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Search for Type-III SeeSaw heavy leptons in leptonic final states using proton-proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
Get PDFThis thesis analyzes multi-leptonic final states to perform a search for the pair production of heavy leptons as predicted by the Type-III SeeSaw mechanism. The analysis uses proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to 139 fb^{-1} of integrated luminosity recorded by the ATLAS detector during the full Run 2 period of the Large Hadron Collider (2015-2018). The search is focused on final states with three and four light leptons (electrons and muons) and large energy produced by the collision coming from all the possible decays of the heavy leptons via intermediate electroweak bosons. As no significant excesses with respect to the Standard Model predictions are observed, upper and lower limits on the production cross-section and on the heavy lepton masses are set. The observed lower mass limit is 870 GeV at 95% of confidence level considering both three- and four-lepton channels. In addition, this result is combined for the first time with the ones already published by the ATLAS Collaboration in the two leptons plus two jets final state. In this case, the observed lower mass limit combining two, three and four lepton channels is 910 GeV at the 95% of confidence level.Questa tesi analizza gli stati finali multi-leptonici per la ricerca della produzione di coppie di leptoni pesanti predetti dal meccanismo SeeSaw di Tipo-III. L'analisi usa i dati prodotti dalle collisioni protone-protone ad una energia del centro di massa di 13 TeV, corrispondenti ad una luminosità integrata di 139 fb^{-1} raccolti dall'esperimento ATLAS durante l'intero periodo Run 2 del Large Hadron Collider (2015-2018). La ricerca è focalizzata su stati finali con tre e quattro leptoni leggeri (elettroni e muoni) e con un'elevata energia rilasciata dalla collisione proveniente da tutti i possibili decadimenti dei leptoni pesanti attraverso bosoni elettrodeboli. Poiché non sono stati osservati eccessi di segnale rispetto alle predizioni del Modello Standard, sono stati posti dei limiti superiori e inferiori sulla sezione d'urto di produzione e sulla massa dei leptoni pesanti. Il limite inferiore di massa osservato è di 870 GeV al 95% di livello di confidenza considerando entrambi i canali con tre e quattro leptoni. In aggiunta, questo risultato è stato combinato per la prima volta con quello già pubblicato dalla collaborazione ATLAS nello stato finale con due leptoni e due jet. In questo caso, il limite inferiore di massa ottenuto combinando i canali con due, tre e quattro leptoni è di 910 GeV al 95% di livello di confidenz
Optimization of emerging treatments for seafood products and by-products valorization
Get PDFThe development of emerging technologies in seafood processing can contribute significantly to meet consumer needs toward safe, healthy, and minimally processed foods. This PhD thesis is focused on the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the effects of emerging treatments applied to extend shelf-life of seafood processing and to preserve the qualitative characteristics of raw materials. The application of innovative non-thermal technologies to recover bioactive substances from crustacean by-products were also studied.
Several experimental procedures were evaluated individually by the following studies: i) study of the effect of modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) with unconventional gas mixtures on the modification of the main qualitative parameters of sardine fillets during refrigerated storage; ii) valorization of an underutilized crustaceans by the application of mechanical flesh separation and freezing iii) application and evaluation of the main effects of high pressure processing (HPP) treatments on the quality and stability of different seafood products; iv) study and application of innovative non-thermal technologies, such as accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) and pulsed electric fields (PEF) for the recovery and valorization of value-added products from crustacean processing by-products.
Based on the obtained results, the use of argon for MAP of sardine fillets showed an inhibitory effect on bacterial spoilage increasing their shelf-life. The effect of HPP treatment on the different types of considered seafood products, intended for raw consumption, highlighted a significant microbiological shelf-life increase at the highest applied pressure levels for all the considered species. The application of ASE and PEF showed high yield of astaxanthin and seemed to be an effective tool to recover high antioxidant compounds from crustacean by-products. The overall results of this PhD thesis highlighted the great advantages in the application of emerging technologies for both seafood products and crustacean by-product valorization, therefore contributing to the potential increase of the sustainability of the seafood sector
Gross and Microscopic Morphological Anatomical Study of the Guinea Pig (Cavia porcellus) and the Capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), Aimed at the Preparation of a Comparative Anatomical Atlas of the Different Systems
Get PDFIn recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the so-called “new pets”, including the domestic guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) and the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), two closely related Caviid rodents native to South America. Both historically bred for food purposes, they have more recently become increasingly popular as pets in the European and American continents, respectively. This led to an increasing veterinary interest in deepening the knowledge regarding their normal anatomy, as a basic contribution to other fields of veterinary medicine, including diagnostic imaging, surgery, and pathological anatomy.
