The urban sprawl dynamics: does a neural network understand the spatial logic better than a cellular automata?

Cellular Automata are usually considered the most efficient technology to understand the spatial logic of urban dynamics: they are inherently spatial, they are simple and computationally efficient and are able to represent a wide range of pattern and situations. Nevertheless the implementation of a CA requires the formulation of explicit spatial rules which represents the greatest limit of this approach. Whatever rich and complex the rules are, they don`t are able to capture satisfactorily the variety of the real processes. Recent developments in natural algorithms, and particularly in Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), allow to reverse the approach by learning the rules and the behaviours in urban land use dynamics directly from the Data Base, following a bottom-up process. The basic problem is to discover how and in to what extent the land use change of each cell i at time t+1 is determined by the neighbouring conditions (CA assumptions) or by other social, environmental, territorial features (i.e. political maps, planning rules) which where holding at the previous time t. Once the NN has learned the rules, it is able to predict the changes at time t+2 and following. In this paper we show and discuss the prediction capability of different architectures of supervised and unsupervised ANN. The Case study and Data Base concern the land use dynamics, between two temporal thresholds, in the South metropolitan area of Milan. The records have been randomly split in two sets which have been alternatively used in Training and in Testing phase in each ANN. The different ANNs performances have been evaluated with Statistical Functions. Finally, for the prediction, we have used the average of the prediction values of the 10 ANNs, and tested the results through the usual Statistical Functions.

Measurements with the ELI-NP cavity Beam Position Monitor Read-out Electronics at FLASH

The Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics Gamma Beam System (ELI-NP GBS) will be installed and commissioned starting within the next year in Magurele, Romania. It will generate gamma beam through Compton back-scattering of a recirculated laser and a multi-bunch electron beam, produced by a 720 MeV LINAC. In order to obtain bunch by bunch position measurements, four cavity beam position monitors (cBPM) near the two interaction points are foreseen. Extensive tests on the cBPM readout electronics, recently developed by Instrumentation Technologies and acquired for ELI-NP GBS, were performed in laboratory at INFN-LNF and at FLASH in DESY, during the user operation. In the latter case, three cBPMs installed along the LINAC, with similar features as the ones of ELI-NP GBS, were used as measuring devices and signal sources for the read-out electronics under test. We present here the measurements collected and the related analysis, with a particular focus on the beam position measurement resolution

Spot size measurements in the Eli-NP compton gamma source

A high brightness electron Linac is being built in the Compton Gamma Source at the ELI Nuclear Physics facility in Romania. To achieve the design luminosity, a train of 32 bunches with a nominal charge of 250 pC and 16 ns spacing , will collide with the laser beam in the interaction point. Electron beam spot size is measured with an OTR (optical transition radiation) profile moni-tors. In order to measure the beam properties, the optical radiation detecting system must have the necessary accu-racy and resolution. This paper deals with the studies of different optic configurations to achieve the magnifica-tion, resolution and accuracy desired considering design and technological constraints; we will compare several configurations of the optical detection line to justify the one chosen for the implementation in the Lina

The urban sprawl dynamics: does a neural network understand the spatial logic better than a cellular automata?

Cellular Automata are usually considered the most efficient technology to understand the spatial logic of urban dynamics: they are inherently spatial, they are simple and computationally efficient and are able to represent a wide range of pattern and situations. Nevertheless the implementation of a CA requires the formulation of explicit spatial rules which represents the greatest limit of this approach. Whatever rich and complex the rules are, they don`t are able to capture satisfactorily the variety of the real processes. Recent developments in natural algorithms, and particularly in Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), allow to reverse the approach by learning the rules and the behaviours in urban land use dynamics directly from the Data Base, following a bottom-up process. The basic problem is to discover how and in to what extent the land use change of each cell i at time t+1 is determined by the neighbouring conditions (CA assumptions) or by other social, environmental, territorial features (i.e. political maps, planning rules) which where holding at the previous time t. Once the NN has learned the rules, it is able to predict the changes at time t+2 and following. In this paper we show and discuss the prediction capability of different architectures of supervised and unsupervised ANN. The Case study and Data Base concern the land use dynamics, between two temporal thresholds, in the South metropolitan area of Milan. The records have been randomly split in two sets which have been alternatively used in Training and in Testing phase in each ANN. The different ANNs performances have been evaluated with Statistical Functions. Finally, for the prediction, we have used the average of the prediction values of the 10 ANNs, and tested the results through the usual Statistical Functions

