Which Conflict? Understanding Conflicts inside the Board of Directors

The analysis of previous studies oncerning corporate governance shows that some variables related to board behavior have not been properly taken into account. The paper analyses board of directors in its decision-making process highlighting the importance that a clear identification of conflict could have on board effectiveness. It emerges that conflict could be distinguished in many typologies affecting board dynamics and decision-making process. The aim of the paper is to identify the mainstream and the other borderline approaches in the existent literature in order to: (i) mark some confusions in the definition or use of the concept of conflict; (ii) point-out its potential in the study of board effectiveness in a behavioural per-spective; (iii) underline the need for operationalizing the concept for a better understanding of its impact on board effectiveness and for a robust future empirical research.Conflict; Board of Directors; Decision-making Process; Board Effetiveness

Prospects for Gamma-Ray Bursts detection by the Cherenkov Telescope Array

The first Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) catalog presented by the Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) collaboration includes 28 GRBs, detected above 100 MeV over the first three years since the launch of the Fermi mission. However, more than 100 GRBs are expected to be found over a period of six years of data collection thanks to a new detection algorithm and to the development of a new LAT event reconstruction, the so-called "Pass 8." Our aim is to provide revised prospects for GRB alerts in the CTA era in light of these new LAT discoveries. We focus initially on the possibility of GRB detection with the Large Size Telescopes (LSTs). Moreover, we investigate the contribution of the Middle Size Telescopes (MSTs), which are crucial for the search of larger areas on short post trigger timescales. The study of different spectral components in the prompt and afterglow phase, and the limits on the Extragalactic background light are highlighted. Different strategies to repoint part of - or the entire array - are studied in detail.Comment: In Proceedings of the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2015), The Hague, The Netherland

Higher education and research programme on sustainable development in the Mediterranean region (PESME)

Peer Reviewe

Oncogenic microRNAs characterization in clear cell renal cell carcinoma

A key challenge for the improvement of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) management could derive from a deeper characterization of the biology of these neoplasms that could greatly improve the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment choice. The aim of this study was to identify specific miRNAs that are deregulated in tumor vs. normal kidney tissues and that could impact on the biology of ccRCC. To this end we selected four miRNAs (miR-21-5p, miR-210-3p, miR-185-5p and miR-221-3p) and their expression has been evaluated in a retrospective cohort of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues from 20 ccRCC patients who underwent surgical nephrectomy resection. miR-21-5p and miR-210-3p resulted the most significantly up-regulated miRNAs in this patient cohort, highlighting these onco-miRNAs as possible relevant players involved in ccRCC tumorigenesis. Thus, this study reports the identification of specific oncogenic miRNAs that are altered in ccRCC tissues and suggests that they might be useful biomarkers in ccRCC management

Management of Intra-abdominal Infections due to Carbapenemase-Producing Organisms.

The prevalence of bacterial resistance to carbapenem antibiotics continues to increase because of bacteria producing metallo-β-lactamases (MBL), called carbapenemase-producing organisms (CPO). Enterobacteriaceae, which can be a common cause of intra-abdominal infections (IAIs), have become carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE). Updated international guidelines for the treatment of both IAIs and IAIs due to CRE have been published. Given the multifaceted nature of these infections, these recommendations have been jointly reviewed and endorsed by the Surgical Society and the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease. The aims of this review are to summarize the general and new generation of multimodal procedure to manage IAIs due to CRE and review the data available on the combination of interventions to reduce CRE. Future research should focus on the development of novel and safe antimicrobial therapies and the quantification of the incremental effect of infection control programmes and new methods to rapidly detect pathogens before patients enter the surgical settin

Mobile Phones and Outdoor Advertising: Measurable Advertising

Television and newspapers sit at the top of many agency marketing plans, while outdoor advertising stays at the bottom. The reason for this is that it’s difficult to account for who views a billboard, so there is no way of consistently determining the effectiveness of outdoor advertising. As a result, agencies do not consider the medium and allocate their money elsewhere. To change this situation, one needs to create new credible audience measurements for the outdoor marketing industry. Here we propose a new way of performing audience measurements that combines mobile phone location estimations with information freely available on the Internet. We show that it is possible to estimate the number of people who drive or walk by a given area in Greater Boston from location estimations of a large fraction of mobile phone users in the region. We also infer the preferences for social events of the users by combing their location estimations with Internet listings of social events. This makes it possible to profile areas based on their residents’ interests and dynamically change displayed advertising based on those assessments.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Horizon project

