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, ...

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), ...

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, ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Nel 2014, 6,7 miliardi di telefoni cellulari hanno generato oltre due exabyte di dati relativi a una vasta gamma di servizi di telefonia mobile, tra cui la navigazione web, il social networking, video streaming, storage online ed il gioco on-line. Questa enorme quantità di attività può essere monitorato e geo-referenziata dagli operatori di telefonia mobile e divenire una fonte di informazioni senza precedenti su grandi popolazioni di individui. L'analisi dei dati di traffico di telefonia ...

Device-free radio vision is an augmented functionality provided by radio transceivers - typically heterogeneous, densely distributed and networked - that monitor the fluctuations of the electromagnetic (EM) field across the space. These monitoring devices may be pre-existing, deployed at arbitrary (or optimized) locations for communication purposes in the area of interest, and exchange digital information by any wireless communication protocol. Radio vision systems leverage diffraction, ...

On its website, Google describes PageRank as follows: "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that are considered important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results." The PageRank algorithm was introduced by the cofounders of Google in the late 1990s and has been implemented on the search engine of Google from the time of its launching. It continues to ...

Road safety and traffic congestions are among major concerns today. The Global status report on road safety 2013 indicates a worldwide total number of road traffic deaths of 1.24 million per year. A large part of them occurs at intersections. Intersection management is also critical to reduce the traffic jams in our cities. However, the percentage of intersections that are governed by traffic lights is inevitably limited and significantly increasing the number of traffic lights is not realistic ...

VCSELs are semiconductor micro-lasers, a Key Enabling Technology for many ICT applications, from datacom to sensors. Nowadays they are the main semiconductor optical source on the market and their production volume is exponentially increasing. Soon they will be part of every smart-phone and used for intra- and inter-chip communications in future microprocessors. VCSELs are complex dielectric resonator, composed of hundreds of layers and with plenty of possible transverse geometries, which can ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In April 2008 the European project SUBTUNE (Widely Tuneable VCSELs using subwavelength gratings) started and will last for three years. This project aims to realize VCSELs (Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers) tuneable in wavelength over large intervals using different techniques, so to cover different emission windows and applications: 850nm, 1550nm and 2000nm. To that end the MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, see Focus 2003) technology will be adopted to realize an optical cavity of ...

DESEREC is an Integrated Project of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Union under the "Information Society Technologies" priority, strategic objective "Towards a global dependability and security framework" . Its main goal is the definition of a framework to increase the dependability of existing and new networked Information Systems by means of an architecture based on the following modules: a) Modelling & simulation: DESEREC devises and develops innovative approaches and tools to ...

MEMS, formally the acronym of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, is the term born in the USA to indicate a family of devices made up of mechanical structures and electronic circuits integrated on the same silicon chip. An emerging field of MEMS applications, known as RF MEMS, is that of radio frequency and millimeter wave systems. Devices such as micro switches, tunable capacitors, high-Q inductors, micro-machined antennas, micro transmission lines and micro-mechanical resonators have been ...

In the field of the management of cultural heritage, it is well known the necessity of acquiring a documentation, the most complete and accurate as possible, on works of art belonging to the common cultural patrimony. The aim is to maintain their state of conservation under continuous control. Besides to carry out classification tasks, this documentation would allow one to foresee and plan conservative actions by preventing the spread and worsening of degradation phenomena. Focusing on ...

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) ...