Graphical Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Patterns in Forage Quality

Due to the highly structured topography in Switzerland, crop growth conditions vary within short distances. Differences in altitude are one of the major causes for climatic variation resulting in significant spatio-temporal effects on forage quality in terms of nutrient content and feeding value, particularly in grassland dominated regions. It is one of the goals of the Swiss feed database to support queries that visualize and quantify the temporal and spatial influence on feed quality

A Multi-Source Harvesting System Applied to Sensor-Based Smart Garments for Monitoring Workers’ Bio-Physical Parameters in Harsh Environments

This paper describes the development and characterization of a smart garment for monitoring the environmental and biophysical parameters of the user wearing it; the wearable application is focused on the control to workers’ conditions in dangerous workplaces in order to prevent or reduce the consequences of accidents. The smart jacket includes flexible solar panels, thermoelectric generators and flexible piezoelectric harvesters to scavenge energy from the human body, thus ensuring the energy autonomy of the employed sensors and electronic boards. The hardware and firmware optimization allowed the correct interfacing of the heart rate and SpO2 sensor, accelerometers, temperature and electrochemical gas sensors with a modified Arduino Pro mini board. The latter stores and processes the sensor data and, in the event of abnormal parameters, sends an alarm to a cloud database, allowing company managers to check them via a web app. The characterization of the harvesting subsection has shown that ≈ 265 mW maximum power can be obtained in a real scenario, whereas the power consumption due to the acquisition, processing and BLE data transmission functions determined that a 10 mAh/day charge is required to ensure the device’s proper operation. By charging a 380 mAh Lipo battery in a few hours by means of the harvesting system, an energy autonomy of 23 days was obtained, in the absence of any further energy contribution

An overview of technologies and devices against COVID-19 pandemic diffusion: virus detection and monitoring solutions

none5siThe year 2020 will remain in the history for the diffusion of the COVID-19 virus, originating a pandemic on a world scale with over a million deaths. From the onset of the pandemic, the scientific community has made numerous efforts to design systems to detect the infected subjects in ever-faster times, allowing both to intervene on them, to avoid dangerous complications, and to contain the pandemic spreading. In this paper, we present an overview of different innovative technologies and devices fielded against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The various technologies applicable to the rapid and reliable detection of the COVID-19 virus have been explored. Specifically, several magnetic, electrochemical, and plasmonic biosensors have been proposed in the scientific literature, as an alternative to nucleic acid-based real-time reverse transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) (RT-qPCR) assays, overcoming the limitations featuring this typology of tests (the need for expensive instruments and reagents, as well as of specialized staff, and their reliability). Furthermore, we investigated the IoT solutions and devices, reported on the market and in the scientific literature, to contain the pandemic spreading, by avoiding the contagion, acquiring the parameters of suspected users, and monitoring them during the quarantine period.openR. de Fazio, A. Sponziello, D. Cafagna, R. Velazquez, P. Viscontide Fazio, R.; Sponziello, A.; Cafagna, D.; Velazquez, R.; Visconti, P

Critical sets of nonlinear Sturm-Liouville operators of Ambrosetti-Prodi type

The critical set C of the operator F:H^2_D([0,pi]) -> L^2([0,pi]) defined by F(u)=-u''+f(u) is studied. Here X:=H^2_D([0,pi]) stands for the set of functions that satisfy the Dirichlet boundary conditions and whose derivatives are in L^2([0,pi]). For generic nonlinearities f, C=\cup C_k decomposes into manifolds of codimension 1 in X. If f''0, the set C_j is shown to be non-empty if, and only if, -j^2 (the j-th eigenvalue of u -> u'') is in the range of f'. The critical components C_k are (topological) hyperplanes.Comment: 6 pages, no figure

VALSE: A Task-independent benchmark for Vision and Language models centered on linguistic phenomena

We propose VALSE (Vision And Language Structured Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed for testing general-purpose pretrained vision and language (V&L) models for their visio-linguistic grounding capabilities on specific linguistic phenomena. VALSE offers a suite of six tests covering various linguistic constructs. Solving these requires models to ground linguistic phenomena in the visual modality, allowing more fine-grained evaluations than hitherto possible. We build VALSE using methods that support the construction of valid foils, and report results from evaluating five widely-used V&L models. Our experiments suggest that current models have considerable difficulty addressing most phenomena. Hence, we expect VALSE to serve as an important benchmark to measure future progress of pretrained V&L models from a linguistic perspective, complementing the canonical task-centred V&L evaluations

VALSE: A Task-independent benchmark for Vision and Language models centered on linguistic phenomena

We propose VALSE (Vision And Language Structured Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed for testing general-purpose pretrained vision and language (V&L) models for their visio-linguistic grounding capabilities on specific linguistic phenomena. VALSE offers a suite of six tests covering various linguistic constructs. Solving these requires models to ground linguistic phenomena in the visual modality, allowing more fine-grained evaluations than hitherto possible. We build VALSE using methods that support the construction of valid foils, and report results from evaluating five widely-used V&L models. Our experiments suggest that current models have considerable difficulty addressing most phenomena. Hence, we expect VALSE to serve as an important benchmark to measure future progress of pretrained V&L models from a linguistic perspective, complementing the canonical task-centred V&L evaluations

Time dependence of the electron and positron components of the cosmic radiation measured by the PAMELA experiment between July 2006 and December 2015

Cosmic-ray electrons and positrons are a unique probe of the propagation of cosmic rays as well as of the nature and distribution of particle sources in our Galaxy. Recent measurements of these particles are challenging our basic understanding of the mechanisms of production, acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays. Particularly striking are the differences between the low energy results collected by the space-borne PAMELA and AMS-02 experiments and older measurements pointing to sign-charge dependence of the solar modulation of cosmic-ray spectra. The PAMELA experiment has been measuring the time variation of the positron and electron intensity at Earth from July 2006 to December 2015 covering the period for the minimum of solar cycle 23 (2006-2009) till the middle of the maximum of solar cycle 24, through the polarity reversal of the heliospheric magnetic field which took place between 2013 and 2014. The positron to electron ratio measured in this time period clearly shows a sign-charge dependence of the solar modulation introduced by particle drifts. These results provide the first clear and continuous observation of how drift effects on solar modulation have unfolded with time from solar minimum to solar maximum and their dependence on the particle rigidity and the cyclic polarity of the solar magnetic field.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

The Cosmic-Ray Proton and Helium Spectra measured with the CAPRICE98 balloon experiment

A new measurement of the primary cosmic-ray proton and helium fluxes from 3 to 350 GeV was carried out by the balloon-borne CAPRICE experiment in 1998. This experimental setup combines different detector techniques and has excellent particle discrimination capabilities allowing clear particle identification. Our experiment has the capability to determine accurately detector selection efficiencies and systematic errors associated with them. Furthermore, it can check for the first time the energy determined by the magnet spectrometer by using the Cherenkov angle measured by the RICH detector well above 20 GeV/n. The analysis of the primary proton and helium components is described here and the results are compared with other recent measurements using other magnet spectrometers. The observed energy spectra at the top of the atmosphere can be represented by (1.27+-0.09)x10^4 E^(-2.75+-0.02) particles (m^2 GeV sr s)^-1, where E is the kinetic energy, for protons between 20 and 350 GeV and (4.8+-0.8)x10^2 E^(-2.67+-0.06) particles (m^2 GeV nucleon^-1 sr s)^-1, where E is the kinetic energy per nucleon, for helium nuclei between 15 and 150 GeV nucleon^-1.Comment: To be published on Astroparticle Physics (44 pages, 13 figures, 5 tables