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Gaze data reveal adaptive mechanisms of strategy generation in judgment and decision making
Full text linkHuman beings must constantly adapt to an uncertain and mutable world by generating efficient behavioral strategies to pursue their goals. The complexity of this task increases in interactive contexts, where the outcomes of our actions depend also on the choices of other agents. When the environment does not provide reliable feedback, the effectiveness of behavioral strategies rests on the ability to handle available knowledge: agents have indeed to extract relevant information from noisy signals and build an exhaustive representation of the set of potential actions and outcomes available to themselves and to others. Individual differences in the implementation of these information- processing operations may underlie behavioral heterogeneity in several judgment and decision making tasks. Here we report three eye-tracking studies revealing the existence of distinct information-processing strategies in different individuals. Study 1 explores inter-individual differences in the generation of relational representations of interdependent contingencies. In Study 2 and Study 3, we move towards social contexts to investigate the mechanisms of strategy generation underlying strategic behavior in interaction. Our findings indicate that gaze data can disclose individual differences in the process of spontaneous strategy generation in both individual and interacting settings. We also report results suggesting that the emergence of unsophisticated information-processing strategies is associated with cognitive style. Moreover, we show that the attentional mechanisms sustaining the generation of unsophisticated strategies can be reconsidered and updated under the impact of endogenous and exogenous cues revealing the existence of alternative information-processing behaviors
Advanced Methods for Change Detection in LiDAR Data and Hyperspectral Images
Full text linkIn the last years Remote Sensing technology has significantly improved and new sensors capable of acquiring data with high spatial and spectral resolution have been developed. Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) and Hyperspectral (HS) sensors acquire data that accurately characterize the 3-D structure and the spectral signature of the area of interest, respectively. With the upcoming generation of small sensors designed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) and new spaceborne missions such data will be acquired more and more often increasing the availability of multitemporal datasets. This requires the development of methods capable of considering the time variable in the analysis of LiDAR point clouds and HS images. In this context, this thesis provides three main contributions related to: i) Change Detection (CD) in LiDAR data, ii) multiple CD in HS images and iii) fusion of bitemporal LiDAR point clouds.
The first novel contribution presents a method for the detection of 3-D changes at the individual tree level in conifer forests using bitemporal LiDAR data. Unlike most of the literature techniques, the method performs an object-based CD to estimate both the vertical and horizontal growth of the individual tree-crown working directly in the point cloud domain to fully exploit the information content of the LiDAR data. Multiple CD in HS images is addressed in the second contribution. Differently from most of the existing methods in the literature, we focus on the information content of each spectral channel to define a novel efficient representation of the change information. This representation is used to automatically discriminate between the different kinds of change. The third contribution presents two methods for the fusion of bitemporal LiDAR point clouds aimed at improving the modeling of the individual tree-crown. One is a compound approach used to improve the detection of tree-tops of conifers by reducing false detections and recovering missed detections. It exploits the temporal correlation between the two LiDAR point clouds by modeling the different probabilities of transition from one date to the other and using the Bayes rule for minimum error to perform the decision process. The other fusion method exploits the richer information content of high density point clouds to improve the parameters estimation of individual conifers in low density data. For each tree, it uses a 3-D model to reconstruct the shape of the crown using the parameters estimated on the high density data to drive the estimation on the low density point cloud.
The proposed methods have been tested on LiDAR point clouds and on simulated and real bitemporal HS datasets. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed automatic and unsupervised techniques, which show equal or better results compared to existing unsupervised and supervised techniques
Il dolo e la violenza del terzo: origini romanistiche di una diversità moderna
Full text linkNell'ambito della presente ricerca si intende dare conto dell'evoluzione millenaria di cui è stata oggetto la disciplina della violenza e del dolo del terzo, a cavaliere del diritto romano e del diritto civile, con l'intramezzo costituito dal pensiero della dottrina pandettistica tedesca che funge da collante tra il diritto antico e il diritto moderno. Il lavoro si articola quindi in tre Sezioni: la prima dedicata al diritto romano; la seconda alla Pandettistica e al suo influsso sul Codice civile tedesco; la terza al diritto civile vigente
Intersections of Algebraic Curves and their link to the weight enumerators of Algebraic-Geometric Codes
Full text linkChannel coding is the branch of Information Theory which studies the noise that can occur in data transmitted through a channel. Algebraic Coding Theory is the part of Channel Coding which studies the possibility to detect and correct errors using algebraic and geometric techniques. Nowadays, the best performing linear codes are known to be mostly algebraic geometry codes, also named Goppa codes, which arise from an algebraic curve over a finite field, by the pioneering construction due to V. D. Goppa. The best choices for curves on which Goppa's construction and its variants may provide codes with good parameters are those with many rational points, especially maximal curves attaining the Hasse-Weil upper bound for the number of rational points compared with the genus of the curve. Unfortunately, maximal curves are difficult to find. The best known examples of maximal curves are the Hermitian curve, the Ree curve, the Suzuki curve, the GK curve and the GGS curve.