Optical issues for the diagnostic stations for the ELI-NP compton gamma source

A high brightness electron Linac is being built in the Compton Gamma Source at the ELI Nuclear Physics facility in Romania. To achieve the design luminosity, a train of 32 bunches, 16 ns spaced, with a nominal charge of 250 pC will collide with the laser beam in the interaction point. Electron beam spot size is measured with optical transition radiation (OTR) profile monitors. In order to measure the beam properties, the optical radiation detecting system must have the necessary accuracy and resolution. This paper deals with the studies of different optic configurations to achieve the magnification, resolution and accuracy in order to measure very small beam (below 30 μm) or to study the angular distribution of the OTR and therefore the energy of the beam. Several configurations of the optical detection line will be studied both with simulation tools (e.g. Zemax) and experimentally. The paper will deal also with the sensibility of optic system (in terms of depth of field, magnification and resolution) to systematic error

Radiative decay of rho^0 and phi mesons in a chiral unitary approach

We study the rho^0 and phi decays into pi^+ pi^- gamma, pi^0 pi^0 gamma and phi into pi^0 eta gamma using a chiral unitary approach to deal with the final state interaction of the M M system. The final state interaction modifies only moderately the large momenta tail of the photon spectrum of the rho^0 --> pi^+ pi^- gamma decay. In the case of phi decay the contribution to pi^+ pi^- gamma and pi^0 pi^0 gamma decay proceeds via kaonic loops and gives a distribution of pi pi invariant masses in which the f_0(980) resonance shows up with a very distinct peak. The spectrum found for phi --> pi^0 pi^0 gamma decay agrees with the recent experimental results obtained at Novosibirsk. The branching ratio for phi --> pi^0 eta gamma, dominated by the a_0(980), is also in agreement with recent Novosibirsk results.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. Revised version using an antisymmetric tensor notation for the vector mesons. To appear in Physics Letters

Mining and Analysing One Billion Requests to Linguistic Services

From 2004 to 2016 the Leipzig Linguistic Services (LLS) existed as a SOAP-based cyber infrastructure of atomic micro-services for the Wortschatz project, which covered different-sized textual corpora in more than 230 languages. The LLS were developed in 2004 and went live in 2005 in order to provide a Web service-based API to these corpus databases. In 2006, the LLS infrastructure began to systematically log and store requests made to the text collection, and in August 2016 the LLS were shut down. This article summarises the experience of the past ten years of running such a cyberinfrastructure with a total of nearly one billion requests. It includes an explanation of the technical decisions and limitations but also provides an overview of how the services were used

Sequential vector and axial-vector meson exchange and chiral loops in radiative phi decay

We study the radiative $\phi$ decay into $\pi^0 \pi^0 \gamma$ and $\pi^0 \eta \gamma$ taking into account mechanisms in which there are two sequential vector-vector-pseudoscalar or axial-vector--vector--pseudoscalar steps followed by the coupling of a vector meson to the photon, considering the final state interaction of the two mesons. There are other mechanisms in which two kaons are produced through the same sequential mechanisms or from $\phi$ decay into two kaons and then undergo final state interaction leading to the final pair of pions or $\pi^0 \eta$, this latter mechanism being the leading one. The results of the parameter free theory, together with the theoretical uncertainties, are compared with the latest experimental results of KLOE at Frascati.Comment: 28 pages, 20 figure