Focus

Metodi Formali per Sistemi Ferroviari

2022
Due articoli su Formal Methods in Railways sono stati appena pubblicati in importanti riviste di Informatica dell'ACM e dell'IEEE da autori del laboratorio Formal Methods and Tools (FMT) dell'Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "A. Faedo" (ISTI) del CNR. I metodi formali sono tecniche fondate su basi matematiche per la specifica, lo sviluppo e la verifica (manuale o automatizzata) di sistemi software e hardware, e FMT è un gruppo di ricerca di fama internazionale in questo campo, ...

CASUALTY RISK FROM THE UNCONTROLLED REENTRY OF ROCKET BODIES AND SATELLITES

2022
The current cumulative annual global casualty expectancy for uncontrolled reentries of spacecraft and orbital stages is of the order of 0.01. Hence, the corresponding individual risk is still extremely low, if compared with the hazards commonly faced in the everyday life, with a probability of being personally injured of the order of 1 in 800 billion per year. However, this risk is increasing, due to the rapid growth of space launch activities and to the rise in world population. Moreover, ...

Non-invasive diagnostics and data integration for the study, conservation and divulgation in the ECCEHOMO project

2021
Antonello da Messina's autograph version of Christ at the column, preserved at the Collegio Alberoni in Piacenza, has been the subject of a program of scientific analyzes non-invasive as part of the ECCEHOMO project - call 2017 of E-RIHS.it, the Italian node of the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (http://www.e-rihs.it/project/ecce-homo-iliazione-documentazione-del-painted-antonello-messina-from-the-collection-alberoni-piacenza/). The project ...

RisQFLan: security risk modelling and analysis

2021
RisQFLan concerns an open-source toolset for quantitative graph-based security risk modelling and analysis based on attack-defense trees, which are compact formal models of possible system attacks. RisQFLan allows to build rich models with expressive quantitative constraints in a domain-specific language that combines distinctive features from various well-known formalisms for risk modelling and analysis from the literature. One of these features is the specification of specific dynamic threat ...

A digital Loggia for Raphael at the time of COVID-19

2020
At http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/farnesina/loggia/, you can observe at a close distance both the beautiful stories of Cupid and Psyche to enjoy, with unprecedented detail, the fable of Apuleius, the vegetal and animals painted by Raphael and his assistants in Villa Farnesina, the Roman residence of the wealthy Sienese banker Agostino Chigi. At the same time, the interactive system allows you to consult the sought-after contents on the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche such as, for example, historical-archival ...

Inference of the three-dimensional structure of chromatin within the cell nucleus

2020
The python-code ChromStruct provides an estimate of the 3D structure of the chromatin fibre in cell nuclei from the contact frequency data produced by a "Chromosome conformation capture" experiment (information on DNA contacts on populations of millions of cells). The algorithm adopts a multiscale approach to explore the structure of chromosomes at different resolution levels and has a Bayesian optimization function to explore the space of the possible configurations that the chromatin fiber can ...

Expert Survey on Formal Methods

2020
The 2020 Expert Survey on Formal Methods has just been published. This lengthy report has been organised to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS), which was founded by researchers from the CNR Institute of Information Science and Technologies "A. Faedo" (ISTI). The survey addresses 30 questions on the past, present, and future of formal methods in research, industry, and education. A stunning 130 high-profile ...

Environmental sustainability of large satellite constellations in low Earth orbit

2020
A specific criticality index, the collision rate percentage increase, was introduced to assess the environmental impact of large satellite constellations in low Earth orbit (LEO). That index was estimated for various constellation arrangements, ranging in altitude from 800 km to 1400 km. The results obtained clearly show that in the regions of space where the current density of cataloged debris is already significant, such as around 800 km, just one hundred more abandoned satellites would ...

A Formal Methods Demonstrator for Railways

2020
The 4SECURail project - funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking - has two overall objectives: to design a Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) for joint EU-Rail cybersecurity, and the setup of a Formal Methods Demonstrator for the evaluation, in terms of cost, benefits and required learning curve, of the impact of the use of Formal Methods for the rigorous specification of the components of a railway signalling infrastructure. While it is recognized ...

A statistical overview of uncontrolled re-entries

2019
More than 24,400 catalogued orbiting objects have re-entered so far into the Earth's atmosphere since the beginning of the space age. The associated mass, close to 30,000 metric tons, was mainly concentrated in intact objects, i.e. payloads and spent upper stages, accounting for nearly 29% of the re-entered objects. During the 10 years from 2008 to 2017, 448 large (i.e. with a radar cross-section > 1 m2) intact objects, represented by 366 rocket bodies (∼82%) and 82 spacecraft ...

International Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Competition (IPIN)

2019
On 3rd October, the IPIN competition - the world championship of indoor localisation among 40 international research teams that study and work to improve the accuracy of indoor localisation systems - ended at the Institute of Science and Technologies of the CNR in Pisa. The main purpose of the competition is to evaluate the accuracy of current indoor localisation systems. During the challenge, teams tested their system along a path about 30 minutes long inside the CNR Research Area of Pisa, ...

Data Analytics for safety of platooning vehicles

2018
The development of automotive cooperative systems has progressed significantly to the point of real world testing (e.g. Google Driverless Car), and are anticipated to offer significant safety benefits for society in general. Most of these automotive cooperative systems are based in V2V and V2I to facilitate communications among vehicles and infrastructure, safety applications to analyse data and identify potential collisions, intelligent Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) that warn drivers and true ...

Large scale simulation of wireless technologies for connected vehicles

2018
The recent events related to pedestrians killed by self-driving cars have driven the attention to the risks and potentialities of the new automotive technologies and to the relative ethic and legal issues. However, it is by now clear that an autonomous vehicle is safer and more efficient than a human-driven car, since it has no reaction time and it can instantaneously brake, thus also increasing the road capacity and the traffic efficiency. But actual on-board sensors, even if advanced, ...

A revolutionary model of breast cancer metastasis in vitro: new horizons for research and identification of innovative therapies

2018
Cancer patients developing metastatic disease are considered incurable. Breast cancer is one of the most common, hitting 1 women in 8, and in some cases it progresses to form metastases, such as bone metastases. A major hurdle to overcome breast cancer mortality is the lack of understanding of dynamics leading to the spread of breast cancer cells to the bone. The Genoa Bioengineering Laboratory of the IEIIT Institute coordinates a European project H2020 FET-OPEN (Future Emerging Technology), ...

Visible Light Communication: back to the origin or leap of faith?

2018
Best things in life are free! Visible Light Communication (VLC) allows high rate data transmission while illuminating. Are we going back to more than 100 years ago when Bell performed his transmissions through a photophone? By sure, we are using the same principles. It is sufficient to quickly switch on and off the LED light to transmit a wide bandwidth signal invisible to the human eye and completely safe for the human body. VLC can be applied in several fields: - In office or at home, ...

VoxLogicA: a tool for declarative spatial-logical image analysis

2018
How can domain experts in (medical) image analysis formalise, execute, improve, and share their methods -- for instance, to identify brain tumours in 3D Magneto-Resonance scans -- with solid guarantees that their findings are portable, predictable and reproducible, and with minimal requirements on their skills and expertise in computing? VoxLogicA is an instrument designed to support image analysis with an emphasis on simplicity, focused on producing explainable and implementation-independent ...

Human-Centered, Smart & Safe, Living Environments Lab

2018
Realizzazione di un living lab presso la sede di ITIA Lecco, che si occupi dello studio delle attività dell'uomo in tutti suoi ambienti di vita: Ufficio, Casa, Luoghi di Cura, Fabbrica. Attività del Lab: o Caratterizzazione dell'utente o Monitoraggio dei parametri fisiologici o Estrazione di indici (scale cliniche, scale per l'analisi del rischio di sovraccarico degli arti, etc.) o Analisi del movimento e della postura o Dispositivi per riabilitazione con supporto di applicazioni in AR-VR o ...

Opinion dynamics in a social network

2017
Dating back to the 60's, and particularly since the advent and successful proliferation of social media, a significant effort has been devoted by the research community to the development of mathematical models describing the evolution of opinions/beliefs in an ecosystem composed of socially interacting individuals. The goal is to gain insights into collective dominant social behaviors and into the impact of different components of the system while being able to predict possible outcomes of ...

CLINEXTRACT: A structured lexicon for the automated extraction of clinical concepts from the multisource medical records of aged people with hearing disabilities

2017
Hearing impairment is very common in older adults: 360 million people over 65 have disabling hearing loss worldwide. It is well recognized that a successful plan for hearing rehabilitation of older people shall take into account not only the technological aspects, such as what type of hearing aid or implanted hearing device is used, but also other aspects broadly related to auditory disability. In this view, key factors include the perceived hearing difficulties in real life, the impact on ...

SWIM (SWitchMiner)

2017
Over the last two decades, biological sciences have undergone radical transformation through the development of new research technologies that have produced a real explosion in the amount of data available. Just think of the modern genomic sequencing techniques that have made the sequencing of the human genome, different animal and plant organisms, and many microorganisms simpler, less expensive and more reliable with enormous benefits for diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In the wake of the ...