Being part of a bilateral framework co-tutelage agreement leading to a joint Doctoral Degree between the Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna, Italy and the Universidad Nacional del Litoral of Santa Fe, Argentina, this research project was partly carried out in Italy (study of guinea pigs) and partly in Argentina (study of capybaras). It consisted in the macroscopic study, through anatomical dissections of carcasses of both species as well as the use of anatomical casts, and in the histological study of the various systems in the two species, and was aimed at creating a gross and microscopic comparative anatomical atlas.
From the gross and microscopic morphological and morphometrical anatomical study of the different system of the guinea pig and capybara, several analogies and differences emerged.
The creation of a comparative anatomical atlas of gross and microscopic anatomy of the capybara and the guinea pig might prove useful for clinical, zootechnical and research purposes
Model selection and the vectorial misspecification-resistant information criterion in multivariate time series
Get PDFThe thesis deals with the problem of Model Selection (MS) motivated by information and prediction theory, focusing on parametric time series (TS) models. The main contribution of the thesis is the extension to the multivariate case of the Misspecification-Resistant Information Criterion (MRIC), a criterion introduced recently that solves Akaike’s original research problem posed 50 years ago, which led to the definition of the AIC. The importance of MS is witnessed by the huge amount of literature devoted to it and published in scientific journals of many different disciplines. Despite such a widespread treatment, the contributions that adopt a mathematically rigorous approach are not so numerous and one of the aims of this project is to review and assess them. Chapter 2 discusses methodological aspects of MS from information theory. Information criteria (IC) for the i.i.d. setting are surveyed along with their asymptotic properties; and the cases of small samples, misspecification, further estimators. Chapter 3 surveys criteria for TS. IC and prediction criteria are considered for: univariate models (AR, ARMA) in the time and frequency domain, parametric multivariate (VARMA, VAR); nonparametric nonlinear (NAR); and high-dimensional models. The MRIC answers Akaike’s original question on efficient criteria, for possibly-misspecified (PM) univariate TS models in multi-step prediction with high-dimensional data and nonlinear models. Chapter 4 extends the MRIC to PM multivariate TS models for multi-step prediction introducing the Vectorial MRIC (VMRIC). We show that the VMRIC is asymptotically efficient by proving the decomposition of the MSPE matrix and the consistency of its Method-of-Moments Estimator (MoME), for Least Squares multi-step prediction with univariate regressor. Chapter 5 extends the VMRIC to the general multiple regressor case, by showing that the MSPE matrix decomposition holds, obtaining consistency for its MoME, and proving its efficiency. The chapter concludes with a digression on the conditions for PM VARX models
Dogmatic and political-criminal study on the crimes of illegal funding of political parties
Get PDFEn el año 2012, el legislador español modificó el artículo 31 bis CP de modo que los partidos políticos quedaban sometidos al régimen de responsabilidad penal previsto para las personas jurídicas, tras haber sido excluidos del mismo en el año 2010. Tres años más tarde, en 2015, fruto del Plan de Regeneración Democrática del Partido Popular, se aprobó la última reforma al sistema de financiación de los partidos políticos, en la que se prohibieron las donaciones procedentes de personas jurídicas o se limitó la cantidad máxima donada por una persona física a 50.000 euros anuales. Ese mismo año 2015, se introdujeron en nuestro ordenamiento jurídico los delitos de financiación ilegal de los partidos políticos. Este conjunto de reformas dibujó un panorama completamente renovado en el ámbito de la financiación ilícita de las formaciones políticas.
Así pues, el presente trabajo constituye un estudio omnicomprensivo en el que se busca analizar el fenómeno de la financiación ilegal de los partidos políticos en su conjunto, desde la regulación administrativa de la financiación de las formaciones políticas, hasta los nuevos tipos penales de financiación ilegal y la compleja aplicación del régimen de responsabilidad criminal de las personas jurídicas a las organizaciones partidistas. En este sentido, nuestro fin último ha sido aportar las claves interpretativas necesarias para que los operadores jurídicos puedan hacer frente a los distintos supuestos de financiación ilegal de los partidos políticos.Nel 2012 il legislatore spagnolo ha modificato l'articolo 31 bis CP in modo che i partiti politici fossero soggetti al regime di responsabilità penale previsto per le persone giuridiche, dopo esserne stati esclusi nel 2010. Tre anni dopo, nel 2015, a seguito del “Plan de Regeneración Democrática” del Partito Popolare, è stata approvata l'ultima riforma del sistema di finanziamento dei partiti politici, con la quale sono state vietate le donazioni da persone giuridiche e si è limitato l'importo massimo donato da una persona fisica a 50.000 euro annui. Nello stesso anno, sono stati introdotti nel nostro ordinamento i reati di finanziamento illecito dei partiti politici. Questa serie di riforme ha tracciato un panorama completamente rinnovato per quanto riguarda le finanze dei partiti politici.
