Several natural systems are characterized by a large number of agents, interacting only locally, whose individual actions produce a macroscopic organized behavior. Examples of this phenomenon are the collective motion of flocks of birds or schools of fishes, the functioning of multicellular biological organisms and genetic networks (Figure 1). All the above mentioned systems exhibit an emergent behavior stemming from local and simple coordination rules among the entities. The aim of this ...

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 ...

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 ...