Google earth engine as multi-sensor open-source tool for supporting the preservation of archaeological areas: The case study of flood and fire mapping in metaponto, italy

In recent years, the impact of Climate change, anthropogenic and natural hazards (such as earthquakes, landslides, floods, tsunamis, fires) has dramatically increased and adversely affected modern and past human buildings including outstanding cultural properties and UNESCO heritage sites. Research about protection/monitoring of cultural heritage is crucial to preserve our cultural properties and (with them also) our history and identity. This paper is focused on the use of the open-source Google Earth Engine tool herein used to analyze flood and fire events which affected the area of Metaponto (southern Italy), near the homonymous Greek-Roman archaeological site. The use of the Google Earth Engine has allowed the supervised and unsupervised classification of areas affected by flooding (2013–2020) and fire (2017) in the past years, obtaining remarkable results and useful information for setting up strategies to mitigate damage and support the preservation of areas and landscape rich in cultural and natural heritage

Ten years of feasibility pump, and counting

The Feasibility Pump (fp) is probably the best-known primal heuristic for mixed-integer programming. The original work by Fischetti et al. (Math Program 104(1):91\u2013104, 2005), which introduced the heuristic for 0\u20131 mixed-integer linear programs, has been succeeded by more than twenty follow-up publications which improve the performance of the fp and extend it to other problem classes. Year 2015 was the tenth anniversary of the first fp publication. The present paper provides an overview of the diverse Feasibility Pump literature that has been presented over the last decade

Strengthening a regional green infrastructure through improved multifunctionality and connectedness: Policy suggestions from Sardinia, Italy

A wide body of research in the latest years has studied either green infrastructures as providers of multiple ecosystem services, especially at the urban level, or ecological corridors and the issue of connectivity between landscape patches in the face of growing fragmentation. However, not many studies have analyzed how the two concepts can be combined to ground evidence-based policy and planning recommendations. In this study, a methodological approach for such combination is proposed: after mapping a regional green infrastructure building upon the assessment of multiple ecosystem services, and a network of ecological corridors through resistance to movement of species, the two spatial layouts are combined so as to analyze correlations between the potential provision of ecosystem services and the resistance to movement. The methodology is applied in the case of the island of Sardinia, whose self-containment makes it possible to discard potential effects from surrounding areas, hence facilitating the implementation of the model. The outcomes of the regression model point out to three ecosystem services as the most important factors that should be targeted by appropriate spatial policies, if connectivity is to be increased: regulation of micro and local climate, forestry productivity, and cultural identity and heritage values

SmartFog: Training the Fog for the energy-saving analytics of Smart-Meter data

In this paper, we characterize the main building blocks and numerically verify the classification accuracy and energy performance of SmartFog, a distributed and virtualized networked Fog technological platform for the support for Stacked Denoising Auto-Encoder (SDAE)-based anomaly detection in data flows generated by Smart-Meters (SMs). In SmartFog, the various layers of an SDAE are pretrained at different Fog nodes, in order to distribute the overall computational efforts and, then, save energy. For this purpose, a new Adaptive Elitist Genetic Algorithm (AEGA) is “ad hoc” designed to find the optimized allocation of the SDAE layers to the Fog nodes. Interestingly, the proposed AEGA implements a (novel) mechanism that adaptively tunes the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the AEGA, in order to quickly escape the attraction basins of local minima of the underlying energy objective function and, then, speed up the convergence towards global minima. As a matter of fact, the main distinguishing feature of the resulting SmartFog paradigm is that it accomplishes the joint integration on a distributed Fog computing platform of the anomaly detection functionality and the minimization of the resulting energy consumption. The reported numerical tests support the effectiveness of the designed technological platform and point out that the attained performance improvements over some state-of-the-art competing solutions are around 5%, 68% and 30% in terms of detection accuracy, execution time and energy consumption, respectively

Nonlinear multiscale viscosity methods and time integration schemes for solving compressible Euler equations

Este trabalho apresenta duas formulações do método de elementos finitos, utilizando estabilização multiescala, para resolver o sistema de equações de Euler compressíveis bidimensionais em variáveis conservativas. O espaço submalha é definido através de funções polinomiais que se anulam na fronteira dos elementos, conhecidas como funções bolha, permitindo o uso de um complemento de Schur local para definir o problema das escalas resolvidas. Esse procedimento resulta em uma metodologia numérica que permite variações temporais das escalas não resolvidas. As formulações propostas neste trabalho são baseadas em resíduo e consideram viscosidade artificial agindo em todas as escalas de discretização. Na primeira formulação um operador não linear é adicionado sobre todas as escalas, já na segunda formulação diferentes operadores não lineares são incluídos sobre as escalas macro e micro. A eficiência das novas formulações são avaliadas através de estudos numéricos, comparando-as com outras formulações, tais como os métodos SUPG combinado com o operador de captura de choque YZBeta e CAU. Outra contribuição que este trabalho apresenta diz respeito ao avanço no tempo, uma vez que métodos baseados em densidade sofrem com efeitos indesejados em escoamento com baixa velocidade, o que inclui convergência lenta e perda de acurácia. Devido a esse fenômeno, a técnica de precondicionamento local é aplicada às equações no caso contínuo. Uma alternativa para resolver esta deficiência consiste em utilizar esquemas de avanço no tempo com propriedade de decaimento como L-estabilidade. Com esse intuito é proposto um esquema preditor-corretor baseado em Backward Differentiation Formulas (BDF) cuja predição é realizada através de extrapolação

