Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting from airflow in HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems

This study focuses on the design and wind tunnel testing of a high efficiency Energy Harvesting device, based on piezoelectric materials, with possible applications for the sustainability of smart buildings, structures and infrastructures. The development of the device was supported by ESA (the European Space Agency) under a program for the space technology transfer in the period 2014-2016. The EH device harvests the airflow inside Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, using a piezoelectric component and an appropriate customizable aerodynamic appendix or fin that takes advantage of specific airflow phenomena (vortex shedding and galloping), and can be implemented for optimizing the energy consumption inside buildings. Focus is given on several relevant aspects of wind tunnel testing: different configurations for the piezoelectric bender (rectangular, cylindrical and T-shaped) are tested and compared, and the effective energy harvesting potential of a working prototype device is assessed

OpenTED Browser: Insights into European Public Spendings

We present the OpenTED browser, a Web application allowing to interactively browse public spending data related to public procurements in the European Union. The application relies on Open Data recently published by the European Commission and the Publications Office of the European Union, from which we imported a curated dataset of 4.2 million contract award notices spanning the period 2006-2015. The application is designed to easily filter notices and visualise relationships between public contracting authorities and private contractors. The simple design allows for example to quickly find information about who the biggest suppliers of local governments are, and the nature of the contracted goods and services. We believe the tool, which we make Open Source, is a valuable source of information for journalists, NGOs, analysts and citizens for getting information on public procurement data, from large scale trends to local municipal developments.Comment: ECML, PKDD, SoGood workshop 201

Condición juvenil, religión y movilización política en el Norte de África

In this essay I try to show that the political and religious change happened in Egypt and in some Maghreb countries (Morocco, Tunisia) can be interpreted from a multiple modernities perspective. The central claim of this essay is that the political modernization in these countries doesn’t follow the secularization paradigm of the West relying on a separation of religion and state. In these North African countries the processes of political subjectivization show a strong connection to the transformation of religious identity and the development of arenas of religious discussion, both in pluralist that in fundamentalist point of view. I will show that the new condition of youth is an important factor in this change. Young people plays the main role/are key players in the re-Islamization of society, started in the 1980s. The strong connection between politics and religion emerged from the Arab Spring is not the result of a traditionalist and antimodern resistance but it’s due to a multiplicity of causes relying on the development of modern forms of life.En este artículo intento demostrar que el cambio político y religioso que se ha dado en Egipto y en algunos países del Magreb (Marruecos, Túnez) puede interpretarse bajo una perspectiva de modernidad múltiple. El tema central de este artículo es que la modernización política en estos países no sigue el paradigma de la secularización de Occidente basándose en la separación entre religión y Estado. En estos países del Norte de África, los procesos de subjetivización política muestran un enlace muy fuerte con la transformación de la identidad religiosa y el desarrollo de anfiteatros de discusión religiosa, tanto desde un punto de vista pluralista como fundamentalista. Voy a poner en evidencia que la nueva condición juvenil es un factor importante en este cambio. Los jóvenes juegan el papel principal y son los protagonistas de la reislamización de la sociedad, empezada en 1980. La relación muy fuerte entre política y religión aparecida gracias a la primavera árabe no es el resultado de una resistencia tradicionalista y antimoderna, sino que se debe a una multiplicidad de causas que dependen del desarrollo de formas de vida modernas

Feature selection in high-dimensional dataset using MapReduce

This paper describes a distributed MapReduce implementation of the minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance algorithm, a popular feature selection method in bioinformatics and network inference problems. The proposed approach handles both tall/narrow and wide/short datasets. We further provide an open source implementation based on Hadoop/Spark, and illustrate its scalability on datasets involving millions of observations or features

Why demand uncertainty curbs investment: Evidence froma a panel of Italian manufacturing firms

From a theoretical point of view, uncertainty over the demand for a firmÂ’s product may not have clear effects on investments, because of the influence of a number of factors, such as the production technology and the amount of competition in the product market.Until now, a deeper investigation of the interplay of different factors in the temporal dimension has not been possible because the empirical research has been based on cross-section analysis. This omission makes biased estimates of the investment-uncertainty relationship likely.The aim of this paper is to extend the findings of the empirical literature by using a panel of Italian firms over the period 1996-2004, covering a complete business cycle. The availability of a panel of survey data on companiesÂ’ investment plans, expected future sales and demand uncertainty allows us to account for unobservable individual firm differences, macroeconomic shocks and the temporal evolution of the investment-uncertainty relationship. A key finding of our paper concerns the role of the competition faced by Italian firms in 1996-2004. The gradual loss of market power experienced by Italian manufacturing firms along with the increasing flexibility of labour input may have weakened the negative effect of uncertainty on investment decisions. We show that, in repeated cross-section estimates, the omission of firm-specific effects together with the dynamic interplay described above, would have lead to misleading conclusions about the relevance of demand uncertainty in explaining investment decisions.planned investments, demand uncertainty, survey data, panel estimation.

Capital structure across Italian regions: the role of financial and economic differences

The objective of this article is to analyse how regional financial and economic differences influence the capital structure decisions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Specifically, this paper considers the regional financial and economic differences in four ways: the development of the financial sector in the region, bank market concentration, the financial cost of obtaining funds, and regional economic development. For this purpose, we used unbalanced panel data from 26,504 SMEs across the 20 Italian regions and over the period from 2004 to 2010. This work is completed with an analysis of a no-crisis (2004–2007) and a crisis period (2008–2010). The results show that the regional differences in the degree of financial sector development, banking concentration, and local economic situations have a significant impact on the leverage level of SMEs, while the cost of obtaining funds is only relevant during a period of economic stability. These results suggest that insights can be derived from data disaggregation at the regional level inside the same country. These regional divergences in the capital structure of SMEs could influence regional economic resilience