National scientific report on the TABULA activities in Italy

The Italian contribution to the TABULA research project is decribed. Ii was addressed to: - the development of the harmonised structure for the Italian typology and the supply of input data on buildings, constructions and systems (heating and DHW), which constitute the main data for the webtool; - the application of the typology concept for the assessment of the energy performance of residential buildings and for the evaluation of the impact of energy conservation measures, through the calculation of the energy performance of the building-types; - the use of the typology concept to create a model for the estimation of the national energy balance of the residential building stock by the support of national statistical dat

Modelling linguistic taxonomic dynamics

This paper presents the results of the application of a bit-string model of languages (Schulze and Stauffer 2005) to problems of taxonomic patterns. The questions addressed include the following: (1) Which parameters are minimally ne eded for the development of a taxonomic dynamics leading to the type of distribution of language family sizes currently attested (as measured in the i number of languages per family), which appears to be a power-law? (2) How may such a model be coupled with one of the dynamics of speaker populations leading to the type of language size seen today, which appears to follow a log-normal distribution?Comment: 18 pages including 9 figure

Optimal Resources for Topological 2D Stabilizer Codes: Comparative Study

We study the resources needed to construct topological 2D stabilizer codes as a way to estimate in part their efficiency and this leads us to perform a comparative study of surface codes and color codes. This study clarifies the similarities and differences between these two types of stabilizer codes. We compute the error correcting rate $C:=n/d^2$ for surface codes $C_s$ and color codes $C_c$ in several instances. On the torus, typical values are $C_s=2$ and $C_c=3/2$, but we find that the optimal values are $C_s=1$ and $C_c=9/8$. For planar codes, a typical value is $C_s=2$, while we find that the optimal values are $C_s=1$ and $C_c=3/4$. In general, a color code encodes twice as much logical qubits as a surface code does.Comment: revtex, 6 pages, 7 figure

Social Fingerprinting: detection of spambot groups through DNA-inspired behavioral modeling

Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a new wave of social spambots has emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go undetected even by current state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we show that efficient spambots detection can be achieved via an in-depth analysis of their collective behaviors exploiting the digital DNA technique for modeling the behaviors of social network users. Inspired by its biological counterpart, in the digital DNA representation the behavioral lifetime of a digital account is encoded in a sequence of characters. Then, we define a similarity measure for such digital DNA sequences. We build upon digital DNA and the similarity between groups of users to characterize both genuine accounts and spambots. Leveraging such characterization, we design the Social Fingerprinting technique, which is able to discriminate among spambots and genuine accounts in both a supervised and an unsupervised fashion. We finally evaluate the effectiveness of Social Fingerprinting and we compare it with three state-of-the-art detection algorithms. Among the peculiarities of our approach is the possibility to apply off-the-shelf DNA analysis techniques to study online users behaviors and to efficiently rely on a limited number of lightweight account characteristics

Completeness Results for Parameterized Space Classes

The parameterized complexity of a problem is considered "settled" once it has been shown to lie in FPT or to be complete for a class in the W-hierarchy or a similar parameterized hierarchy. Several natural parameterized problems have, however, resisted such a classification. At least in some cases, the reason is that upper and lower bounds for their parameterized space complexity have recently been obtained that rule out completeness results for parameterized time classes. In this paper, we make progress in this direction by proving that the associative generability problem and the longest common subsequence problem are complete for parameterized space classes. These classes are defined in terms of different forms of bounded nondeterminism and in terms of simultaneous time--space bounds. As a technical tool we introduce a "union operation" that translates between problems complete for classical complexity classes and for W-classes.Comment: IPEC 201

Lectures on Superstring and M Theory Dualities

These lectures begin by reviewing the evidence for S duality of the toroidally compactified heterotic string in 4d that was obtained in the period 1992--94. Next they review recently discovered dualities that relate all five of the 10d superstring theories and a quantum extension of 11d supergravity called M theory. The study of p-branes of various dimensions (some of which are D-branes) plays a central role. The final sections survey supersymmetric string vacua in 6d and some of the dual constructions by which they can be obtained. Special emphasis is given to a class of N=1 models that exhibit ``heterotic-heterotic duality.''Comment: 67 pages, latex, 1 figure; Lectures given at the ICTP Spring School (March 1996) and the TASI Summer School (June 1996), TASI9