Information in a network of neuronal cells: Effect of cell density and short-term depression

Neurons are specialized, electrically excitable cells which use electrical to chemical signals to transmit and elaborate information. Understanding how the cooperation of a great many of neurons in a grid may modify and perhaps improve the information quality, in contrast to few neurons in isolation, is critical for the rational design of cell-materials interfaces for applications in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and personalized lab-on-a-chips. In the present paper, we couple an integrate-and-fire model with information theory variables to analyse the extent of information in a network of nerve cells. We provide an estimate of the information in the network in bits as a function of cell density and short-term depression time. In the model, neurons are connected through a Delaunay triangulation of not-intersecting edges; in doing so, the number of connecting synapses per neuron is approximately constant to reproduce the early time of network development in planar neural cell cultures. In simulations where the number of nodes is varied, we observe an optimal value of cell density for which information in the grid is maximized. In simulations in which the posttransmission latency time is varied, we observe that information increases as the latency time decreases and, for specific configurations of the grid, it is largely enhanced in a resonance effect

FairPilot: An Explorative System for Hyperparameter Tuning through the Lens of Fairness

Despite the potential benefits of machine learning (ML) in high-risk decision-making domains, the deployment of ML is not accessible to practitioners, and there is a risk of discrimination. To establish trust and acceptance of ML in such domains, democratizing ML tools and fairness consideration are crucial. In this paper, we introduce FairPilot, an interactive system designed to promote the responsible development of ML models by exploring a combination of various models, different hyperparameters, and a wide range of fairness definitions. We emphasize the challenge of selecting the ``best" ML model and demonstrate how FairPilot allows users to select a set of evaluation criteria and then displays the Pareto frontier of models and hyperparameters as an interactive map. FairPilot is the first system to combine these features, offering a unique opportunity for users to responsibly choose their model

Optimal Sensor Placement in a Partitioned Water Distribution Network for the Water Protection from Contamination

Water network protection from accidental and intentional contamination is one of the most critical issues for preserving the citizen health. Recently, some techniques have been proposed in the literature to define the optimal sensor placement. On the other hand, through the definition of permanent DMAs (District Meter Areas), water network partitioning allows significant reduction in the number of exposed users through the full isolation of DMA. In this paper, the optimal sensor placement is coupled with water network partitioning in order to define the best location of isolation valves and control stations, to be closed and installed respectively. The proposed procedure is based on different procedures, and it was tested on a real water network, showing that it is possible both to mitigate the impact of a water contamination and simplify the sensor placement through the water network partitioning

FREEDOM: Validated Method for the Rapid Assessment of Incipient Multimodal Faults of Complex Aerospace Systems

Model-based Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) methods allow to infer the health status of complex aerospace systems through a large quantity of data acquired in-flight, and evaluations of numerical models of the equipment. This results in an intensive computational procedure that can be addressed only grounding the aircraft. We introduce an original methodology to sensitively accelerate FDI by reducing the computational demand to identify the health status of the aircraft. Our scheme FREEDOM – Fast REliability Estimate and incipient fault Detection Of Multiphysics aerospace systems – proposes an original combination of a novel two-step compression strategy to compute offline a synthesized representation of the dynamical response of the system, and uses an inverse Bayesian optimization approach to infer online the level of damage determined by multiple fault modes affecting the equipment. We demonstrate and validate FREEDOM against numerical and physical experiments for the case of an ElectroMechanical Actuator (EMA) employed for secondary flight controls. Particular attention is dedicated to simultaneous incipient mechanical and electrical faults considering different experimental settings. The outcomes validate our FDI strategy, which permits to achieve the accurate identification of complex damages outperforming the computational time of state of the art algorithms by two orders of magnitude