are described from an architectural and historical point of view, as well as the most famous churches in the area. The book also suggests a complete itinerary of the city, which includes not only places of religious and academic interest but also activities and places typical of the city where you can dive, dream and spend the whole day. Oxford was in fact defined by the English writer Matthew Arnold as the city of the 'dreaming spires', referring to its architectural and poetic beauty.

Financial communication is a new science, which mixes the concepts related to the finance and marketing area. Is this new discipline so necessary in the enterprise¿s world? Is this subject able to influence and determinate different business performances? Is this communication a fundamental aspect of value creation, leading to an improvement of revenues, a reduction of costs, a huge issuing of company¿s shares, an enhancing stock price? In this research thesis the relationship between the disclosure with the operational and market results will be examined firstly by analyzing a case study of firms involved in a circumstance of mergers and acquisitions and secondly by trying to identify positive or negative correlations between financial communication and performances. The work, which is structured through a deep analysis of financial disclosure interactions and implications in the Microsoft-­¿Skype acquisition case happened in 2011, evidences congruencies with qualitative and operational results, while the outcomes of the market analysis are fluctuating.

This work has various motivations. First of all to assess the available knowledge of the foundations of the important measurement technique that is the subject of this dissertation. Since its invention in the late 70s, Particle Image Velocimetry has become, in fact, a standard method for the measurement of velocity elds in uid motion. Bio-uid-dynamics applications and wind-tunnel tests represent the elds where this technique will hopefully be used extensively by the author in the near future. The second motivation was to analyze the limits of the Traditional PIV in the way it is available in almost all commercial implementations relevant from a metrological point of view. We are particularly concerned with the maximum resolution of this method, its limited description of the act of motion of a uid element and the incomplete number of kinematic components that are directly measurable. The third (and most important) motivation was to investigate the possibility to overcome at least partially these limits.

One of the biggest problems in standard software development process is that the connection among the analysis phases and the implementation ones is usually loose. Model Driven Approach is a software development methodology that aims to strongly connect the system model to its final realization, filling the gap between the analysis and the implementation phases. This book describes how to apply Model Driven Approach to a real-world project: the design and realization of an Un-manned All-Terrain Vehicle¿s control system.

Development of sports and its place in modern society is a topic of great importance. Nowadays, the increase of physical culture, sports and healthy lifestyle plays an important role in society in any country. Sport can be practiced as professional or simply as personal improvement, as pleasure or as educational subject. In any case, sport allows people to identify individual abilities, to fight for result, to learn how to be part of a team, to follow rules and a training process, having an impact not only on people¿s body, health and strength but also on people¿s attitude and personality. Sport is, above all, an important social phenomenon at all levels affecting national relations, business life, social status, fashion forms, ethical values and people¿s lifestyle. Considering together all these areas, sport has become a business that is rising all over the world. Requests of sport practices by people are increasing in Italy as well as all over the world and, for that reason, the coordination and regulation of sport activities is constantly increasing too.

In surgery the term ¿minimally invasive¿ was coined in 1986 by urologist John Wickham to describe a range of procedures that required making only very small incisions, or sometimes no incision at all, to treat diseases which traditionally treated by open surgery. In thyroid surgery, not much has changed after the establishment of surgical principles in the early part of the twentieth century. Surgical instruments have improved, anaesthesia developed, and safety of surgery increased to allow procedures also on fragile patients. The big challenge of thyroid surgery came when endoscopic procedures widely entered into surgery around 1990. In the first part of this book it is analysed the development of minimally invasive thyroidectomy, focusing on the technique we reckon could become the gold standard, that is the transoral endoscopic thyroidectomy with vestibular approach. In the second part we will expose our preliminary experience with this new operation.