Il presente lavoro costituisce uno studio onnicomprensivo che si propone di analizzare il fenomeno del finanziamento illecito dei partiti politici nel suo complesso, dalla disciplina amministrativa del finanziamento delle formazioni politiche, alle nuove fattispecie penali del finanziamento illecito e l’applicazione del regime di responsabilità penale delle persone giuridiche alle organizzazioni partitiche. In questo senso, il nostro obiettivo finale è stato quello di fornire le chiavi interpretative necessarie affinché gli operatori legali possano affrontare i diversi casi di finanziamento illecito dei partiti politici.In 2012, the Spanish legislator modified the article 31 bis CP so that political parties were also subject to corporate criminal liability, after having been excluded from this system in 2010. Three years later, in 2015, because of the “Plan de Regeneración Democrática” of the Popular Party, the latest reform to the regulation on the funding of political parties was approved. In this last reform, donations from legal entities were prohibited and the maximum amount donated by an individual was limited to 50,000 euros per year. That same year, the crimes of illegal funding of political parties were introduced into our legal system. This set of reforms drew a completely different panorama in terms of the illegal funding of political parties.
Thus, the present work constitutes an all-encompassing study that seeks to analyse the phenomenon of illegal funding of political parties. It includes the administrative regulation of the funding of political formations, the new crimes of illegal funding and the complex application of the corporate criminal liability system to political parties. In this sense, our goal has been to provide the keys to interpreting the different cases of illegal funding of political parties
A double chance to investigate populist influence: The Five Star Movement.
Get PDFIn the last decade, new kinds of European populist parties and movements characterized by a left wing, right wing or “eclectic” attitude have succeeded in entering in governments where they could exert a direct populist influence on their coalition partners or, conversely, become victims themselves of the influence of the institutional background. Such a scenario brought this research to formulate two questions: (i) “To what extent did populist parties succeed in influencing their government coalition partners, leading them to adopt populist rhetoric and change their policy positions?” and (ii) “Have populist parties been able to retain their populist “outside mainstream politics” identity, or have they been assimilated to mainstream parties?”. As a case study this project chose the Italian Five Star Movement. Since 2018 this eclectic populist actor has experienced three different governments first with the radical right wing populist League (2018-2019) and then with the mainstream center left Democratic Party (2019-2021). In addition to this, currently the Five Star Movement is a coalition partner of the ongoing Draghi’s government. Theoretically based on the ideological definition of populism (Mudde, 2004), on a new “revised” model of the inclusionary - exclusionary framework to classify populist parties and on a novel definition of “populist influence”,this research made use of both quantitative (bidimensional and text analysis) and qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews) and mainly focuses on the years 2017- 2020.The importance of this study is threefold. First it contributes to the study of populist influence in government in relation to the ideological attachment of the political actors involved. Second, it contributes to understand if populists in power necessarily need to tone down their anti-system character in order to survive. Third, this study introduces conceptual and methodological novelties within the study of populism and populist influence in government
Exploring domain-informed and physics-guided learning in image-to-image translation
Get PDFImage-to-image (i2i) translation networks can generate fake images beneficial for many applications in augmented reality, computer graphics, and robotics. However, they require large scale datasets and high contextual understanding to be trained correctly. In this thesis, we propose strategies for solving these problems, improving performances of i2i translation networks by using domain- or physics-related priors. The thesis is divided into two parts. In Part I, we exploit human abstraction capabilities to identify existing relationships in images, thus defining domains that can be leveraged to improve data usage efficiency. We use additional domain-related information to train networks on web-crawled data, hallucinate scenarios unseen during training, and perform few-shot learning. In Part II, we instead rely on physics priors. First, we combine realistic physics-based rendering with generative networks to boost outputs realism and controllability. Then, we exploit naive physical guidance to drive a manifold reorganization, which allowed generating continuous conditions such as timelapses
Topics in climate change risk
Get PDFIn this Thesis, we analyze how climate risk impacts economic players and its consequences on the financial markets. Essentially, literature unravels two main channels through which climate change poses risks to the status quo, namely physical and transitional risk, that we cover in three works. Firstly, the call for a global shift to a net-zero economy implicitly devalues assets that contribute to global warming that regulators are forcing to dismiss. On the other hand, abnormal changes in the temperatures as well as weather-related events challenge the environmental equilibrium and could directly affect operations as well as profitability. We start the analysis with the physical component, by presenting a statistical measure that generally represents shocks to the distribution of temperature anomalies. We oppose this statistic to classical physical measures and assess that it is the driver of the electricity consumption, in the weather derivatives market, and in the cross-section of equity returns. We find two transmission channels, namely investor attention, and firm operations. We then analyze the transition risk component, by associating a regulatory horizon characterization to fixed income valuation. We disentangle a risk driver for corporate bond overperformance that is tight to change in credit riskiness. After controlling a statistical learning algorithm to forecast excess returns, we include carbon emission metrics without clear evidence. Finally, we analyze the effects of change in carbon emission on a regulated market such as the EU ETS by selecting utility sector corporate bond and, after controlling for the possible risk factor, we document how a firm’s carbon profile differently affects the term structure of credit riskiness