The importance of worker reputation in crowd-work systems

2017
Crowd work is a term often adopted to identify networked systems that can be used for the solution of a wide range of complex problems by integrating a large number of human and/or computer efforts. Among several different types of crowd work systems that are already operational in the Internet, a large research effort has been devoted to characterize the performance of microtask-based crowd work systems. The key characteristic of these systems is that a requester structures his problem in a set ...

Spatiotemporal classification of mobile network demands

2017
The surge in mobile data traffic -estimated globally at 3.7 exabytes in 2015, with a 74% increase over 2014 and an overall 4,000-fold growth over the past ten years- has fostered the interest of the computer network community towards better understanding the dynamics of the mobile demand. Indeed, a proper characterization of how mobile services are consumed by subscribers can enable an informed, more efficient tailoring of network resource planning and management to the end users' needs. ...

Advanced multi-layer system based on surfaces and innovative nanostructured materials for a sustainable and energy-efficient construction

2017
In the last years, there has been a growing interest in the integrated use of innovative materials and ICT technologies to design a new concept of building, meeting the requirements of environmental compatibility and sustainability in terms of materials and energy. In the framework of the Tuscany Regional Project SELFIE, new technological components for buildings have been designed and implemented aiming at introducing new prototypical facade elements that can have a great impact on energy ...

The Secular Decay of the Semi-Major Axis of the Lares SatelliteLLITE

2017
The LAser Ranged Satellites Experiment (LARASE) has the goal to carry out a sequence of measurements of relativistic effects using specific Earth-orbiting satellites for verifying the predictions of General Relativity and of alternatives theories proposed for the description of the gravitational interaction. These measurements are achieved in the so-called weak-field and slow-motion (WFSM) limit of the theory, by means of passive "cannonball" satellites tracked very precisely with the Satellite ...

Formal Methods for the Railway Sector

2017
Researchers from the Formal Methods and Tools group of ISTI-CNR are working on a review and assessment of the main formal modelling and verification languages and tools used in the railway domain, with the aim of evaluating the actual applicability of the most promising ones to a moving block signalling system model. The research is being conducted in the context of the EU H2020 Shift2Rail project ASTRail: SAtellite-based Signalling and Automation SysTems on Railways along with Formal Method ...

GaN technology Power-DAC supply modulator for high-speed envelope tracking and driver waveform generation

2016
Modern wireless communication systems employ large bandwidth digital modulated signals with very high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) to enhance spectral efficiency and maximize the data rate. However, high PAPR digital modulations schemes are strongly detrimental for the radiofrequency (RF) amplifier that must operate most of the time several dB in back-off with respect to the nominal power and, therefore, with very low efficiency. A common technique to improve the RF high power amplifier ...

Opere d'arte e imaging iperspettrale

2016
Sulla prestigiosa rivista 'Accounts of Chemical Research' è stato recentemente pubblicato da ricercatori dell'Istituto di fisica applicata 'Nello Carrara' del Cnr (Ifac-Cnr), insieme a un collega della National Gallery of Art di Washington, un lavoro di rassegna dedicato ad alcune delle più significative applicazioni dell'imaging iperspettrale su opere policrome di grande pregio storico artistico. La tecnologia dell'imaging iperspettrale rappresenta oggi una delle più avanzate frontiere ...

H2020 PROGRAMME FUNDS A REASEARCH PROJECT FOR THE PRODUCTIONO OF BIO-BUTANOL FROM AGRO-FOOD WASTE

2016
The Institute of Research on Combustion (IRC) is one of the partners of the research project Waste2Fuels 'Sustainable production of next generation biofuels from waste streams' that has been funded under the European Union's research and innovation program Horizon 2020 under the grant agreement no. 654623. The project is coordinated by the Spanish company IRIS Advanced Engineering with the participation of 20 partners from 8 countries, among these the 'Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica dei ...

PETRA Project: Personal Transport Advisor: an integrated platform of mobility patterns for Smart Cities to enable demand-adaptive transportation systems

2016
The objective of the PETRA project is to develop a service platform that connects providers & controllers of city transport with the travellers in a new way. Cities get an integrated platform to enable the provision of citizen-centric, demand-adaptive city-wide transportation services. Travellers get mobile applications that facilitate them in making travel priorities and choices for route and modality. The result of the project is a city-wide transportation system comprised of several ...

Deep learning models for text to image retrieval

2016
Researchers of the Networked Multimedia Information System (NeMIS) laboratory of Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "A. Faedo" in Pisa have developed a deep learning-based image search model that works by taking in input a short textual description of the image the user is looking for, e.g.: "a group of skiers in a sunny day". They implemented the actual search process as a similarity search in a visual feature space, by learning to translate a textual query into a deep neural ...