Before starting my experience as an internship student at the Kengo Kuma Lab at The University of Tokyo, I had participated in the 2nd edition of the TTT workshop. This was an international workshop that involved the 3 different universities, the Polytechnic of Turin, the Feng Chia university of Taichung ( Taiwan ) and the University of Tokyo. The theme concerned with the design of a pavilion inside an old urban system of narrow roads called roji. After the workshop I started my experience as an international internship student at the KengoKuma Lab, there I started researching on my thesis theme at the university library, meanwhile I was participating at the students meeting for the competition in which the Lab was involved, and attending at the english-spoken lectures. By working in contact with the students of the lab, I had the occasion to know and speak with other professors interested in the same case I was studying. In particular I got in contact with professor Hidenobu Jinnai, a professor of History, at the Hosei University, who, from that moment on, I regularly met to show him the work in progress analysis.

The aim of the present book is to show that Bowie was not only a great musician but also a great poet, who was inspired by great works of literature, such as "A Clockwork Orange" and "2001: A Space Odyssey". In particular, the essay analizes three very important and famous Bowie records: "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" (1972), "Aladdin Sane" (1973) and "Diamond Dogs" (1974). The single "Space Oddity" (1969) is interpreted, too.

Crime as entertainment has entered our everyday lives thus becoming a foundation of popular culture in literature, television, radio and films. Whether the stories focus on criminals, convicts, avengers, detectives, police officers, attorneys, or victims, crime films depend on a nearly universal fear of crime and an equally strong attraction to the criminal world. This paper will report on the study of eight crime film posters whose visual elements can convey powerful messages. A poster is one of the leading non-verbal means of communication in the society of today. It is considered a multimodal text compared with the reading of print - based texts, and is seen as a form of visual communication, designed to attract potential viewers and introduce them to the film itself.

In the first publication presented at the ISPRS conference in Dresden in 2006, I showed the first attempts to use spherical panoramas, as a collection of measurable directions taken with a theodolite for arquitectural surveys. It was necessary to make vertical the axis of the sphere of the panorama such as for setting up the theodolite. In the next work at the Sifet 2007 conference in Arezzo, I presented the first successful architectural surveys. The limitation of the technique is the absence of stereoscopy and so far any automation in plotting. Spherical Photogrammetry¿s benefits include acquisition speed, document completeness, and cost-effectiveness. At the 2015 Taipei CIPA conference, I was honored with a career prize, with the motivation "For the unbelievable number of documentation surveys carried out in every part of the world." Following the publication over 10 years, one can see the evolution of the technique with which I made hundreds of surveys all around the world, here shown, then developed by my students, to whom this book is devoted.

The tale that I wish present here is about the effort of looking at basketball with a new pair of eyes. A mission that from the beginning was, I feared, for an aficionado of the game as myself, be almost impossible. What is there about the game that I still don't know? And the game, is what in front of this ethnographic tale that I painted, after three months observations in Israel. I was bound to question my knowledge about the game and give it sociological interpretations. The book is composed of three parts, while the focus is changing between them simultaneously. The main part of the book deals with an Israeli Premier League team and its story of the 2013-2014 season. The second part sheds light on the world of women's basketball and its construction as inferior in society. This section examines the story of the younger professional group of the same club. In addition, in view of the events, each episode begins with my personal story in the days when I was a young basketball player. This part gives the book its nostalgic notion that connects the parts. The book is about the love for the game, but it also teaches what is basketball, and how women are an integral part of it.

Dr. Ungureanu research activity has involved the study and application of quantum mechanical ab initio calculation techniques. Has extensive experience in the use of the CRYSTAL package, a code developed by the Theoretical Chemistry Group of the University of Torino, together with the Computational Materials Science Group of the Daresbury Laboratory. As a Ph.D. student, She acquire knowledge in the structure of the CRYSTAL code and use it in the Study of different crystalline phases. In this work is presented the ab initio study of Calcium Carbonate Polymorphs.

Childhood is very important. We need to be stimulated and followed in our first years. We need somebody to understand all the basic knowledge present in this world. Everything can be stimulated, even our characters and our consciousness. Our parents have to teach us how to walk, speak and eat and everything it's a new discovery. In this situation our parents have to be present in every single moment of our life: they are our frames of reference. I want to describe the necessity for the young people to be hold by their people and to be stimulated in childhood. An important crucial factor in people are skills. Skills are our social capital, the most important things in a individual. Form this comes out our future, our abilities and the capacity to solve problem and take important chance in our future. In various papers we can see that skills have a crucial role as a determinants on the wage, on our QI and on our choice. In this dissertation we want to understand what are skills, when they are shaped, how to implement it and what are their role in our future.

