This focus is devoted to numerical methods for the solution of optimization problems where first order derivatives of the functions defining the problems are not available. All of the presented methods are available for download under the GPL license. The library director is Giampaolo Liuzzi (giampaolo.liuzzi@iasi.cnr.it). At the moment, the packages that can be downloaded are the following: Local Optimization SDBOX, for bound constrained problems SDPEN, for general (inequality/equality) ...

Il Progetto SOLar Thermal Energy Solid Storage (SOLTESS), inserito nel contesto delle energie rinnovabili e in particolare dell'energia solare, introduce una tecnologia innovativa applicata al solare termodinamico a concentrazione. SOLTESS ha ricevuto nel 2012 un prestigioso riconoscimento con una menzione speciale quale Miglior Processo/Tecnologia alla VI edizione del Premio Impresa Ambiente. Il Premio è un'iniziativa promossa dal Ministero dell'Ambiente e dalla Camera di Commercio di Roma che ...

One of the key steps in nanotechnology is our ability to engineer and fabricate low-dimensional nano-objects, such as quantum dots, nanowires, two-dimensional atomic layers or three-dimensional nano-porous systems. Silicon carbide (SiC), a wide band-gap semiconductor, offers fascinating structural, thermomechanical, electronic, and chemical properties with a vast range of advanced applications including high-power, high-frequency, and high-temperature electronic devices and sensors. SiC ...

The ESA's GOCE satellite was launched on 17 March 2009. It had a dry mass of 1002 kg and a roughly cylindrical shape of 1 m diameter and 5.3 m length, with wing-shaped fins spanning 2 m. After mapping the geopotential with unrivalled accuracy and detail for four years from an extremely low circular polar orbit, on 21 October 2013 the low thrust ion propulsion motor used to contrast the atmospheric drag was automatically shut down when the pressure in the xenon propellant tank dropped below a ...

Researchers at IMEM-CNR have created a composite nanostructure made of zinc oxide (ZnO) tetrapod-shaped crystals and nanometric magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles with super-paramagnetic properties, i.e. thanks to their small size they behaves like a ferromagnetic material only when an external magnetic field is applied. In the obtained composite nano-material several useful properties are contemporary present and combined together in a single multifunctional structure. By means of the proper ...

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a semiconductor with unique physical/chemical properties ideally suitable for hard and protective coatings, optoelectronics and sensing. It is the most promising alternative to Si for electronic devices working at high power/high frequency or in prohibitive conditions. A new perspective is now being pursued for SiC as material for biomedical applications, thanks to its good biocompatibility. Since it is also the substrate for synthesizing high quality Graphene, SiC is ...

La trasformazione di liquame fresco in pellet ha diversi vantaggi. La riduzione del contenuto di acqua e la densificazione della massa solida conferisce al materiale organico una migliore conservabilità e una maggiore facilità di trasporto e distribuzione. La pellettizzazione del materiale organico ottimizza la gestione aziendale dei reflui da un punto di vista economico ed ambientale. Infatti il materiale pellettizzato può essere utilizzato come ammendante organico oltre i confini aziendali ...

How many times in daily research activity do we face with datasets where is contained some relevant knowledge, which a direct visual inspection is not able to extract?!? And in how many cases we would desire an integrated system capable of performing advances statistical analysis or employing complex data mining algorithms without having to manage the choice of obscure options and unknown formats?!? The problem of extracting knowledge from real world data producing effective models that allow ...

La produzione di energia ecosostenibile richiede il miglioramento delle prestazioni e la riduzione dell'impatto sull'ambiente e sul clima dei processi utilizzati. L'Istituto di Ricerche sulla Combustione (IRC) del CNR di Napoli, capofila d'importanti progetti finanziati dalla Ricerca di Sistema Elettrico del MiSE e del progetto FECUNDUS finanziato dalla Commissione Europea, svolge da tempo attività di studio sui processi tecnologicamente avanzati per la cattura della CO2(CCS). Le attività di ...

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) represents the future of radioastronomy. It will be composed of several subsystems operating in various frequency bands from 50 MHz to 10 GHz. The lower portion of this spectrum will be covered by a sparse array of antennas with more than 250000 elements which will provide incredibly high sensitivity and resolution performance. Italy is very active in the SKA design. A long-term collaboration between the Istituto di Radio Astronomia (IRA) of the Istituto ...

