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Automated Analysis and Synthesis for the Compliance of Privacy and Other Legal Provisions
No full textEnforcing legal compliance into software systems is a non-trivial task that requires an interdisciplinary approach. This thesis presents a new methodology for legal compliance checking against European legal provisions, namely the EU Data Protection Directive, the EU General Data Protection Regulation and the revised EU Payment Services Directive. We propose two types of compliance checking mechanisms that should be exploited at design-time or run-time. The former is based on security policy analysis of access control policies. The later is built on top of an approach to synthesizing run-time monitors for workflow-driven applications. Our contributions include a comprehensive methodology for legal compliance checking, the formalization of the regulations and the prototype tool of the implemented compliance methodology
'Domum servavit'. La responsabilità economica delle donne romane tra guerre civili e Principato. Economia e diritto per una storia di genere
Get PDFLa ricchezza femminile rappresentava una componente di assoluto rilievo nella vita delle città dell'Impero, come rivela in modo macroscopico l'evidenza epigrafica, opportunamente valorizzata anche dagli orientamenti più recenti della ricerca. Ma cosa accade se si volge lo sguardo alla dimensione privata della gestione e della trasmissione del patrimonio? È possibile individuare, quantomeno de facto, una responsabilità nell'amministrazione delle ricchezze da parte delle donne? In quali termini queste ultime potevano concorrere alla prosperità finanziaria delle loro famiglie? Prendendo le mosse da una rilettura degli epitaffi dedicati alle 'matronae', spesso commemorate proprio attraverso espliciti riferimenti alle loro qualità di amministratrici domestiche, il lavoro si propone di indagare la rilevanza del contributo femminile all'economia di una 'domus' aristocratica nel periodo compreso tra le guerre civili e il primo Principato.
Nella prima parte della ricerca (Capitolo Primo), sottoposta a riconsiderazione critica l'attendibilità dell'idea che il principale apporto economico muliebre fosse limitato alla lavorazione della lana, viene analizzata la centralità del ruolo matronale nella supervisione della 'domus', che nel quadro delle economie preindustriali rappresentava molto più di una struttura abitativa o di uno spazio funzionale all'autorappresentazione del proprietario, fungendo piuttosto anche da vero e proprio centro di produzione, conservazione e organizzazione dell'intero patrimonio.
Nella seconda parte della tesi, il contributo della matrona all'economia della 'domus' viene valutato sotto il profilo più strettamente finanziario, concentrando l'attenzione rispettivamente sulla dote (Capitolo Secondo), sui beni ereditari (Capitolo Terzo) e sui negotia (Capitolo Quarto).
Tra la tarda Repubblica e il primo Impero, infatti, il patrimonio di una 'domus' aristocratica poteva contare su due diversi apporti, rigorosamente distinti e ugualmente significativi: da un lato quello del 'paterfamilias', dall'altro quello della 'materfamilias', non solo, dunque, moglie e madre, ma anche domina, titolare di diritti patrimoniali e di capacità di agire.
Il lavoro evidenzia che assumere la 'domus' quale 'focus' dell'indagine costituisce una prospettiva tutt'altro che limitativa: dall'esame delle fonti, in effetti, traspare come la soggettività patrimoniale femminile non esaurisse la propria rilevanza in un'ottica esclusivamente privatistica, assurgendo invece, negli equilibri socio-politici di un ordinamento censitario quale quello romano, a elemento di rilevanza strategica, non a caso sovente oggetto d'attenzione anche da parte del potere imperiale
Too much of anything is bad for you, even information: how information can be detrimental to cooperation and coordination
Get PDFRepeated games of cooperation share the same equilibrium selection problem as coordination games. In both settings, providing information might help players coordinating on efficient equilibria. Which equilibrium is most likely to be selected strictly depends on the type and the amount of information provided. It is then natural to ask under which conditions providing more information increases efficiency.