The starting point of this thesis project is the observation that as a result of the explosion of the World Wide Web in the 90s, the Internet has become the most profitable and used source of information. It may seem that the drastic reduction of the search and information costs for buyers has pushed the market toward a greater degree of price competition. In fact, lower search costs making easier for buyers to find low-cost sellers, promote price competition, wiping out any extraordinary seller profit. This will results in the increase of market efficiency and total welfare. On the other hand, the reduction of seller search costs allows on-line retailers to use the web layout to provide differentiated and customized products, avoiding competing purely in price. For instance, since products are not constrained in the physical shelf, online retailers can increase the number of offering and information. In addition, since in many cases consumers can customize the products characteristics, sellers have the possibility to manufacture the product after the consumers have placed the order, thus avoiding overproduction costs.

The main goal of this research is to investigate new methods intended to increase the degree of driving automation of autonomous vehicles operating in realistic conditions, in both on-road and o-road environments. Safe driving in an urban, extra-urban, or, in general, uncertain environments requires the continuous combination of three important complementary functions: (i) interpretation of the surrounding environment (sense); (ii) evaluation of safe-driving plans taking into account the risk of collision or unsafe driving according to the characteristics of the scene, including any moving participants (plan); (iii) action, considering the outputs of the two previous tasks and involving an on-line reactive navigator able to avoid any choices leading to probabilistically inevitable collisions in the near future (act).

In few years, the age of intelligent machines will grow up towards a worldwide technological transformation and it will be one of the most revolutionary of the history as much as the industrial revolution. Advanced robots will accomplish complex tasks breaking up new boundaries in fields such as fully autonomous driving or personal assistance in a global diffusion. Focusing on autonomous driving, society and industry have great interest in developing such vehicles since they could enhance safety and comfort in the transportation system. While autonomous driving in realistic situations remains a challenging problem, the DARPA challenge (Buehler et al., 2007) and the Urban Challenge in 2004 and 2007 (Leonard et al., 2009) have clearly shown that such a challenge could be reasonably addressed thanks to the recent progresses in the field of perception and autonomous navigation for unmanned vehicles. Urmson et al. (2007) used a hierarchical control system for planning and sensing to win the urban challenge in 2007 with the Carnegie Mellon University Tartan Racing team.

The purpose of the book is to evaluate and compare the financial statements of different companies to rate their performances. The emphasis is to be able to choose among several companies the best one to invest in. The aim of the study is met by comparing the risk of different companies, their rate of return, future trends and their strengths and weaknesses. In the theoretical section of the book different factors affecting the capital market are discussed, with the focus being on the risks of an investment. Basic financial statements and ratios are discussed briefly. Next cross sectional and time series techniques to compare the financial statements and ratios are revealed. Most of the information from the theories is later on used in the empirical part of the book. In the empirical study, initially the financial statements of different companies are taken to compute the ratios, risk, average return, to make trends and common size statements. Then a quantitative interpretation of the risk and return charts, common size statements, trend statements is executed alongside the qualitative discussion of individual figures and tables.

Monsanto Company is a publicly traded America multinational agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation, it is one of the most important multinationals in the world and it is a leading producer of genetically modified organisms. The company holds a dominant position in the global market of herbicides and genetically engineered seeds and for this reason, it has made itself a controversial corporation and the target of ongoing campaigns including annual March Against Monsanto actions in hundreds of cities around the world. Monsanto's role in agricultural changes, biotechnology products, and lobbying of government agencies, along with its history as a chemical company have brought the company on the first pages of all the newspapers in the world. The aim of the present book is to analyze the company structure and its role in global food market. A close analysis will also try to underline the reasons why the company has become such a controversial topic during the years.