Human Action Recognition and Monitoring in Ambient Assisted Living Environments

Population ageing is set to become one of the most significant challenges of the 21st century, with implications for almost all sectors of society. Especially in developed countries, governments should immediately implement policies and solutions to facilitate the needs of an increasingly older population. Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and in particular the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) offer a feasible response, allowing the creation of human-centric smart environments that are sensitive and responsive to the needs and behaviours of the user. In such a scenario, understand what a human being is doing, if and how he/she is interacting with specific objects, or whether abnormal situations are occurring is critical. This thesis is focused on two related research areas of AAL: the development of innovative vision-based techniques for human action recognition and the remote monitoring of users behaviour in smart environments. The former topic is addressed through different approaches based on data extracted from RGB-D sensors. A first algorithm exploiting skeleton joints orientations is proposed. This approach is extended through a multi-modal strategy that includes the RGB channel to define a number of temporal images, capable of describing the time evolution of actions. Finally, the concept of template co-updating concerning action recognition is introduced. Indeed, exploiting different data categories (e.g., skeleton and RGB information) improve the effectiveness of template updating through co-updating techniques. The action recognition algorithms have been evaluated on CAD-60 and CAD-120, achieving results comparable with the state-of-the-art. Moreover, due to the lack of datasets including skeleton joints orientations, a new benchmark named Office Activity Dataset has been internally acquired and released. Regarding the second topic addressed, the goal is to provide a detailed implementation strategy concerning a generic Internet of Things monitoring platform that could be used for checking users' behaviour in AmI/AAL contexts

Proceedings of the SUPTM 2022 conference

This book includes the proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Future Challenges in Sustainable Urban Planning & Territorial Management celebrated on January 17-19, 2022. Urban planning is an essential tool in our global society's journey towards sustainability. This tool is as important as the territorial management to execute the plans. Both, planning and management, must be efficient to achieve the goal of sustainability inside the general framework of Sustainable Development Goals of United Nations. It does not exist any B planet so, identify urban & territorial challenges in our territories such reaching sustainable mobility, diagnose natural hazards and control land resource consumption is mandatory for our XXI century generation. Planning land uses compatibles with the ecosystem services of territory and manage them by public-private cooperation systems is a greatly challenge for our global society. Human activities do not have very frequently among their objectives to maintain ecosystem services of territory. Therefore, this field of research must help to guarantee the maintenance of natural resources, also called Natural Capital, necessary for social and economic activities of our global society. This conference aims to be a space to share research works, ideas, experiences, projects, etc. in this field of knowledge. We want to put in value that planning and management are subjects that include technological and social matters and their own methodologies. Laws, rules and cultures of different countries around the world are or can be very diverse. But the planet is only one. Technologies are shared, methodologies to analyze territories are also communal to share experiences about the global goal of sustainability, so these events are a necessary way to build our joint future. We trust that the success of this first edition of the SUPTM conference (which has been attended by more than 200 researchers from the five continents) will be an opening step towards international collaboration and the dissemination of knowledge that is so important in this field of urban planning and territorial management

Transforming our World through Universal Design for Human Development

An environment, or any building product or service in it, should ideally be designed to meet the needs of all those who wish to use it. Universal Design is the design and composition of environments, products, and services so that they can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people, regardless of their age, size, ability or disability. It creates products, services and environments that meet people’s needs. In short, Universal Design is good design. This book presents the proceedings of UD2022, the 6th International Conference on Universal Design, held from 7 - 9 September 2022 in Brescia, Italy.The conference is targeted at professionals and academics interested in the theme of universal design as related to the built environment and the wellbeing of users, but also covers mobility and urban environments, knowledge, and information transfer, bringing together research knowledge and best practice from all over the world. The book contains 72 papers from 13 countries, grouped into 8 sections and covering topics including the design of inclusive natural environments and urban spaces, communities, neighborhoods and cities; housing; healthcare; mobility and transport systems; and universally- designed learning environments, work places, cultural and recreational spaces. One section is devoted to universal design and cultural heritage, which had a particular focus at this edition of the conference. The book reflects the professional and disciplinary diversity represented in the UD movement, and will be of interest to all those whose work involves inclusive design