Giorgio Castelfranco and the protection of italian cultural heritage. The issue of illegal export of cultural property and nazi-looted art in Italy during the Second World War
Get PDFLa presente ricerca affronta il tema delle esportazioni illecite e delle spoliazioni di opere d’arte attuate dai nazisti in Italia negli anni precedenti e durante la Seconda guerra mondiale. In particolare, all’interno di tale vasta questione, si è voluto far emergere il ruolo di Giorgio Castelfranco nella salvaguardia e tutela del patrimonio artistico italiano. Giorgio Castelfranco, funzionario di soprintendenza storico dell’arte, ha apportato il proprio contributo nella tutela del patrimonio grazie a diverse azioni da lui compiute durante la propria carriera. Contributo che si può far iniziare con i primi interventi di tutela, diremmo oggi, preventiva, come la compilazione del catalogo degli oggetti d’arte e degli elenchi dei monumenti, ma anche la salvaguardia delle bellezze naturali, compiuti negli anni Venti e Trenta del Novecento, presso le Soprintendenze della Puglia, dell’Umbria e della Toscana. Con l’emergenza della Guerra poi Castelfranco fu impegnato in una vera e propria opera di recupero e ricostruzione. Quest'ultima intesa non del solo patrimonio storico-artistico e monumentale, ma anche dell’amministrazione delle Belle Arti, a cui Castelfranco ha attivamente contribuito durante la reggenza della Direzione Generale sotto il Governo Badoglio. Inoltre, in occasione dei sopralluoghi ai depositi di opere d’arte toscani e durante la Missione per il recupero delle opere d’arte in Germania del 1946-1947, Castelfranco, grazie alle proprie competenze e all’esperienza maturata in decenni di attività professionale, ebbe l’occasione di dare il proprio fondamentale contributo all’individuazione e al recupero delle opere d’arte esportate illecitamente e trafugate dai nazisti.The research deals with the issue of illegal export of cultural property and Nazi-looted art in Italy during the Second World War. Within this vast issue, we wanted to provide a broader perspective on the figure of Giorgio Castelfranco and on his role in safeguarding and protecting the Italian artistic heritage. Giorgio Castelfranco was an art historian and critic. During the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, he was employed by the Italian Fine Arts Administration at the Superintendencies of Apulia, Umbria and Tuscany. Thus, he gave his first contribution to the protection of cultural heritage thanks to various actions he carried out during his career. He started working on some preventive protection measures such as: the compilation of the catalog of art objects; the development of lists of monuments; the preservation of natural beauties. With the emergence of the war then Castelfranco was engaged in a real work of recovery and reconstruction of the historical-artistic and monumental heritage. He also gave his contribution to the administration of Fine Arts as ruling General Director of the Ministry of Education throughout the governments of Badoglio and Bonomi. Moreover, on the inspections of the deposits of works of art in Tuscany and during the Mission for the recovery of works of art in Germany of 1946-1947, Castelfranco, thanks to his skills and experience gained in decades of professional activity, had the opportunity to work on looted-art identification and restitution
A conceptualisation of a governance model for biobanks in the digital society
Get PDFBiobanks are key infrastructures in data-driven biomedical research.
The counterpoint of this optimistic vision is the reality of biobank governance, which must address various ethical, legal and social issues, especially in terms of open consent, privacy and secondary uses which, if not sufficiently resolved, may undermine participants’ and society’s trust in biobanking. The effect of the digital paradigm on biomedical research has only accentuated these issues by adding new pressure for the data protection of biobank participants against the risks of covert discrimination, abuse of power against individuals and groups, and critical commercial uses. Moreover, the traditional research-ethics framework has been unable to keep pace with the transformative developments of the digital era, and has proven inadequate in protecting biobank participants and providing guidance for ethical practices. To this must be added the challenge of an increased tendency towards exploitation and the commercialisation of personal data in the field of biomedical research, which may undermine the altruistic and solidaristic values associated with biobank participation and risk losing alignment with societal interests in biobanking.
My research critically analyses, from a bioethical perspective, the challenges and the goals of biobank governance in data-driven biomedical research in order to understand the conditions for the implementation of a governance model that can foster biomedical research and innovation, while ensuring adequate protection for biobank participants and an alignment of biobank procedures and policies with society’s interests and expectations. The main outcome is a conceptualisation of a socially-oriented and participatory model of biobanks by proposing a new ethical framework that relies on the principles of transparency, data protection and participation to tackle the key challenges of biobanks in the digital age and that is well-suited to foster these goals