In the present thesis, we construct and investigate algebraic geometry codes (shortly AG codes), their parameters and automorphism groups
Development and characterization of Silicon Photomultipliers for cryogenic applications
No full textThe R&D program reported in this thesis (develop of cryogenic setups, analysis software and characterizations) has delivered the NUV HD Cryo technology of Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) developed in FBK to the DS-20k experiment for the research of Dark Matter. NUV HD Cryo technology currently represents the best cryogenic SiPM performance and fully satisfies the experiment requirements. These developments are relevant also to nEXO experiment and have attracted the attention of other large experiments, such as DUNE, which require large active areas of SiPMs operated in cryogenic noble liquid
Promoting the Execution of Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights: The (Potential) Role of National Human Rights Institutions
Full text linkThe acknowledgment that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Committee of Ministers are flooded with repetitive cases has brought increasing attention to the issue of full and timely execution of the Court’s judgments. Efforts have been made to render the system of supervision of the execution more transparent, independent, and participatory. The involvement of actors other than the intergovernmental Committee of Ministers appears particularly significant. This dissertation focuses on specific entities that, while somewhat neglected in the literature, would seem to be ideally situated to promote the execution of ECtHR judgments – i.e., National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), which are commonly portrayed as “bridges” between the State and civil society, and between the national and international levels.
The dissertation provides a comprehensive examination of the current level of engagement by NHRIs with the Committee of Ministers for furthering the execution of ECtHR judgments. Participating NHRIs have generally provided detailed information on the state of legislation, administrative practice, and case-law in their respective countries, and they have proposed measures to prevent future human rights violations. Nonetheless, the findings show that a relatively low number of NHRIs have submitted communications to the Committee of Ministers to date and that the impact of these communications on the actions undertaken by States and the decisions adopted by the Committee of Ministers is often difficult to assess. The activities carried out by NHRIs at the domestic level to encourage the execution of ECtHR judgments are also systematically identified with a view to illustrating the multifarious ways in which NHRIs can contribute to the execution process.
On the basis of these findings, the dissertation highlights and accounts for the unfulfilled potential of NHRIs in promoting the execution of ECtHR judgments; it further puts forward proposals to strengthen the involvement of NHRIs in the process
An investigation on Integer Factorization applied to Public Key Cryptography
Full text linkPublic key cryptography allows two or more users to communicate in a secure way on an insecure channel, using two different keys: a public key, which has the function to encrypt the messages, and a private key, employed in the decryption of the ciphertext. Because of the importance of these keys,their generation is a sensible issue and it is often based on an underlying mathematical problem, which is considered hard to be solved. Among these difficult problems, the Integer Factorization Problem (IFP) is one of the most famous: given a composite integer number, recovering its factors is commonly believed to be hard (worst-case complexity). In this thesis, after a brief explaination of the developments on integer factorization and a description of the General Number Field Sieve (GNFS), we will present different strategies to face this well-known problem of Number Theory. First, we will employ elementary remarks on modular arithmetic to produce a formula that describes the remainders of a given integer, starting from just three monotonic remainders and we will link this result to the behaviour of a second-degree interpolating polynomial. Secondly, we will show an attempt to improve GNFS, considering two linearly disjoint quadratic fields and study the relation between first-degree prime ideals. Finally, we will characterize the elements used in GNFS through some systems having integer solutions, that can be found using Groebner Bases
Attorno al Maestro di Viboldone. Scultura gotica lombarda tra le province di Milano, Pavia, Como, Lecco e Monza
Full text linkIl presente lavoro è volto a indagare la figura dello scultore anonimo, attivo a Milano tra il quinto e il sesto decennio del XIV secolo, etichettato dalla critica come "Maestro di Viboldone", del quale si propone per la prima volta la compilazione di un catalogo ragionato. Per inquadrare meglio questo artista, operoso nell'età di Giovanni Visconti, la ricerca si è estesa sul territorio lombardo, con un'attenzione speciale verso le province di Milano, Pavia, Como, Lecco e Monza. Ne è derivata la compilazione di un catalogo topografico relativo alle sculture lapidee di epoca gotica presenti in questi territori e la messa a fuoco di diverse personalità artistiche
