Precision agriculture to improve the monitoring and management of tomato insect pests

Human-based monitoring of arthropod pests of agricultural importance is usually a time-consuming and costly activity. The advent of technologies such as automatic traps opens new opportunities for remote monitoring. In this article, we present a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approach aimed to developing a smart trap for monitoring two major pests of greenhouse tomatoes, namely whiteflies, i.e., Bemisia tabaci and Trialeurodes vaporariorum (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae), and leaf miner flies, Liriomyza spp. (Diptera: Agromyzidae)

A deep learning-based pipeline for whitefly pest abundance estimation on chromotropic sticky traps

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is an essential approach used in smart agriculture to manage pest populations and sustainably optimize crop production. One of the cornerstones underlying IPM solutions is pest monitoring, a practice often performed by farm owners by using chromotropic sticky traps placed on insect hot spots to gauge pest population densities. In this paper, we propose a modular model-agnostic deep learning-based counting pipeline for estimating the number of insects present in pictures of chromotropic sticky traps, thus reducing the need for manual trap inspections and minimizing human effort. Additionally, our solution generates a set of raw positions of the counted insects and confidence scores expressing their reliability, allowing practitioners to filter out unreliable predictions. We train and assess our technique by exploiting PST - Pest Sticky Traps, a new collection of dot-annotated images we created on purpose and we publicly release, suitable for counting whiteflies. Experimental evaluation shows that our proposed counting strategy can be a valuable Artificial Intelligence-based tool to help farm owners to control pest outbreaks and prevent crop damages effectively. Specifically, our solution achieves an average counting error of approximately compared to human capabilities requiring a matter of seconds, a large improvement respecting the time-intensive process of manual human inspections, which often take hours or even days

Simulation models of an electric-driven smart window: energy and visual performances

 The ?in-situ? measurements acquired to characterize full-scale electric-driven glasses, able to dynamically switch from opaque to transparent state, were used to develop, calibrate and validate thermal and visual simulation models of these devices. The validated models were then used, in the simulation software TRNSYS, to assess the ability of these dynamic glasses to control the indoor conditions and reduce cooling load. The analysis was conducted for an office in a historical building, comparing the simulation results associated with the electric-driven glasses with those of the conventional double-glazing ones, from energy and visual points of view. Two different switching strategies were considered: i) Daylight strategy and ii) Thermal strategy. The use of electric-driven glasses allows from the thermal point of view to reduce about 12.5% of the cooling load, while from a visual point of view, to reach the highest values of Useful Daylight Illuminance, if controlled following the Daylight strategy.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Il MUVISS, MUseo VIrtuale di Scienze Spaziali, dell’IAPS - Report anni 2018-2019

Il progetto della costituzione di un MUseo VIrtuale di Scienze Spaziali (MUVISS) dell’INAF - Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali (IAPS) è nato nel 2018, con l’obiettivo di far vivere al pubblico l’esperienza della scienza e dell‘esplorazione spaziale grazie a tecnologie quali la realtà virtuale e aumentata, strumenti estremamente efficaci per la comunicazione, divulgazione e didattica dell’Astronomia e in particolare per l’esplorazione del Sistema Solare e dello spazio. Nel 2018/2019, il MUVISS è stato avviato con una prima dotazione hardware e software e la sperimentazione di alcuni progetti multimediali all’interno dei locali dell’IAPS, includendo anche progetti preesistenti come Pianeti in una stanza. I primi due anni di attività per il pubblico, raccontati in questo report, hanno incluso sia attività in sede che in manifestazioni esterne e hanno raggiunto un pubblico di circa 6000 persone. Come studio per la realizzazione del primo prototipo del MUVISS è stata anche pubblicata una tesi del Master in Scienza e Tecnologia Spaziali dell’Università di Roma Tor vergata, riportata come allegato a questo Report

Luciferase-free Luciferin Electrochemiluminescence

Luciferin is one of Nature's most widespread luminophores, and enzymes that catalyze luciferin luminescence are the basis of successful commercial “glow” assays for gene expression and metabolic ATP formation. Herein we report an electrochemical method to promote firefly's luciferin luminescence in the absence of its natural biocatalyst—luciferase. We have gained experimental and computational insights on the mechanism of the enzyme-free luciferin electrochemiluminescence, demonstrated its spectral tuning from green to red by means of electrolyte engineering, proven that the colour change does not require, as still debated, a keto/enol isomerization of the light emitter, and gained evidence of the electrostatic-assisted stabilization of the charge-transfer excited state by double layer electric fields. Luciferin's electrochemiluminescence, as well as the in situ generation of fluorescent oxyluciferin, are applied towards an optical measurement of diffusion coefficients