Introduction Agricultural structured environments, like greenhouses, are facilities where it's possible to obtain profitable crops, in virtue of favourable agronomical conditions that can be realized in order to increase plants growth. Unfortunately the favourable atmosphere created inside greenhouses for plant growth causes pests and undesirable organisms to prosper as well, making necessary the use of pesticides and other products that must be sprayed directly on the plants quite ...

The main aim of this research is to generate and upgrade prediction models of radio propagation impairments, necessary to design satellite systems at centimetric and millimetric wavelengths with large capacity. To obtain this goal, an extensive use was made of the experimental equipments at disposal: an S band meteorological radar, radiometers operating in the 13-50 GHz frequency bands, and an ASI receiving station for different satellites. Two main research areas have been considered: 1) ...

Pest control is a basic problem in agriculture. Recentely, research on sustainable pest control strategies has become very important. Implementation of biological and integrated control strategies is based both on the knowledge of pest population abundance and the possibility to forecast the time evolution of the population dynamics in order to optimize the control operations. Jointly with ENEA - La Spezia and the University of Reggio Calabria, a modelling strategy for a single species ...

by Domenico Laforenza Introduction Nowdays the popularity of Internet and the availability of powerful computers and fast networks make possible to couple a wide variety of computational resources like supercomputers, storage systems, data sources and special devices, and using all of them as a single powerful parallel machine. This new computational paradigm has been defined "Grid Computing". This research topic has raised enoumous interest both in US [1] and Europe, as witnessed by the ...

The Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR) during its first year of activity has produced the following taxonomy of research topics which represents a sort of Knowledge Map of ICAR: (A) High Performance Computing and Networking (A.1) Advanced Architecture and Pervasive Platforms (A.1.1) Dedicated Processors (A.1.2) Reflective Middleware for Pervasive Computing (A.1.3) Multichannel Software Platforms (A.2) Advanced Environments, Protocols ...

Some ESA scientific missions (e.g. GOCE, SMART-2) require an accurate control of the attitude of the spacecratf. Many European factories have developed small thrusters capable of delivering very small forces (3 mN). Those thrusters have to be characterized in order to determine their thrust and its noise. IMGC has developed, as required by Alenia Spazio, an instrument able to perform those measurements, the "Nanobalance". The instrument is mainly constituted by two Cu-Be plates, hold by a ...

Neutron activation analysis for trace elements characterization in the atmospheric pollution studies The monitoring of trace elements (TE) content in the atmospheric particulate furnishes additional information for assessing the air quality of our cities. Many TE of anthropogenic origin may constitute a potential risk for the population not only at level of threshold concentrations but also in terms of prolonged exposure to low levels. At the CNR Unit of Radiochemistry and ...

The described application constitutes the first part of a project in which the experience on vehicle management, developed in the car field, is transferred to the heavy-duty vehicles, which use hydraulic systems for power transmission and motion generation. The project belongs to the activity area of the IMAMOTER institute directed to the evolution of power management systems for vehicles in the agricultural and earth-moving field. Mapping techniques and complex diagnosis systems have allowed ...

"Satellites are invading our skies". At a first sight this sentence could represent only a common sense; actually it summarizes a powerful reality that permeates (sometimes in an inquietant way) everyday life of each person and that involves both strongly industrialized countries and those that hope to become such. The main reason is that satellite is the cheapest tool able to "photograph" or "inform" the whole terrestrial globe (including oceans, isolated areas, poles and everything most ...

For a few years the Institute has had a research group in quantitative methods for finance and economics. Most of the group's research activity is, at this time, concentrated on a collaboration with the Italian Ministry for Economic Affairs for the optimization of the management of the Public Debt in Italy, an issue of paramount importance for the Italian society. There are a number of possible fixed income securities issued by the Italian Treasury ("zero coupon", called BOT, and bonds with ...

by O. Salvetti The research The study and development of deformable models enabling simulation of the behaviour of three-dimensional (3-D) structures embedded into real scenes and subjected to deforming forces, represent a challenge to computational neurosciences. In the construction of such models, artificial neural networks are in the forefront of research, results obtained so far by the "Signals and Images" Laboratory of ISTI-CNR have evidenced the potential and the effectiveness of ...

The experimental and theoretical research activity of the Istituto di Fisica del Plasma "Piero Caldirola" is mainly focused on the physics of the interaction of electromagnetic waves with laboratory plasmas. Research in this field is essential in providing the means for plasma heating in magnetized plasmas in fusion devices and in developing diagnostic methods appropriate both to laboratory and space. The technological research is mainly dedicated to the use of plasma-materials interaction ...

The spread of new technologies leads to a crucial role for the modeling of 3D objects, and in particular for shape modeling, in many applications. Actually, most of the information our senses collect is visual and shape-oriented, and most of our knowledge about the physical world comes as a shape information: reasoning about shape is a common way of describing real objects in engineering, architecture, medicine, biology, physics, and in daily life. Geometric modeling has been a key research ...

On July 2002 a railway derailment on the route Messina-Palermo caused eight people dead and forty ones remained injured. The accident was caused by bad conditions of railroad and more precisely some rails were deformed and some fastening elements were lacking. Nowdays, considered the high tecnological level both in construction of and in the realization of the trains should consider high safety level, so when those kind of accidents happen, the ways which the maintenance management and ...

On April 2002, just after one year since its recovery into a dockyard in Genoa, due to the breaking of the mooring, the meteo-oceanographic buoy "ODAS Italia 1", managed by the branch in Genoa of Istituto di Studi sui Sistemi Intelligenti per l'Automazione, regained the sea. It was positioned at the centre of the Ligurian Sea on about 1400 m deep sea bottom, approximately at 73 Km southward from Genoa along the line with Cape Corse. The research project developed around the system "ODAS Italia ...

The notable population and urban growth of last decades has determined the necessity to provide for a detailed monitoring program of urban zones in the geologic and environmental field; in such a context deformation monitoring represents a very critical problem. The particularity of this kind of area and the sensitivity of the context has induced to the development of detective methods as little as possible invading, in alternative to the classical geodetic methodology that has a direct contact ...