The present thesis makes a step in answering this question. It analyzes how the presence of information regarding either the opponent, or the options that are available for choice, might change players' behavior.
It focuses on two settings where increasing information might be detrimental for players: a repeated Prisoner's dilemma, and a coordination game.
The first chapter develops a theoretical model in which players have limited information about the opponents' previous moves. When applied to the Trust Game, we show that by increasing the amount of information disclosed to the first player, more exploitative equilibria appear, in which that player obtains a smaller payoff. These equilibria disappear in settings in which the information the first player obtains about the second player's past behavior is limited. This is a case in which providing a player more information may reduce his payoff in equilibrium.
In the second chapter, we test this latter result with a laboratory experiment, and we show that subjects do understand that different behavior might be optimal in different settings. Subjects tend to use a fully cooperative strategy more often when only minimal information is available. Moreover, subjects trying to exploit the opponent succeeded in gaining more than the mutual cooperation payoff only when the information provided to the opponent is sufficiently rich, that is when our model predicts that exploitative outcomes are equilibria.
The last chapter considers the effects of introducing information about the options available for choice in a coordination game. It reports the results from a simulated crowdfunding experiment. We show that the presence of non payoff-relevant information is able to make a project focal. However, when returns from coordination are uncertain, the presence of information is instead detrimental for coordination
Operazioni con parti correlate e dinamiche intragruppo in prospettiva italiana ed europea
Get PDFLe operazioni con parti correlate – seppure molto frequenti, spesso necessarie e talvolta perfino vantaggiose per la società – sono considerate la manifestazione più tipica e significativa del conflitto di interesse nell’ambito del diritto societario, potendo determinare consistenti estrazioni di ricchezza dalla società a danno in particolare degli azionisti di minoranza. La necessità di assicurare un’adeguata tutela agli azionisti di minoranza è stata considerata fondamentale a livello europeo, al punto da introdurre una disciplina delle operazioni con parti correlate nella Direttiva 2017/828 (c.d. Shareholders Rights Directive II, SRD II). Il lavoro nasce allora dalla normativa europea di recente adozione, occupandosi della sua genesi, della sua ratio e del suo contenuto. L’obiettivo che ci si propone è quello di effettuare una prima analisi della SRD II e più segnatamente della disposizione dedicata alle operazioni con parti correlate, per poi procedere ad un approfondimento della regolamentazione interna che abbia come focus la prospettiva del recepimento della direttiva.
Una particolare attenzione è dedicata ai profili di corporate governance, valutando il ruolo che svolge ciascun organo societario in materia di operazioni con parti correlate. Segue lo studio di due aspetti reputati di fondamentale importanza: le operazioni realizzate nell’ambito dei gruppi societari; i meccanismi di enforcement previsti in caso di mancata adozione o applicazione delle procedure per le operazioni con parti correlate. Si indaga infine il fenomeno delle operazioni con parti correlate in riferimento alle società chiuse e alle s.r.l., valutando la possibilità di una sua (almeno parziale) contrattualizzazione con riferimento a tali tipi societari
Renormalization of Wick polynomials for Boson fields in locally covariant AQFT
Get PDFThe aim of this thesis is to study renormalization of Wick polynomials of quantum Boson fields in locally covariant algebraic quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Vector fields are described as sections of natural vector bundles over globally hyperbolic spacetimes and quantized in a locally covariant framework through the known functorial machinery in terms of local *-algebras. These quantized fields may be defined on spacetimes with given classical background fields, also sections of natural vector bundles: The most obvious one is the metric of the spacetime itself, but we encompass also the case of generic spacetime tensors as background fields. In our framework also physical quantities like the mass of the field or the coupling to the curvature are viewed as background fields. Wick powers of the quantized vector field are then axiomatically defined imposing in particular local covariance, scaling properties and smooth dependence on smooth perturbation of the background fields. A general classification theorem is established for finite renormalization terms (or counterterms) arising when comparing different solutions satisfying the defining axioms of Wick powers. The result is then specialized to the case of spacetime tensor fields. In particular, the case of a vector Klein-Gordon field and the case of a scalar field renormalized together with its derivatives are discussed as examples. In each case, a more precise statement about the structure of the counterterms is proved. The finite renormalization terms turn out to be finite-order polynomials tensorially and locally constructed with the backgrounds fields and their covariant derivatives whose coefficients are locally smooth functions of polynomial scalar invariants constructed from the so-called marginal subset of the background fields.
