Odisseo e la proprietà intellettuale: il percorso di una startup alla ricerca di tutela dei propri asset immateriali

L'innovazione e la creatività sono il lievito fondante delle startup. Spesso però la fretta di implementare l'idea che si suppone vincente, o i tempi strettissimi nello sviluppo del software, nella ricerca dell'ultima killer app, fanno passare in secondo piano l'imprescindibile esigenza di assicurare la corretta gestione (e attribuzione) dei diritti di proprietà intellettuale e industriale. Marchi, brevetti, diritto d'autore, know-how, accordi di confidenzialità e diritti connessi sono trascurati, con conseguenze a volte irrimediabili. Il seminario (a due voci) ripercorrerà il percorso di un'ideale startup, tappa per tappa, per fornire esempi operativi di buone pratiche, e evidenziare i principali errori da evitare.2014-03-31Auditorium dell'Open Campus Tiscali a Sa Illetta - CagliariDall'idea al mercato: ciclo di seminari su come realizzare un'ide

A Tipping Point for the Planarity of Small and Medium Sized Graphs

This paper presents an empirical study of the relationship between the density of small-medium sized random graphs and their planarity. It is well known that, when the number of vertices tends to infinite, there is a sharp transition between planarity and non-planarity for edge density d=0.5. However, this asymptotic property does not clarify what happens for graphs of reduced size. We show that an unexpectedly sharp transition is also exhibited by small and medium sized graphs. Also, we show that the same "tipping point" behavior can be observed for some restrictions or relaxations of planarity (we considered outerplanarity and near-planarity, respectively).Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2020

Assessing the Impact of Rutting Depth of Bituminous Airport Runway Pavements on Aircraft Landing Braking Distance during Intense Precipitation

A runway pavement during its useful life is subject to a series of deteriorations because of repeated load cycles and environmental conditions. One of the most common deteriorations is the formation of rutting (surface depression in the wheel path) on the runway surface. Rutting negatively affects aircraft performance during landings and will behave even worse during precipitation or with the existence of fluid contaminations on the surface. This paper aims to develop a model for calculating aircraft braking distance during landing on wet-pavement runways affected by rutting based on dynamic skid resistances generated by tire–fluid–pavement interactions. Intense precipitation, variable rutting depths for a 100 m length step, water film depths (e.g., 1 to 26 mm), and aircraft wheel loads (e.g., 10 to 140 kN) are considered as the boundary conditions of the developed model. The output is a model that can estimate aircraft braking distance as a function of rutting depth and can perform further assessment of the probability of the occurrence of landing overrun. After validating the model with existing methodologies and calibrating it according to the actual landing distance required for each type of aircraft, an Italian airport is simulated using a model with real data regarding the level of service of its pavement surface characteristics

Regimens to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis:past, present and future perspectives

Over the past few decades, treatment of multidrug-resistant (MDR)/ extensively drugresistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) has been challenging because of its prolonged duration (up to 2024 months), toxicity, costs and sub-optimal outcomes. After over 40 years of neglect, two new drugs (bedaquiline and delamanid) have been made available to manage difficult-to-treat MDR-/XDR-TB cases. World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines published in March 2019 endorsed the possibility of treating MDR-TB patients with a full oral regimen, following previous guidelines published in 2016 which launched a shorter regimen lasting 9-10 months.The objectives of this article are to review the main achievements in MDR-TB treatment through the description of the existing WHO strategies, to discuss the main ongoing trials and to shed light on potential future scenarios and revised definitions necessary to manage drug-resistant TB.</p

Abnormal temporal coupling of tactile perception and motor action in Parkinson's disease

Evidence shows altered somatosensory temporal discrimination threshold (STDT) in Parkinson's disease in comparison to normal subjects. In healthy subjects, movement execution modulates STDT values through mechanisms of sensory gating. We investigated whether STDT modulation during movement execution in patients with Parkinson's disease differs from that in healthy subjects. In 24 patients with Parkinson's disease and 20 healthy subjects, we tested STDT at baseline and during index finger abductions (at movement onset "0", 100, and 200 ms thereafter). We also recorded kinematic features of index finger abductions. Fifteen out of the 24 patients were also tested ON medication. In healthy subjects, STDT increased significantly at 0, 100, and 200 ms after movement onset, whereas in patients with Parkinson's disease in OFF therapy, it increased significantly at 0 and 100 ms but returned to baseline values at 200 ms. When patients were tested ON therapy, STDT during index finger abductions increased significantly, with a time course similar to that of healthy subjects. Differently from healthy subjects, in patients with Parkinson's disease, the mean velocity of the finger abductions decreased according to the time lapse between movement onset and the delivery of the paired electrical stimuli for testing somatosensory temporal discrimination. In conclusion, patients with Parkinson's disease show abnormalities in the temporal coupling between tactile information and motor outflow. Our study provides first evidence that altered temporal processing of sensory information play a role in the pathophysiology of motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease

Creativi per forza! Tutelare e promuovere le proprie opere nell'era della condivisione e della conoscenza

Nel corso dell'incontro i due relatori hanno risposto alle seguenti domande, utili per chi voglia usare la propria creatività per fare impresa: 1. Devo farmi conoscere: come posso usare il web e i social media per promuovermi e cercare di evitare che altri si approprino della mia creatività? 2. Devo andare ad una fiera di settore: quali azioni preliminari devo fare per tutelare la mia creatività e comunicare il suo valore? 3. Non ho molti soldi: quali costi devo sostenere per dotarmi di strumenti di tutela adeguati al mio scopo? 4. Voglio vendere online: quali aspetti devo considerare prima di aprire il mio negozio virtuale? 5. Come faccio a sapere se quello che ho creato non viola diritti di qualcun'altro? 6. È vero che basta che mi spedisco una raccomandata per dimostrare che sono io il titolare della mia opera? L'incontro si è arricchito della testimonianza di Stefano Carta Vasconcellos, diplomato IED, con un intervento dal titolo "cucinaLeggera: digital fabrication come concreto strumento di creatività".2014-11-10Istituto Europeo di Design (IED), Aula Magna - Viale Trento 39, CagliariDall'idea al mercato: ciclo di seminari su come realizzare un'ide

Challenging MDR-TB clinical problems - The case for a new Global TB Consilium supporting the compassionate use of new anti-TB drugs.

MDR-TB is a growing challenge worldwide, and an obstacle to TB elimination. It is apparent that TB is being replaced by small but growing number of resistant cases with an anticipated 2 million cases of MDR-TB within the next two decades. One of the potential causes of MDR-TB is iatrogenic and we risk losing our new drugs through inexperience and repetition of basic errors of adding single active drugs to failing regimens. Discussion of MDR-TB cases with senior colleagues is not only best practice; it is now embedded in the WHO and many national and local guidelines.TB Consilia act as gatekeepers to the new drugs, monitor guideline adherence and mandate active drug safety monitoring. TB Consilia are also excellent educational tools.TB Consilia are now recommended by funding bodies, the WHO and manufacturers of drugs available for compassionate use in the hope that these drugs will be protected and will continue to be useful in the future. This article briefly discusses Consilia, their origin and evolution and gives some examples of how they operate. Keywords: TB, MDR-TB, TB Consilium, Prevention, New TB drugs, Compassionate use, Alderott

Bedaquiline and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis: a systematic and critical analysis of the evidence

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Adversarial Attacks Against Uncertainty Quantification

Machine-learning models can be fooled by adversarial examples, i.e., carefully-crafted input perturbations that force models to output wrong predictions. While uncertainty quantification has been recently proposed to detect adversarial inputs, under the assumption that such attacks exhibit a higher prediction uncertainty than pristine data, it has been shown that adaptive attacks specifically aimed at reducing also the uncertainty estimate can easily bypass this defense mechanism. In this work, we focus on a different adversarial scenario in which the attacker is still interested in manipulating the uncertainty estimate, but regardless of the correctness of the prediction; in particular, the goal is to undermine the use of machine-learning models when their outputs are consumed by a downstream module or by a human operator. Following such direction, we: \textit{(i)} design a threat model for attacks targeting uncertainty quantification; \textit{(ii)} devise different attack strategies on conceptually different UQ techniques spanning for both classification and semantic segmentation problems; \textit{(iii)} conduct a first complete and extensive analysis to compare the differences between some of the most employed UQ approaches under attack. Our extensive experimental analysis shows that our attacks are more effective in manipulating uncertainty quantification measures than attacks aimed to also induce misclassifications