During the last 40 years, the mass of the artificial objects in orbit increased quite steadily at the rate of about 145 metric tons annually, leading to a total tally of approximately 7000 metric tons. Now, most of the cross-sectional area and mass (97% below the altitude of 2000 km) is concentrated in about 4500 intact objects, i.e. abandoned spacecraft and rocket bodies, plus a further 1000 operational spacecraft. Simulations and parametric analyses have shown that the most effective way to ...

Based on the idea that contribution of volunteers might play a fundamental role in monitoring and protecting the environment, CNR-ISTI designed and developed a mobile application in order to allow people to timely report oil spills. By downloading the FREE app "ARGO Sentinel" volunteers are helping to monitor the health of our seas and the scientific research by demonstrating that the use of this new technology could be really important to combat pollution. Moreover this experiment suggests that ...

La necessità di condivisione di risorse e di dati, in qualsiasi ambito della vita quotidiana di più di due miliardi di persone è uno dei problemi chiave delle comunicazioni dei prossimi anni, sia in termini di quantità che di disponibilità che di sicurezza; ne sono riprova social networks e l'esponenziale crescita di traffico dati da e per dispositivi "mobile", quali smartphone, tablet, ultrabook, etc. Questi trend hanno innescato una sorta di reazione a catena, che coinvolge sempre più ...

The steel casting industry is always improving its manufacturing plants and techniques in terms of both product quality and safety. In this framework, a lot of open challenging problems need to be solved. As far as continuous casting is concerned, where several very long steel products (e.g. billets) are manufactured in a single machine run, the steel level in the mold should be controlled with great accuracy in order to obtain a high-quality output and to avoid breakouts. This kind of ...

Experimental studies have shown that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, a single-cell slime mold that feeds on bacteria and spores, is able to perform tasks that are surprisingly complex for such a simple organism: for example, finding the shortest path through a maze. From these experiments and from the mathematical model proposed by biologists, IASI researchers have developed a rigorous mathematical analysis that confirms how the process followed by Physarum is a perfect "natural algorithm" ...

La diffusione di prodotti meccatronici contenenti schede elettroniche in costante aumento in diversi settori industriali e consumer. La gestione di tali prodotti a fine ciclo vita non segue attualmente logiche di efficienza ed efficacia sostenibili a livello globale. Ciò è dovuto, oltre che alla rapida evoluzione tecnologica e alla mancanza di business model di comprovato successo, alla carenza di tecnologie e sistemi integrati ad alto contenuto di automazione e flessibilità, che ne ...

Le tecnologie di micro manufacturing sono largamente riconosciute come tecnologie abilitanti fondamentali per affrontare le 'grandi sfide' della società del 21esimo secolo, poiché favoriscono la realizzazione di nuovi prodotti innovativi con applicazioni in numerosi settori, penalizzati dall'attuale situazione economica internazionale che risente dei rischi legati all'aumento del costo dell'energia, della diminuzione delle risorse e della manodopera. Il beneficio ultimo è di migliorare e ...

With the increasing influence of technology on our lives, it is becoming ever more important to offer new ambient intelligence solutions which enable humans to adapt and organize their lives around computational technologies and technologies that adapt to meet user behaviour. We apply machine learning techniques to demonstrate how user needs can be satisfied and anticipated by adding Ambient Intelligence solutions to any environment equipped with well-established commercial domotic ...

Vehicular networks are large-scale communication systems envisioned to exploit wireless technologies to interconnect moving cars. The principle is to let vehicles 'talk' to each other or to some roadside infrastructure through wireless links, so as to build autonomous networks in urban areas or along highways. Vehicular networks are foreseen to provide drivers with real-time information on potential dangers, traffic conditions, and travel times. By exploiting such data, drivers (or fast-reacting ...

I veicoli delle ultime generazioni sono governati quasi interamente da sistemi elettronici. La storia ci ricorda che è stato necessario introdurli per ridurre le emissioni inquinanti dei veicoli, per poi passare lentamente ad integrare sistemi di controllo della frenatura, dell'assetto, della coppia e potenza del motore, fino ad arrivare a sistemi autonomi che mediano le richieste del guidatore per rendere più sicura e confortevole la marcia del veicolo. Tutto questo è nato nell'auto, ma è ...

