In our everyday life, we are used to picture social relations - as well as countless other interactions - as mutable, dynamic and often short-term bonds. Research studies have extensively shown that networks inferred from social ties can be used to observe, characterize and forecast different aspects of human activities (such as predict new connections [1] or the usage of online communication services [2]) and that, in order to correctly describe the social phenomena we study, it is often ...

Production of a ship is a very complex task, representing the synthesis of an intense design activity: all the relevant parameters affecting the mission of the ship are considered in this phase. However, some of these parameters are changing in time, i.e. the payload may increase or reduce due to the different market demands: if the variations are not negligible, a review of the project could be economically advantageous after some years, identifying a modification of the hull able to produce an ...

The restoration of the Neptune Fountain in Bologna (Italy) started in 2016 and will be terminated in the first half of 2017. This action is funded by Comune di Bologna and it is joint project of Bologna University, Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro del MiBACT (ISCR) and CNR-ISTI. This restoration qualifies as a major restoration action both for the complexity of the artwork (a complex multi-material monument, with parts in stone and bronze showing different conservation ...

Sometimes, under certain circumstances, we know that problems that are in general hard to solve become easy for certain input instances. Of course, we have to be able to recognize such "lucky instances"and therefore we have to be able to characterize their "lucky properties" and exploit the characterization to devise efficient recognition algorithms. In other words we have to be able to answer the following question efficiently: "Is this instance a lucky one"; if the answer is yes then we are ...

Context Mobile devices are today noticeable means by which people disseminate digital tracks of their everyday activities: movements, purchase transactions, preferences, opinions, and so on. In particular, mobile phones and the data they produce revealed as a high-quality proxy for studying people mobility in different domains, such as environmental monitoring, transportation planning , smart cities and social relationship analysis and innovative demographic indexes. Opportunities Currently, a ...

The so-called Cyber-Physical Convergence is one of the main trends of the research in the Future Internet domain. It argues that the pervasiveness of mobile devices with networking capabilities is fostering a convergence between the physical world and the cyber world, whereby smart objects and humans interact with the cyberspace via sensing, computing and communication, generating huge volumes of data flowing between the two worlds. To address this vision, IIT-CNR researchers focus on several ...

The study deals with the friction and wear properties of materials for brake pads. It has been developed in the frame of a research collaboration with ITT Friction Technologies company, who is one of the world leaders in the field of brake pads. The gradual phasing out of asbestos, recognized as carcinogenic materials, pushed pads manufacturers to move away from them, to the purpose to obtain safe components. Such phenomenon resulted in a wide variety of brake pads, each with its peculiar ...

The processes behind the functioning of modern Public Administration (PA) are characterized by increasing complexity and continuous evolution. In most cases these processes require a collaborative activity shared among different offices, both within an administration and also across more organizations. Moreover, as related laws and regulations are frequently modified, the administrative processes are constantly transformed requiring the intertwined adaptation of related services and data. At ...

The EU-funded DOREMI project (Decrease of cOgnitive decline, malnutRition and sedEntariness by elderly empowerment in lifestyle Management and social Inclusion) showed that in elderly people cognitive decline can be counteract and social inclusion can be improved with the help of cognitive games and a virtual companion to be used with PCs, TVs and tablets. The decline of cognitive ability is strongly related to lifestyle, as well as social engagement, cognitive stimulation, nutrition and ...

The face is the pre-eminent channel of communication among humans: it is a mirror of status, emotions, mood. This is the base principle of Medical Semeiotics, which looks at the face as a revealer of the healthy status of an individual, through a combination of physical signs (e.g., skin colour, subcutaneous fat) and facial expressions. Medical Semeiotics dates back as far as Aristotle's time; nevertheless it is still used by medical practitioners today, who rely on their ability to read the ...

In recent years, European maritime countries had to face new situations involving the traffic of illegal vessels. The fight against unauthorized fishing, irregular migration and related smuggling activity has become an international priority. Image processing and computer vision methods can contribute to find a solution to these problems by using the large scale data which is nowadays made available by satellite constellations. With this aim, researchers at the Signals and Images Lab of ...

We live in times of increasing opportunities of sensing and analysing data describing human activities at extreme detail and resolution. Unfortunately, this comes with unprecedented risks, since this data can be related to personal and sensitive information about individuals. Data are tipically stored in the databases of companies (e.g., telecom, insurance and retail companies), which use legal constraints on privacy as a reason for not sharing it with science and society at large. Clearly, this ...

The design and development of flexible software able to match the many possible user needs and provide high quality user experience is a major open issue, further complicated by the recent explosion of mobile technology and the Internet of Things (IoT), which have highly increased the variability and heterogeneity of the possible contexts of use of smart applications. In this scenario, such applications need to address extremely contextualized user needs, thus their complete behaviour cannot be ...

A common way to evaluate the latent long-term environmental impact of an orbiting object, refraining from running thousands of complex simulations based on quite uncertain scenario assumptions, is to devise an indexing scheme grounded on reasonable premises. The main advantage of these heuristic approaches is the adoption of simple to understand and simple to apply rules, while the main drawback is the lack of a validated cause-effect foundation, unavoidable if the uncertain, stochastic and ...

The structure of a social network is fundamentally related to the interests of its members. People assort spontaneously based on the topics that are relevant to them, forming social groups that revolve around different subjects. Online social media are also favorable ecosystems for the formation of topical communities centered on matters that are not commonly taken up by the general public because of the embarrassment, discomfort, or shock they may cause. Those are communities that depict or ...

