A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to build the PNS upon the three mentioned pillars, beyond the limitations of their respective state-of-art. Social sensing is aimed at developing better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social ecosystem and make them available for mining, learning and analysis at a properly high abstraction level. Social mining is the problem of discovering patterns and models of human behaviour from the sensed data across the various social dimensions by data mining, machine learning and social network analysis. Trusted networks and privacy-aware social mining is aimed at creating a new deal around the questions of privacy and data ownership empowering individual persons with full awareness and control on own personal data, so that users may allow access and use of their data for their own good and the common good. The PNS will provide a goal-oriented knowledge discovery framework, made of technology and people, able to configure itself to the aim of answering questions about the pulse of global society. Given an analytical request, the PNS activates a process composed by a variety of interconnected tasks exploiting the social sensing and mining methods within the transparent ecosystem provided by the trusted network. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. We need such a tool for everyone to become fully aware of how powerful is the knowledge of our society we can achieve by leveraging our wisdom as a crowd, and how important is that everybody participates both as a consumer and as a producer of the social knowledge, for it to become a trustable, accessible, safe and useful public good. Graphical abstrac

Genetic structure of pike (Esox lucius) reveals a complex and previously unrecognized colonization history of Ireland

Aim: We investigated genetic variation of Irish pike populations and their relationship with European outgroups, in order to elucidate the origin of this species to the island, which is largely assumed to have occurred as a human-mediated introduction over the past few hundred years. We aimed thereby to provide new insights into population structure to improve fisheries and biodiversity management in Irish freshwaters. Location: Ireland, Britain and continental Europe. Methods: A total of 752 pike (Esox lucius) were sampled from 15 locations around Ireland, and 9 continental European sites, and genotyped at six polymorphic microsatellite loci. Patterns and mechanisms of population genetic structure were assessed through a diverse array of methods, including Bayesian clustering, hierarchical analysis of molecular variance, and approximate Bayesian computation. Results: Varying levels of genetic diversity and a high degree of population genetic differentiation were detected. Clear substructure within Ireland was identified, with two main groups being evident. One of the Irish populations showed high similarity with British populations. The other, more widespread, Irish strain did not group with any European population examined. Approximate Bayesian computation suggested that this widespread Irish strain is older, and may have colonized Ireland independently of humans. Main conclusions: Population genetic substructure in Irish pike is high and comparable to the levels observed elsewhere in Europe. A comparison of evolutionary scenarios upholds the possibility that pike may have colonized Ireland in two ‘waves’, the first of which, being independent of human colonization, would represent the first evidence for natural colonization of a non-anadromous 42 freshwater fish to the island of Ireland. Although further investigations using comprehensive genomic techniques will be necessary to confirm this, the present results warrant a reappraisal of current management strategies for this species

A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to build the PNS upon the three mentioned pillars, beyond the limitations of their respective state-of-art. Social sensing is aimed at developing better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social ecosystem and make them available for mining, learning and analysis at a properly high abstraction level. Social mining is the problem of discovering patterns and models of human behaviour from the sensed data across the various social dimensions by data mining, machine learning and social network analysis. Trusted networks and privacy-aware social mining is aimed at creating a new deal around the questions of privacy and data ownership empowering individual persons with full awareness and control on own personal data, so that users may allow access and use of their data for their own good and the common good. The PNS will provide a goal-oriented knowledge discovery framework, made of technology and people, able to configure itself to the aim of answering questions about the pulse of global society. Given an analytical request, the PNS activates a process composed by a variety of interconnected tasks exploiting the social sensing and mining methods within the transparent ecosystem provided by the trusted network. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. We need such a tool for everyone to become fully aware of how powerful is the knowledge of our society we can achieve by leveraging our wisdom as a crowd, and how important is that everybody participates both as a consumer and as a producer of the social knowledge, for it to become a trustable, accessible, safe and useful public good.Seventh Framework Programme (European Commission) (grant agreement No. 284709

Visually driven analysis of movement data by progressive clustering

The paper investigates the possibilities of using clustering techniques in visual exploration and analysis of large numbers of trajectories, that is, sequences of time-stamped locations of some moving entities. Trajectories are complex spatio-temporal constructs characterized by diverse non-trivial properties. To assess the degree of (dis)similarity between trajectories, specific methods (distance functions) are required. A single distance function accounting for all properties of trajectories, (1) is difficult to build, (2) would require much time to compute, and (3) might be difficult to understand and to use. We suggest the procedure of progressive clustering where a simple distance function with a clear meaning is applied on each step, which leads to easily interpretable outcomes. Successive application of several different functions enables sophisticated analyses through gradual refinement of earlier obtained results. Besides the advantages from the sense-making perspective, progressive clustering enables a rational work organization where time-consuming computations are applied to relatively small potentially interesting subsets obtained by means of ‘cheap’ distance functions producing quick results. We introduce the concept of progressive clustering by an example of analyzing a large real data set. We also review the existing clustering methods, describe the method OPTICS suitable for progressive clustering of trajectories, and briefly present several distance functions for trajectories

Design, status and perspective of the Mu2e crystal calorimeter

The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will search for the charged lepton flavor violating process of neutrino-less $\mu \to e$ coherent conversion in the field of an aluminum nucleus. Mu2e will reach a single event sensitivity of about $2.5\cdot 10^{-17}$ that corresponds to four orders of magnitude improvements with respect to the current best limit. The detector system consists of a straw tube tracker and a crystal calorimeter made of undoped CsI coupled with Silicon Photomultipliers. The calorimeter was designed to be operable in a harsh environment where about 10 krad/year will be delivered in the hottest region and work in presence of 1 T magnetic field. The calorimeter role is to perform $\mu$/e separation to suppress cosmic muons mimiking the signal, while providing a high level trigger and a seeding the track search in the tracker. In this paper we present the calorimeter design and the latest R$\&$D results.Comment: 4 pages, conference proceeding for a presentation held at TIPP'2017. To be published on Springer Proceedings in Physic

Quality Assurance on a custom SiPMs array for the Mu2e experiment

The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will search for the coherent $\mu \to e$ conversion on aluminum atoms. The detector system consists of a straw tube tracker and a crystal calorimeter. A pre-production of 150 Silicon Photomultiplier arrays for the Mu2e calorimeter has been procured. A detailed quality assur- ance has been carried out on each SiPM for the determination of its own operation voltage, gain, dark current and PDE. The measurement of the mean-time-to-failure for a small random sample of the pro-production group has been also completed as well as the determination of the dark current increase as a function of the ioninizing and non-ioninizing dose.Comment: 4 pages, 10 figures, conference proceeding for NSS-MIC 201

Prospects for K+→π+ννˉK^+ \to \pi^+ \nu \bar{ \nu } at CERN in NA62

The NA62 experiment will begin taking data in 2015. Its primary purpose is a 10% measurement of the branching ratio of the ultrarare kaon decay $K^+ \to \pi^+ \nu \bar{ \nu }$, using the decay in flight of kaons in an unseparated beam with momentum 75 GeV/c.The detector and analysis technique are described here.Comment: 8 pages for proceedings of 50 Years of CP