I pedoni in gruppo e le folle si comportano come pecore, quando non sanno dove andare, e si possono controllare: una scoperta, a cui ha contribuito l'Iac-Cnr, che con un'opportuna guida 'nascosta' potrebbe consentire di gestire in modo ottimale situazioni quali i flussi dei pellegrini al prossimo Giubileo. L'esperimento è apparso su arXiv In situazioni di confusione, i gruppi umani si comportano esattamente come le greggi: tendono a seguire le persone davanti a loro, in particolare se sembrano ...

We present a set of integrated tools designed and developed for the digital acquisition and structural analysis of historical monuments and buildings. The assessment of monuments requires various types of expertise and technologies. The St@rt project (Sciences and Technologies for the Artistic, Architectural and Archaeological Tuscan heritage), funded by the region of Tuscany (Italy) for the three year period 2007-2010, aimed at integrating different research and administrative expertise in ...

La Posta Elettronica Certificata (PEC) è una estensione della Posta Elettronica disponibile in Internet. Estendendo il classico sistema di posta elettronica e aggiungendo nuove funzioni che servono a certificare (in modo tale da avere valore legale) i vari eventi cui è soggetto un messaggio durante il suo transito in rete (invio dal mittente, trasporto, consegna al destinatario), la PEC si configura oggi come uno strumento semplice, rapido ed efficace per snellire processi, velocizzare ...

We present a novel environment that supports the design of multi-device service-based interactive applications by using several user interface abstraction levels and utilizing the composition of annotated services. Web services are increasingly used to support remote and distributed access to application functionalities, thus enabling a large gamut of interactive applications. However, when the user support (the service front end) is developed after delivering the Web services, it is often ...

Conditions appropriate to gas-surface interactions on satellite surfaces in orbit have not been successfully duplicated in the laboratory. However, measurements by pressure gauges and mass spectrometers in orbit have revealed enough of the basic physical chemistry that realistic theoretical models of the gas-surface interaction can now be used to calculate physical drag coefficients. The dependence of these drag coefficients on conditions in space can be inferred by comparing the physical drag ...

Il progetto conTatto nasce dall'esperienza di terapista nel settore della neuropsichiatria infantile della D.ssa Grazia Ragone e della D.ssa Marina Pagliarini operata all'interno di strutture ospedaliere con modalità e tecniche di musicoterapia riabilitativa ed educativa e dall'esperienza di informatici del Dr.Leonello Tarabella e del Dr.Massimo Magrini operata all'interno dell'Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Area della Ricerca del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerca di Pisa, ...

Hand-handled user devices, such as smartphones and tablets, as well as in-vehicle sensors are becoming extremely popular and represent a fertile ground for the development of crowdsensing (or, equivalently, community urban sensing) applications. Indeed, user devices are typically equipped with cameras, gyroscope, air-quality sensor, and accelerometer. The data obtained through such devices, as well as the ones gathered by in-vehicle sensors, can be combined with cellular BS positioning or GPS so ...

OpenAIRE will deliver "an electronic infrastructure and supporting mechanisms for the identification, deposition, access, and monitoring of FP7 and ERC funded articles", where the main supporting mechanism will be a European Helpdesk System. The infrastructure will be based on state-of-the-art software services of the D-Net Software Toolkit developed within the DRIVER and DRIVER-II projects and the Invenio digital repository software developed at CERN. Although simple in conception, ...

A research team at the Signal and Image Processing Lab of ISTI-CNR has been involved in studying data analysis algorithms for the European Space Agency's Planck Surveyor Satellite since 1999. The huge amount of data on the cosmic microwave background radiation provided by the Planck sensors requires very efficient analysis algorithms and high-performance computing facilities. The CNR group has proposed some of the source separation procedures that are now operational at the Planck data ...

n recent years scientists have been rethinking research workflows in favour of innovative paradigms to support multidisciplinary, computationally-heavy and data-intensive collaborative activities. In this context, e-Infrastructures can play a crucial role in supporting not only data capture and curation but also data analysis and visualization. Their implementation demands seamless and on-demand access to computational, content, and application services such as those typified by the Grid and ...