Generating and Validating Transition Path Ensembles of Protein Folding
Full text linkThis thesis proposes to provide a unified and systematic strategy to overcome the second timescale in protein folding, by exploiting qualities and drawbacks of the Bias Functional Method and proposing new theoretical approaches to overcome its limitations. The first half of the thesis is dedicated to the development of theoretical solutions to the dependence of the Bias Functional Method on an a-priori defined collective coordinate and microscopic non-reversibility of the dynamics. The second part of the manuscript is devoted to applications of the BF method on two different proteins: Canine milk lysozyme and alpha1-antitrypsin (A1AT)
Multidimensional Development and Inequality in China. The effects of the reforms after Deng Xiaoping
Full text linkThis thesis sheds light on the multidimensional development experienced by China in the last decades, investigating to which extent different regions and segments of the society have benefitted from this process. The thesis comprises three independent chapters, each of which addresses this issue from a different angle and with different methodologies. The purpose of the first chapter is to document and analyze the trend and distribution of income, education and nutrition of Chinese individuals between 1989 and 2011. These three dimensions are analyzed separately (dashboard approach) through similar techniques, to preserve the possibility to compare the results of different dimensions. The inequalities observed in the three variables are measured with the Gini index, and are associated to the policies of the government and other explanatory variables. Moreover, the first chapter investigates how each type of inequality is related to the inequality of opportunities, and how the different types of discrimination evolved over time. The discrimination of individuals based on their circumstances (inequality of opportunities) is measured over time with a regression-based decomposition of inequalities. Income, education and nutrition inequalities show different trends, leading to dimension-specific policy implications.
The purpose of the second chapter is to measure the Chinese poverty reduction in the multidimensional space and to individuate an informative index of multidimensional deprivation. Two alternative methodologies, the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and the Multidimensional Synthesis Indicator (MSI), are adopted and compared, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both indexes. Moreover, an original version of the MSI index is introduced, consistently with the idea of income as a mean, not an end, to achieve well-being. The multidimensional inequality amongst different groups of Chinese people is analyzed through these techniques, which are computed based on CHNS objective data, but result significantly correlated with subjective well-being too. The results, generally consistent with the previous MPI literature, contains also original findings about the intra-household identification of multidimensional deprivation. The purpose of the third chapter is to measure the multidimensional development and convergence of Chinese provinces with composite indexes. The introduction of several MSI indexes of development, based on ten economic and social indicators of development, allows to identify the development trajectory of all the 31 provinces of China between 1993 and 2016. The effectiveness of “harmonious society” policies is investigated in terms of achievements of synergies between social and economic achievements and in terms of convergence amongst provinces, according to the β- and σ-convergence methods. Both multidimensional development and convergence are characterized by generally positive results during the “harmonious society” period; however, inequalities across provinces remains, and interventions to recover the level and distribution of specific dimensions are needed.
The results of the three chapters are consistent in highlighting that Chinese reforms have different effects in terms of income and multidimensional well-being. Moreover, the thesis generally points to an improvement of Chinese conditions (despite multidimensional indexes grow more slowly than income) that has been achieved also thanks to the efforts of the central government in pursuing a more balanced and harmonious development strategy.
The thesis also indicates which dimensions and regions remain more fragile, providing a possible framework to design anti-poverty policy interventions. The diffusion of multidimensional indexes in future researches about Chinese development could allow to evaluate the trajectory of future reforms, preventing the repetition of unbalanced development strategies