Our main technical tools are based on the Peetre-Slov\'ak theorem characterizing differential operators and on the classification of smooth invariants on representations of reductive Lie groups
Advanced methods for the analysis of multispectral multitemporal satellite images
No full textThanks to the revisit property of the Earth observation satellites, a huge amount of multitemporal (MT) images are now available in archives. Such kind of images allows us to monitor land surface changes in wide geographical areas according to both long term (e.g., yearly) and short term (e.g., daily) observations. Evolution on the acquisition sensor technology has resulted in the availability of MT and multispectral satellite images with: i) Very High spatial Resolution (VHR) (e.g., Quick-Bird, WorlView-2) and, ii) very high temporal and high spatial resolutions (e.g., Sentinel-2 (S2)). Images acquired by such sensors allow for a detailed geometrical and temporal analysis when compared to medium or high spatial and temporal resolution data. Nevertheless, factors like satel-lite revisit period, the possible competing orders of different users on the satellite pointing (for VHR images only), the limited life of a satellite mission, and weather conditions can lead to: i) lack of enough images acquired by a single sensor to perform MT analysis (VHR case), and ii) lack of regular and continuous Time Series (TS) to perform short term MT analysis (very high temporal and high spatial resolution sensors case) at the level of small objects. Both problems arise from the application requirements on temporal resolution and are being of particular interest in the last years. Two main solutions to the above mentioned problems can be considered: i) use of multisen-sor VHR optical images to replace the missing acquisitions when a single VHR sensor is considered and; ii) development of regression techniques to reconstruct regular and continuous TS from both high temporal and very high temporal resolution sensors. In the literature, most of the MT analysis techniques have been designed to work with: i) VHR images acquired by single sensors, and ii) multispectral images acquired by high spatial resolution sensors, but with low temporal resolution or very high temporal resolution, but with low spatial resolution. Therefore, the effectiveness of ex-isting techniques when applied to the complex MT problems in both VHR multisensor and very high temporal resolution images is reduced. Accordingly, the goal of this thesis is to develop novel tech-niques for the automatic analysis of MT multispectral satellite images such that images acquired by multisensor VHR and very high temporal resolution sensors can be analyzed.
The thesis provides four main novel contributions to the state-of-the-art. The first three contribu-tions address the problems arising from the analysis of multisensor VHR multispectral images, whereas the fourth one deals with the problems faced while working with long TS acquired by sen-sors with high spatial and very high temporal resolutions. The first contribution presents an ap-proach for unsupervised CD in multisensor MT VHR images, where the possible sources of noise/changes are studied in detail and a strategy to mitigate them at the levels of pre-processing and feature extraction is presented. In the second contribution, further attention is paid to the ho-mogenization step and a method to generate homogeneous VHR TS focused on the homogenization of intrinsic spectral induced differences is presented. The third contribution further focuses on the detection of multiple changes, while relaxing the knowledge on the statistical distribution of the classes. To this aim, a method based on iterative clustering and adaptive thresholding is imple-mented. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results, with real VHR multisen-sor datasets, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and led to the development of 3 contributions that allow to perform unsupervised bi-temporal CD by means of MT multisensor VHR images.