Biomass ¿ integrated gasification fuel cell (B ¿ IGFC) systems represent an interesting alternative to state of the art fossil-fuel based power plants due to their high overall efficiency and low emissions in terms of pollutants and greenhouse-gas (GHG). The aim of this study is the improvement of a B ¿ IGFC system, composed by a biomass updraft gasifier, a high temperature gas-cleaning unit (GCU) and a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) by acting on overall efficiency, system cost and its complexity. The focus of the study is on the possibility to reform tar internally in the SOFC and on the cross-influence of another contaminant present in syngas, HCl, which may influence SOFC performance and internal reforming. Higher tolerability level might result in less stringent cleaning requirements, thus increasing the system efficiency and reducing its complexity and costs.

In this book we face the problems of the optimal portfolio selection and asset- liability management, with constraints and transaction costs. In the basic problem, the portfolio manager has to manage an initial investment A0 until a fixed maturity T > 0. The manager is free to choose how to invest the money among a number of available assets and can periodically modify the portfolio composition, but has to satisfy several constraints both of endogenous and exogenous nature. Furthermore, each allocation change entails transaction costs, since it implies selling part of an asset to provide either liquidity or a different asset. The company manages the investments to achieve a number of goals, the most important of which is to meet its obligations towards the policy-holders.

Fruit seeds are byproducts from fruit processing. Characterisation of the bioactive compounds present in seeds and evaluation of their potential biological properties is therefore of particular importance in view of a possible valorisation of seeds as a source of health beneficial components. In this work, we have analysed the seeds of Sambucus and Rubus species in order to identify their bioactive components and to determine the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities of the extracts. We first analysed their oil content, in order to assess the fatty acid profile and tocopherol content. Moreover, the methanolic extracts of the seeds were analysed for their total phenolic contents and antioxidant capacities. Polyphenols were identified by HPLC¿ESI¿MS/MS analysis. Furthermore, extracts were evaluated for their inhibitory effects on the production of LPS-induced inflammatory mediators (NO, CCL-20) in RAW 264.7 cells. Our findings show that the methanolic extracts from Rubus seeds have strong antioxidant and antiinflammatory properties and could therefore represent an attractive source of bioactive compounds for food, cosmetic, or pharmaceutical applications.

The study of catalyst behavior at pressure up to 12 bar during CH¿, H¿, CO and their mixtures combustion is the main purpose of this PhD thesis. Actually the interest towards catalytic combustion as an alternative route to produce electric power is renewed due to the use of Low-Btu fuels. Therefore the research activity was focused notably on CH¿ but also on H¿ and CO combustions and on the effect of their addition on methane combustion at variable pressure.

Before analyzing and understanding how Italian products, especially cheese, have entered the Chinese market, how they were welcomed by local customers and how one of the most ancient Italian dairy firms has been able to achieve such great results in this large heterogeneous market, it is good to explain and introduce how culture influences the choices of customers and the food habits of people. Since ancient times, consumption has always characterized the lives of people. Goods are crucial to our lives and they have always underlined the existent difference between individuals and between the different groups of society. Customers make purchasing choices according to the meaning that goods represent to the individuals within the same group. It is thanks to goods that they use that it is possible to outline the differences between many social groups and in this way goods become representative of their cultural profile.

Thus, policy measures that enhance the growth of urban areas over time which avoid the negative effects and promote open trade has the potential of significantly stimulating economic growth in Africa. In other words, sound urban development policies that support economic openness with greater emphasis on liberalization policy since the continent stands to gain from this policy stance better off to be called for.

A major step forward in our understanding of the formation mechanism and evolution with cosmic time of galaxies is given by the recent development of powerful astronomical tools able to detect exceedingly faint signals from remote distances. One of the latter developments of particular signifcance was the opening of wavelengths longwards the classical visual band to the astronomical observation from space. From the mid '80 with the pioneering IRAS survey, until today, with the operation of the Herschel Space Observatory in the far-infrared and the Large Atacama Millimetre Array (ALMA) in the millimetre, a variety of initiatives have been put in operation to observe the Cosmo at long wavelengths. Among the many novelties emerging from all this, it became more and more evident the role of diffuse media in galaxies in shaping their spectral emission and modifying the flux emerging from stars.