Research activities

The research activity covers the following topics:

1. OPTIMIZATION, MODELING AND ALGORITHMS FOR BIOINFORMATICS AND SYSTEMS BIOLOGY (BIOSYS)

• BIOLOGICAL NETWORKS: coding biological problems on graphs; differential equation models applied to cell molecular dynamics; biological functional analysis based on modules and networks.


• GENOMICS AND PROTEIN STRUCTURES: data mining applied to DNA sequence and transcriptomic and/or proteomic data to characterize diseases, identify models for diagnosis and identification of therapies; design and implementation of databases for biological Big Data; design and implementation of algorithms for the analysis of biological words; design and implementation of algorithms for clustering and similarity detection between metagenomic samples; study of synergistic interactions between transcription factors couples.

• DATABASES: big OLAP data; business intelligence; data integration; data modelling; advanced query languages; spatial databases.


• INFORMATION SYSTEMS: social network-based information systems; geographic information systems; human-computer interaction.


• KNOWLEDGE BASES: knowledge representation; ontologies; automated reasoning; ontology engineering; semantic annotation; similarity reasoning; semantic relatedness; semantic interoperability; semantic search; semantic web; decision support systems; document management; qualitative spatial reasoning.


• LOGIC, SEMANTICS AND PROGRAMMING: automated theorem proving; constraint logic programming; semantics of programming languages.


• SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: model checking; model-driven engineering; business process modeling and simulation; software architectures; service-oriented architectures; software analysis, synthesis and transformation; software testing; software verification and validation.

• METABOLISM IN CRITICAL ILLNESS: sepsis-systemic infections; severe inflammatory response states; monitoring criteria; clinical severity assessment; alterations of energy and protein/amino acid metabolism; optimization of artificial nutrition; quantification of carbon dioxide transport and exchange; metabolism of patients undergoing major hepatic resections.


• ENERGY METABOLISM AND ARTIFICIAL PANCREAS: artificial pancreas; pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics; glucose/insulin models.


• CELL REPLICATION AND EPIDEMICS: cell proliferation; tumor growth and treatments; epidermis growth; epidemic modelling; structured population models.

• COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION AND DISCRETE MATHEMATICS: graph theory, coloring, partitioning, packing and covering; network algorithms: cuts, flows, matchings; combinatorics on words; structural properties of 0/1 matrices.


• MIXED-INTEGER PROGRAMMING: exact solution of NP-hard problems; guaranteed approximation algorithms; scheduling problems; routing problems.


• CONTINUOUS OPTIMIZATION: convex, lagrangian and semidefinite programming relaxations; global optimization; multi-criteria optimization; nonsmooth optimization; direct search methods.

• DETERMINISTIC AND STOCHASTIC DYNAMIC SYSTEMS AND CONTROL THEORY: structural properties and solution of systems described by nonlinear ordinary differential equations; nonlinear control; observers for nonlinear systems; optimal control; delayed systems control; stochastic control; modeling of Chemical Master Equations; control of biochemical reactions; modeling of macro-economic systems.


• SYSTEMS IDENTIFICATION AND FILTERING: positive systems realizations; stochastic realization; nonlinear / non-Gaussian filtering; estimation and identification of microfluidic systems; fault detection.


• SIGNAL, SPEECH, AND IMAGE PROCESSING: control of sea surface vehicles; processing / prediction of meteorological data.