European Module for Crisis Management A Crisis Room on the field Design of a ready-to-deploy mobile module for Crisis Management

In the context of crisis management, new technologies are employed to enable the crisis managers exploiting better the flow of information. The presence of decision makers near the crisis locations helps the process of coordination, scaling from a tactical to a strategic level. Providing promptly a shelter and a proper place to arrange a coordination centre is a challenging task, which requires a solution agile, flexible and sustainable. In order to coordinate the efforts of different entities involved in the crisis management, the solution must also provide interoperability usually achieved by modularity. In this report this concept will be further described together with past and present implementations. On the basis of past experiences and using consolidated technologies, the report will then provide a design of a mobile crisis room to be implemented in 2016. At the end of the report new technologies will be introduced to evaluate their possible impact on future implementation of similar solutions.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Field Reporting Tool Experience in Digne with SDIS 04

This document will describe the use of the Field Reporting Tool platform during a demonstration of technologies applied to the crisis management held in Digne by SDIS 04 on June, 22nd 2017. The tool was applied to a search and rescue simulation and integrated with the other technologies demonstrated in Digne by SDIS 04.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

JRC Field Tracking Tool

The report describes the activities performed for the JRC Field Collection Tool. The programme uses 3 components: one for a PDA, one for a Notebook and a server in order to collect data on the field and display them immediately on a server. The Notebook section is used to prepare the mission.JRC.DG.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Tsunami Decision Support Systems. TDSS-2015. Outcomes of the 6th JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop

The 6th JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop on Tsunami Decision Support Systems was held in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, from 2ndto 3rd July 2015. The workshop, co-organized with DRIVER (Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience) Consortium Partners, brought together stakeholders in the design, development and use of ICT tools for decision support. 20 participants attended the event. A good mix of regional and national service providers was represented, along with European and non-European systems providers and users. The purpose of the workshop was to show the status of the technology in this field, the specific requirements and the benefits in the use of one or another solution. During the first day participants presented their tools, while during the second they had to carry out demonstration exercises on the basis of given scenarios. In the last part of the event, they were involved in a discussion which revolved around a set of questions focused on, inter alia, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities of each tool. The main aims of the discussion were to identify both new opportunities for collaboration and for tools integration and also to “bridge the gap” between the scientific and technical level and the operational dimension. The workshop was a very good opportunity for several research and operational teams to collaboratively discuss Decision Support Systems, lessons learned, ideas for improvements and opportunities for collaboration.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Interoperability of Mobile Devices for Crisis Management: Outcomes of the 1st JRC ECML Crisis Technology Workshop

The 1st JRC ECML Crisis Technology Workshop on Mobile Interoperability for International Field Deployment took place in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, from 12 to 13 March 2012. 37 participants attended the workshop. They were coming from: 11 EU countries and Norway, Brazil and US, 3 UN agencies, and 2 NGOs. The workshop's purpose was to measure the added value of mobile assessment technology for rapid situation assessment in international emergency operations. Seven mobile assessment systems were deployed among the participants and needed to provide, in an interoperable way, real-time data to a single electronic On-Site Operations Coordination Centre (eOSOCC). The performance of the systems was benchmarked against a traditional paper-based assessment that was conducted simultaneously (pOSOCC). In the workshop experiment both paper and electronic On-Site Operations Coordination Centres (OSOCCs) reached a similar situation awareness in the same time, but only the eOSOCC had products available as sharable electronic maps and documents. The final map with all incoming feeds in the eOSOCC was very cluttered and there was considerable information overload. Therefore sophisticated editing, filtering, and visualization functionalities have to be available for eOSOCC staff. Mobile technology is mature and can be deployed in an interoperable way. However, then the information of each system leaves the proprietary applications for processing and analyzing the data. The main impression from the eOSOCC team was that there is a lot of potential. Having access in real-time to field information was felt to be extremely useful. Still missing are tools and procedures for exploiting this benefit. Most important are tools to curate, filter, manipulate, edit, and delete assessment information of all teams. A dedicated eOSOCC software suite is needed that gives full control over the data to the eOSOCC staff.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Enhanced Expression of Human Endogenous Retroviruses, TRIM28 and SETDB1 in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) are relics of ancestral infections and represent 8% of the human genome. They are no longer infectious, but their activation has been associated with several disorders, including neuropsychiatric conditions. Enhanced expression of HERV-K and HERV-H envelope genes has been found in the blood of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) patients, but no information is available on syncytin 1 (SYN1), SYN2, and multiple sclerosis-associated retrovirus (MSRV), which are thought to be implicated in brain development and immune responses. HERV activation is regulated by TRIM28 and SETDB1, which are part of the epigenetic mechanisms that organize the chromatin architecture in response to external stimuli and are involved in neural cell differentiation and brain inflammation. We assessed, through a PCR realtime Taqman amplification assay, the transcription levels of pol genes of HERV-H, -K, and -W families, of env genes of SYN1, SYN2, and MSRV, as well as of TRIM28 and SETDB1 in the blood of 33 ASD children (28 males, median 3.8 years, 25–75% interquartile range 3.0–6.0 y) and healthy controls (HC). Significantly higher expressions of TRIM28 and SETDB1, as well as of all the HERV genes tested, except for HERV-W-pol, were found in ASD, as compared with HC. Positive correlations were observed between the mRNA levels of TRIM28 or SETDB1 and every HERV gene in ASD patients, but not in HC. Overexpression of TRIM28/SETDB1 and several HERVs in children with ASD and the positive correlations between their transcriptional levels suggest that these may be main players in pathogenetic mechanisms leading to ASD