In the fourth contribution, an approach to handle images acquired by both high spatial and very high temporal resolution sensors is presented. To this aim, spectral, spatial and temporal infor-mation of S2 satellite images TS is exploited in different phases and in a fully automatic way, allow-ing for the derivation of different relevant products in the precision agriculture field. Comprehen-sive qualitative and, to some extent, quantitative experimental results confirm the capacity of the method to automatically exploit TS containing both high spatial and very high temporal resolution information. The proposed method can be easily extrapolated for other applications and other sen-sors with similar characteristics to those of S2
Generation, manipulation and detection of NIR and MIR entangled photon pairs
Get PDFThe PhD thesis work here presented was carried out within the SiQuro project at the Nanoscience laboratory of the University of Trento. The project started in September 2013 and lasted four years. It was funded by the Provincia Autonoma di Trento (PAT).
SiQuro’s goal was to bring the quantum world into integrated photonics by using the silicon platform and, therefore, permitting the integration of quantum photonics with electronics. The vision was to have low cost and mass manufacturable integrated quantum photonic circuits for a variety of different applications in quantum computing and secure communications. It must be said that SiQuro was a challenging and ambitious project, nevertheless important achievements in the quantum photonics arena were reached. My thesis is concentrated on the generation, manipulation and detection of quantum states of light. On one side, this was carried on in strained silicon waveguides, with the final goal to generate MIR entangled photon pairs via SPDC. Alongside, the generation and manipulation of correlated photon pair sources by means of spontaneous FWM in traditional silicon waveguides and microring resonators at telecom wavelength was also investigated. For the detection of MIR photon pairs, a suitable detection unit was developed as well. Moreover, even though the long-term goal of the project was the realization of a silicon quantum photonic circuit, I also implemented free-space quantum optical experiments. For this, I exploited a bulk nonlinear crystal, namely lithium niobate (LiNbO3), which has a well-known sizeable χ(2) nonlinearity
Calcium Phosphate Powders for Biomedical Applications: Synthesis, Thermal Behavior and Non-Conventional Sintering
Get PDFThe present work was focused on the synthesis of three different calcium phosphate powders with possible application as bioceramics, their chemical, structural and thermal characterization, and finally their consolidation into dense compounds by conventional and flash sintering techniques.
In the first part, Mg-doped (0 - 2 mol% Mg2+) tricalcium phosphate powders with micrometric size were produced by solid state reaction, and the influence of dopant on their sintering behavior and, specifically, on the β→α phase transition was studied. It was shown that magnesium stabilizes β-phase and ensures, after conventional sintering, much better densification and final mechanical properties. Moreover, annealing treatments on sintered compounds are suitable to convert the retained α- into β-TCP only in presence of Mg.
Un-doped β-TCP was additionally subjected to flash sintering, thus obtaining dense microstructure at temperatures lower than 1000°C in just 10 min and avoiding any phase transition. A specific physical model based on of thermal-balance equations was considered to investigate the flash sintering process in detail; it was possible to point out that thermal runaway is the main mechanisms that triggers the process, which could be described also in terms of electric behavior of the material, real sample temperature and flash onset. Moreover, the observed blackening effect and the development of an additional resistance contribution at the electrodes were taken into account and discussed.
In the second part of the work, Mg-doped (0 - 5 mol% Mg2+) tricalcium phosphate nanometric (~ 20 nm) powders were synthetized by chemical precipitation, thus obtaining highly-defected CDHA easily convertible into β-TCP at 750°C. Magnesium doping was found to inhibit the first crystallization and to promote β-TCP formation directly. The nanopowders were conventionally sintered to produce dense (~90%) β-TCP with sub-micrometric gran size.
Flash sintering was also carried out on the nanopowders, demonstrating that the flash event can occur only after CDHA→β-TCP reaction, since the precursor is too resistive for allowing the electrical current flow. A non-linear electrical behavior was found for the β-phase, associated with the grain growth. Flash sintering was also applied in isothermal mode, producing dense sub-micrometric β-TCP at 900°C in just few seconds. It was also possible to build two maps relating the processing parameters for flash sintering on the basis of thermal model and the material behavior.
