Tharu women at the crossroads of labor migration in Chitwan, Nepal

In an ethnically mixed village in the Chitwan district of Nepal, large numbers of young Tharu men are migrating for labor to the Arab Gulf countries and Malaysia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this essay examines the impact labor migration has on the lives of women who stay behind. I focus on two ways that local women participate in this process: first, by financing migration through microcredit loans and second, by managing the remittances they receive from abroad. I argue that, while women now play a significant role in helping finance migration, they are still subject to societal oversight when it comes to managing the remittance money, which creates new sources of conflict within families, and reinforces women’s desires to become more independent. Microcredit loans and remittances, as a social agreement and the material outcome of migration, are altering traditional gender roles, although it is still too early to determine their lasting effect

Matter-wave interferometry in the time-domain

In this thesis we present the last results obtained by OTIMA, one of the experiments of the Quantum Nanophysics group in Vienna and its name is an acronyms for Optical TIme-domain MAtter-wave interferometer. In particular we will propose and discuss a new method to estimate the Visibility and we will show the last interfere measurement with AgSF2, tailored nanoparticles that were specially designed to achieve interference with high mass.ope

Layer-wise compressive training for convolutional neural networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are brain-inspired computational models designed to recognize patterns. Recent advances demonstrate that CNNs are able to achieve, and often exceed, human capabilities in many application domains. Made of several millions of parameters, even the simplest CNN shows large model size. This characteristic is a serious concern for the deployment on resource-constrained embedded-systems, where compression stages are needed to meet the stringent hardware constraints. In this paper, we introduce a novel accuracy-driven compressive training algorithm. It consists of a two-stage flow: first, layers are sorted by means of heuristic rules according to their significance; second, a modified stochastic gradient descent optimization is applied on less significant layers such that their representation is collapsed into a constrained subspace. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves remarkable compression rates with low accuracy loss (<1%)

Realizzazione di un canale per QKD basato sul protocollo PBC00

L’obiettivo di questa tesi è la realizzazione di un sistema ottico per la condivisione di chiavi tramite il Protocollo PBC00. In questa tesi presenterò la caratterizzazione di una sorgente di fotoni Entangled basata sullo schema di Kim, Fiorentino e Wong e la progettazione dello schema ottico degli apparati di misura.ope

Dynamic ConvNets on Tiny Devices via Nested Sparsity

This work introduces a new training and compression pipeline to build nested sparse convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), a class of dynamic ConvNets suited for inference tasks deployed on resource-constrained devices at the edge of the Internet of Things. A nested sparse ConvNet consists of a single ConvNet architecture, containing N sparse subnetworks with nested weights subsets, like a Matryoshka doll, and can trade accuracy for latency at runtime, using the model sparsity as a dynamic knob. To attain high accuracy at training time, we propose a gradient masking technique that optimally routes the learning signals across the nested weight subsets. To minimize the storage footprint and efficiently process the obtained models at inference time, we introduce a new sparse matrix compression format with dedicated compute kernels that fruitfully exploit the characteristic of the nested weights subsets. Tested on image classification and object detection tasks on an off-the-shelf ARM-M7 microcontroller unit (MCU), nested sparse ConvNets outperform variable-latency solutions naively built assembling single sparse models trained as stand-alone instances, achieving 1) comparable accuracy; 2) remarkable storage savings; and 3) high performance. Moreover, when compared to state-of-the-art dynamic strategies, such as dynamic pruning and layer width scaling, nested sparse ConvNets turn out to be Pareto optimal in the accuracy versus latency space

When the Young Men Leave: Social Implications of Migration and Remittances among the Tharu of Chitwan, Nepal

In Pipariya, an ethnically mixed village in the Chitwan district of Nepal, young Tharu men are migrating for labor to the Arab Gulf countries and Malaysia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this project examines motivations to migrate as well as the impact of remittances on the stay-home population. I argue that migration is a strategy utilized by Tharu households to pursue upward social mobility in a multi-ethnic context. Remittances, as a social agreement and the material outcome of migration, increase the family’s income, enabling a reduction in social class differences and the redefinition of traditional women’s roles

Acute idiopathic pericarditis with transient constriction [4]

The etiology and the clinical pattern of acute pericarditis change frequently and some classic assumption and descriptions are outdated. We report on a case of transient constrictive pericarditis in a healthy young man