Magnetic recording is presently the leading technology for mass data storage. Its dominant role has been reinforced by the success of cloud computing, which requires huge amounts of data to be stored and managed on a multitude of servers. Nonetheless, the hard-disk storage industry is presently at a crossroad as the current magnetic recording technologies are unable to achieve storage densities beyond 1Tbit/in2. Pushing the recording density to the terabit regime requires new storage materials, ...

With specific reference to production processes, industrial security may be defined as the set of the studies, development and the applications of strategies, policies and operative plans, finalized to prevent, manage and solve adverse behaviors against people, environment and properties, either within or outside the industrial site, and against company resources, which are essential to ensure competitiveness in short or long period. In this perspective, industrial installations can represent ...

The question of the worlwide climate modification, due to the human emissions (i.e. greehnouse gas) is alwais more stringent: Europe consumes more petroleum for transportation than for any other energy use; transportation is responsible for about half of the smog forming pollutants in our cities, for up to 90% of the carbon monoxide, and for more than half of the toxic air pollutants. The need to accelerate the development of the technologies able to reduce the effect of the human activity ...

Nowadays, companies and individuals are immersed in digital interconnected ecosystems in which huge amounts of heterogeneous data, the so-called Big Data, are generated at an unprecedented speed. In this scenario, approaches and technologies for Big Data have the aim to make computable problems that involve large volumes of data, highly heterogeneous in size and structure, often generated in real-time, which can not be dealt with the existing information technologies. The purpose of the ...

Computer science today is driven by two main trends: the use of computing resources on demand (outsourced computing) and the need of processing a huge amount of data coming from different sources (data-centric computing). The effects of these two trends will lead the future computing platforms towards hybrid systems composed of distributed specialized subsystems with specific and complementary features that operate synergistically. These systems will interact with the users by means of multiple ...

The Cognitive Systems Lab is aimed at studying and realizing cognitive systems of new generation, able to learn, reason, and pervasively engage with humans in a natural, personalized, reactive and/or proactive way. Theoretical, experimental, and applied research activities will be aimed at designing and implementing cognitive systems able to: i) engage individually or collectively with humans by combining advanced visualization techniques with adaptive and proactive multi-modal mechanisms based ...

The aim of Computational and Data Lab is to develop algorithms, models and software tools to detect, understand and design scientific and tecnologic solutions through the analysis of data obtained from experiments and tests, and/or through simulation of the processes generating them, dealing with new scientific challanges and multidisciplinary activities, related to ICT. Its activity is focused on the resolution of real problems with methodologies spanning from computer simulation, to scientific ...

by Maria Girardi, Cristina Padovani and Daniele Pellegrini In Italy many historically and artistically important masonry buildings are in dire need of maintenance and restoration. In order to optimize such operations in terms of cost-effectiveness, architectural impact and static effectiveness, numerical codes have a crucial role to play in modelling the structural behaviour of masonry buildings. By providing important information such as the collapse loads, the stress field and the ...

Human activities and the environments in which they occur (real or virtual) are perceived in an increasingly sophisticated manner by artificial agents, and they can trigger complex interactions with "intelligent" software agents or "autonomous"robot. The research activities aims to study new architectures and methodologies to better manage the cycle "perception-understanding-action" of artificial autonomous systems, taking inspiration also from human cognitive models. The perception usually ...

Il progetto SI DO RE MI è stato sviluppato dal Laboratorio Segnali e Immagini dell'ISTI grazie ad un finanziamento della Fondazione Telecom Italia. Il progetto prevede un intervento rivolto a bambini con Disturbi dello Spettro Autistico (DPS) e difficoltà relazionali finalizzato a promuovere l'interazione a vari livelli di complessità attraverso la mediazione della stimolazione sonora interattiva. A tale scopo è stato sviluppato un sistema HW/SW basato su di un calcolatore con sistema ...

The Cognitive Systems Lab is aimed at studying and realizing cognitive systems of new generation, able to learn, reason, and pervasively engage with humans in a natural, personalized, reactive and/or proactive way. Theoretical, experimental, and applied research activities will be aimed at designing and implementing cognitive systems able to: i) engage individually or collectively with humans by combining advanced visualization techniques with adaptive and proactive multi-modal mechanisms based ...

The smart area of the CNR was born in Pisa, baptized with an event held at the Auditorium of the National Research Council on Nov. 30, 2015, in which ICT applications were presented that make smart the CNR area in Pisa, being this the largest area in the overall panorama of the CNR research centers in Italy. In its 130 thousand s/m, 13 CNR institutes operate, and other research centers are housed, such as the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, the Ericsson, the Enea and and the G. Monasterio ...

The Speedy laboratory investigates the principles, models, methodologies and tools needed for the design and development of high-performance, distributed and pervasive systems. Such systems are a complex ecosystem of heterogeneous entities (services, smart objects/M2M, people, etc.) that cooperate to provide the related functionalities, and are able to evolve and quickly adapt to changing requirements. The focus is on combining Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), in order to enable ...

The main aim of industrial prototyping is to create a tangible representation of an arbitrary digital geometry. Industrial fabrication is generally tuned for a specific object and the initial setup is usually a time consuming operation. The more complex the shape of the object, the more complex is the manufacturing process. Obviously, implementing a similar process to create a single (or a few) prototype(s) is not efficient. To deal with these specific industrial needs 3D printing devices have ...

The continual progress of physics provides an insight ever deeper of the Universe, and also to have new technologies, but at the same time place us in front to new and new demands. One of the open questions in physics is to reconcile the two most successful theories of physics, Einstein's general relativity and quantum physics, which work perfectly, but in completely different fields. General relativity explains gravity and the universe at large scale, astronomical and cosmological, and at the ...