A new push–pull dye for semi-transparent p-type dye-sensitized solar cells: tuning conjugation by sexithiophene chain engineering

We report on the synthesis of two new dyes to be employed as sensitizers in p-type dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). The design of the two new molecules under consideration has been inspired by the state-of-art dye PMI-6 T-TPA. In particular, a specific engineering of the thiophene-based central core is here considered to favour structural planarity between an oligothiophenic π-spacer (a sexithiophene), and the acceptor and donor units made by peryleneimide (PMI) and triphenylamine (TPA) moieties, respectively. This leads to a wide absorption in the NIR with stabilization of the HOMO energy level in the resulting dyes, as supported by TD-DFT simulations and spectroscopic characterization. When tested as sensitizers in NiOx-based p-type DSCs, A6D (with an Acceptor-π-Donor structure) outperforms both its counterpart with a Donor-π-Donor structure (D6D) and P1, a benchmark dye in the field of p-DSCs. With A6D dye-sensitizer the resulting DSC device presents the quite remarkable value of stabilized efficiency as high as 0.15 % when I-/I3- is employed as redox couple and nanostructured NiOx photocathode is thick less than 2 μm and does not contain any blocking layer. Notwithstanding the panchromatic feature of the sensitizer, A6D-based devices show an average visible transmittance (AVT) of 8 %. Such a result paves the way toward the application of these types of multifunctional dyes in semi-transparent solar cells

Roadmap on thermoelectricity

The increasing energy demand and the ever more pressing need for clean technologies of energy conversion pose one of the most urgent and complicated issues of our age. Thermoelectricity, namely the direct conversion of waste heat into electricity, is a promising technique based on a long-standing physical phenomenon, which still has not fully developed its potential, mainly due to the low efficiency of the process. In order to improve the thermoelectric performance, a huge effort is being made by physicists, materials scientists and engineers, with the primary aims of better understanding the fundamental issues ruling the improvement of the thermoelectric figure of merit, and finally building the most efficient thermoelectric devices. In this Roadmap an overview is given about the most recent experimental and computational results obtained within the Italian research community on the optimization of composition and morphology of some thermoelectric materials, as well as on the design of thermoelectric and hybrid thermoelectric/photovoltaic devices

Coastal Sea Level Monitoring in the Mediterranean and Black Seas

Spanning over a century, a traditional way to monitor sea level variability by tide gauges is – in combination with modern observational techniques like satellite altimetry – an inevitable ingredient in sea level studies over the climate scales and in coastal seas. The development of the instrumentation, remote data acquisition, processing and archiving in last decades allowed for extending the applications towards a variety of users and coastal hazard managers. The Mediterranean and Black50 seas are an example for such a transition – while having a long tradition for sea level observations with several records spanning over a century, the number of modern tide gauge stations are growing rapidly, with data available both in real-time and as a research product at different time resolutions. As no comprehensive survey of the tide gauge networks has been carried out recently in these basins, the aim of this paper is to map the existing coastal sea level monitoring infrastructures and the respective data availability. The survey encompasses description of major monitoring networks in the Mediterranean and Black55 seas and their characteristics, including the type of sea level sensors, measuring resolutions, data availability and existence of ancillary measurements, altogether collecting information about 236 presently operational tide gauge stations. The availability of the Mediterranean and Black seas sea level data in the global and European sea level repositories has been also screened and classified following their sampling interval and level of quality-check, pointing to the necessity of harmonization of the data available with different metadata and series at different repositories. Finally, an assessment of the networks’ capabilities60 for their usage in different sea level applications has been done, with recommendations that might mitigate the bottlenecks and assure further development of the networks in a coordinated way, being that more necessary in the era of the human-induced climate changes and the sea level ris