Finally, hydroxyapatite nanopowders were synthesized by chemical precipitation with different amount of Sr2+ replacing Ca2+ into the apatite structure (0 - 100 mol%). The nanopowders were deeply characterized from a morphological, chemical and structural point of view (SEM, TEM, ICP, XRD, FT-IR, 31P-NMR, 1H-NMR, N2 sorption) finding a relation between the experimental evidences and the amount of Sr
Innovative Tiling Methodologies for the Synthesis of Phased Array Antennas for Advanced Radar and Communications Systems
Get PDFIn this work, the synthesis of clustered phased array antennas characterized by an irregular organization of tiles modules is addressed. By exploiting tiling theorems drawn from the mathematical theory, optimal and sub-optimal methods for the optimization of tiles arrangements and the corresponding excitations minimizing user-defined cost functions are presented. An enumerative approach able to retrieve the optimal clustering providing the maximum aperture coverage and the best radiation performance is proposed to deal with the synthesis of low/medium-size arrays. Based on the same optimal theorems and still exploiting the algorithmic procedures at the basis of the enumerative approach, an innovative schemata-bas ed optimization method is introduced for designing large arrays, as well. A set of numerical examples and full-wave simulations, concerned with different aperture sizes, is reported to assess the effectiveness, the limitations, and the ranges of computationally-admissible applicability of the proposed methods
Health and Fertility among Afghan Women of Reproductive Age
Get PDFChapter II:
No extant study addresses the persistent detrimental effect of in utero exposure to conflict in countries experiencing
protracted conflict. I therefore estimate the impact of in utero conflict exposure on weight-for-age z-score (WAZ) by
applying instrumental variable regression to information on Afghan children aged 0-59 months merged with data on
district-level fatalities during the intrauterine period. Although like previous research, I find an overall negative effect of violence on WAZ, the effect is stronger for children born in districts where long-term conflict is on average comparatively lower. I attribute these heterogeneous effects to the fact that households living in environments of constant conflict have developed more effective coping strategies. I support this result by showing that physical insecurity in districts in which opium poppy is cultivated, a coping strategy for rural farmers, has a comparatively smaller negative effect on household wealth because of the lower risk of eradication.
Chapter III:
Although Afghanistan experienced a slight rise in female literacy and some decline in female and infant mortality
between 2000 and 2015, these improvements were not great enough to explain the simultaneous dramatic drop in total
fertility, from 7.5 to 4.6. In this study, therefore, I test the previously unverified hypothesis that long-term conflict
has a negative causal impact on both fertility outcomes and fertility preferences. More specifically, by applying 2SRI
GLM Poisson regressions to cross-sectional data for a subsample of ever-married women of reproductive age (15-49)
combined with georeferenced information on district level conflict from 1979 to 2015, I estimate the causal impact on
fertility of conflict experienced since the time of first union. I find that although long-term conflict does indeed reduce the number of pregnancies and living children, when a woman’s ideal number of children desired over the lifetime is used as the dependent variable, conflict is a relatively small (albeit still statistically significant) determinant of fertility preferences. This finding implies that, given the only modest improvements in women’s health and development, the drop in Afghanistan’s total fertility rate would slow down if the conflict were to cease.
Chapter IV:
This study uses biomarker information from the 2013 National Nutrition Survey Afghanistan and satellite precipitation driven modeling results from the Global Flood Monitoring System to analyze how floods affect the probability of
anemia in Afghan women of reproductive age (15–49). In addition to establishing a causal relation between the two by exploiting the quasi-random variation of floods in different districts and periods, the analysis demonstrates that floods have a significant positive effect on the probability of anemia through two possible transmission mechanisms. The first is a significant effect on inflammation, probably related to water borne diseases carried by unsafe drinking water, and the
second is a significant negative effect on retinol concentrations. Because the effect of floods on anemia remains significant even after we control for anemia’s most common causes, we argue that the condition may also be affected by elevated levels of psychological stress