Marine targets recognition through micro-motion estimation from SAR data

The capability to perform Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) from SAR images has great importance for both civilian and military applications. However, this task becomes challenging when the quality and quantity of target information is not sufficient to reliably discriminate the targets. This is particularly important when dealing with marine targets, where features such as scattering intensities and shapes are common to many different targets. This paper investigates the possibility to enhance classification capabilities of marine targets in SAR images by exploiting the micro-motion information. This characterizing source of information, is extracted by applying Doppler sub-apertures and pixel tracking on SAR images containing the target of interest. The proposed approach is validated on real COSMO-SkyMed SAR data demonstrating the effectiveness to discriminate ships through their unique Doppler fingerprint

The pattern of structural change: testing the product space framework

The set of available local “capabilities” determines what an economy produces today (its static comparative advantage) and, at the same time, defines the trajectories that the process of structural change may take in the future. The product space (PS) framework developed in recent seminal works by economists and physicists suggests that path-dependence characterizes the evolution of the production basket (Hausmann and Klinger, 2007, Harvard University Center for International Development Working Paper #146; Hidalgo et al., 2007, Science Magazine, 317(5837), 482–487). These authors represent economies as sets of productive capabilities that can be combined in different ways to produce different products. Countries progressively change their production baskets and move toward goods that require capabilities that are already available; on the contrary radical structural change rarely happens. In this article, we analyze the evolution over time of the production baskets in 107 Italian provinces (NUTS 3) and perform the first test on the PS hypothesis of path-dependence. We investigate whether new products entering the provincial production baskets are nonrandomly related to initial production baskets. We confirm the general tendency of path-dependence but highlight at the same time that a sizable share of “new products” are an exception to this general pattern. These “random entries” over the PS are particularly interesting for industrial policy, since they represent radical deviations from the initial comparative advantage. In the final part of the article, we investigate using parametric analysis the product and provincial characteristics that determine these deviations from the PS pattern

DIPG-27. Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) challenge: from gene expression profile to drug.

Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) accounts for 80% of pediatric brainstem tumors and about 10-20% of all central nervous system tumors in childhood. Despite the adoption of aggressive therapeutic approaches, DIPG remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality in childhood: prognosis is still poor with more than 90% of affected children dying within 18-24 months from the diagnosis.1 Decades of clinical attempts involving more than 200 trials evaluating different conventional cytotoxic drugs, targeted drugs and studies with radiation dose escalating and new radio sensitizing agents, have failed to improve the overall survival of children with DIPG. Since available drugs have proven no benefits hereto for DIPG, it is fundamental to gain insights into the gene expression profile of DIPG patients and speed up the discovery of novel therapeutics for this dismal malignancy. Only the compound ONC201 was discovered to reduce DIPG tumors size in DIPG H3K27M mutated and now is in phase III clinical trials. Given the complex molecular mechanisms underlying DIPG, it would be necessary to fully utilize gene expression profiles to build a fully knowledge of DIPG-related genes and pathways. Preliminarily, the gene expression profile of eight pediatric DIPG samples and two primary pontine tissue samples was downloaded and analyzed starting from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database2. The GEO data were used to evaluate the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the pediatric DIPG samples. Subsequently, Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and Reactome pathways of DEGs were enriched, integrated, and analyzed to find out genes and signaling pathways involved in the biological and clinic-pathological features of DIPG. More data are being to be added to our meta-analysis

The pattern of structural change: testing the product space framework

The set of available local “capabilities” determines what an economy produces today (its static comparative advantage) and, at the same time, defines the trajectories that the process of structural change may take in the future. The product space (PS) framework developed in recent seminal works by economists and physicists suggests that path-dependence characterizes the evolution of the production basket (Hausmann and Klinger, 2007, Harvard University Center for International Development Working Paper #146; Hidalgo et al., 2007, Science Magazine, 317(5837), 482–487). These authors represent economies as sets of productive capabilities that can be combined in different ways to produce different products. Countries progressively change their production baskets and move toward goods that require capabilities that are already available; on the contrary radical structural change rarely happens. In this article, we analyze the evolution over time of the production baskets in 107 Italian provinces (NUTS 3) and perform the first test on the PS hypothesis of path-dependence. We investigate whether new products entering the provincial production baskets are nonrandomly related to initial production baskets. We confirm the general tendency of path-dependence but highlight at the same time that a sizable share of “new products” are an exception to this general pattern. These “random entries” over the PS are particularly interesting for industrial policy, since they represent radical deviations from the initial comparative advantage. In the final part of the article, we investigate using parametric analysis the product and provincial characteristics that determine these deviations from the PS pattern