Guest Editorial Special Section on Advances in Automation and Optimization for Sustainable Transportation and Energy Systems

This special section of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) focuses on new models, methods, and technologies for energy efficiency and sustainability in transportation and energy systems. In this section, the focus is thus on articles considering sustainable transportation, such as electric vehicles (EVs), integrated with the smart grid requirements. As guest editors, we are very pleased to present the selected 12 papers, whose topics are specifically related to optimal planning of charging stations (CSs), sustainable transportation and mobility, EVs integration in smart grids, reliability, reduction of consumption, demand response and smart grid modeling, optimal scheduling, routing and charging of fleets of EVs, as well as smart parkin

Snap4City: A big data platform for smart cities

Since the idea of smart city has become a practice to be implemented, urban planners and policy makers have needed tools that would allow them to exploit the information potential of the amount of data that the city itself produced in order to understand and manage its growing complexity. This article, after examining the close relationship between good governance based on a data-driven approach and the economic and social development of a city, describes the Snap4City Open Source solution, a Big Data Smart City Platform, adopted in European cities and region (Antwerp, Florence, Pisa, Santiago, France, Belgium, Finland, Tuscany, Sardinia, Croatia, Greece, etc.). Snap4City is GDPR compliant and designed to support city planners, combining strong tools for data integration, analytics, forecasting and visualization with the possibility of set Living Labs to enhance the collaboration among operators. Four scenarios have been selected and described (a. Florence Smart City Control Room; b. Traffic Flow Reconstruction and Air Quality predictions in Firenze, Pisa, Livorno; c. Air Quality in Helsinki for the citizens; d. People flows in Antwerp). The main KPIs have been briefly exposed, in order to evaluate the Snap4city impact in Smart City planning

How Can the Microbiologist Help in Diagnosing Neonatal Sepsis?

Neonatal sepsis can be classified into two subtypes depending upon whether the onset of symptoms is before 72 hours of life (early-onset neonatal sepsis—EONS) or later (late-onset neonatal sepsis—LONS). These definitions have contributed greatly to diagnosis and treatment by identifying which microorganisms are likely to be responsible for sepsis during these periods and the expected outcomes of infection. This paper focuses on the tools that microbiologist can offer to diagnose and eventually prevent neonatal sepsis. Here, we discuss the advantages and limitation of the blood culture, the actual gold standard for sepsis diagnosis. In addition, we examine the utility of molecular techniques in the diagnosis and management of neonatal sepsis

Microbiological and epidemiological characterization of the oral cavity microbiota using cultural and molecular techniques.

La ricerca si è focalizzata su due degli aspetti di interesse odontoiatrico più diffusi: la carie dentaria e la parodontite cronica. Il problema della carie dentaria è stato studiato in una popolazione di 39 soggetti affetti da cardiopatia congenita in cui la scarsa igiene orale è fattore di rischio per problematiche di salute generale e soprattutto per lo sviluppo di endocardite infettiva. I dati osservati e confrontati con quelli di un omogeneo gruppo di controllo dimostrano che nella dentatura decidua questi bambini hanno più denti cariati, come dimostrato dalla significativa differenza dell'indice dmft. Nella dentatura permanente non si osservano differenze tra i due gruppi. La carica microbica totale rilevata nella saliva e la presenza di Streptococcus mutans non mostrano differenze tra i due gruppi. I problemi di parodontite cronica sono stati studiati in un gruppo di 352 soggetti italiani adulti in cui si è definita la prevalenza dei 6 più importanti patogeni parodontali e la possibile correlazione con parametri clinici (pus, sanguinamento al sondaggio - BOP, profondità di sondaggio della tasca parodontale – PPD). Tra le 6 specie batteriche ricercate, quello di più frequente riscontro è stato Fusobacterium nucleatum (95%), mentre quello con carica batterica più alta è stato Tannerella forsythia. La carica batterica di Porphyromonas gingivalis, Treponema denticola, Tannerella forsythia e Fusobacterium nucleatum ha mostrato una correlazione diretta con il BOP e la presenza di pus. Inoltre, si è riscontrato che la carica batterica di tutte le specie (tranne Aggregatibacterium actinomycetemcomitans) aumenta all'aumentare del PPD. Tra le variabili studiate, PPD rappresenta il più importante fattore di rischio per la presenza di parodontopatogeni, mentre BOP è un indicatore di rischio per la ricerca del complesso rosso.This research was focused on the two widespread dental problems: dental caries and chronic periodontitis. Caries problems were studied among 39 patients affected by congenital hearth disease (CHD) who are at high risk to deteriorate their general health status and develop infective endocarditis if they have poor oral hygiene. The results were compared with those of an homogeneous control group and showed that children with CHD have more decayed teeth and a significant higher dmft index for primary teeth. There were no differences in the caries experience in the two groups when comparing the permanent teeth. Saliva obtained and cultured from both groups showed no differences in the viable microbial load and Streptococcus mutans presence. These results agree with other published data and show that dental care in CHD subjects is not a priority. Chronic periodontitis was studied among 352 Italian adult patients whose subgingival samples were analyzed to detect the 6 most important periodontal pathogens. Correlation with clinical parameters (suppuration, bleeding on probing – BOP, pocket probing depth – PPD) was also analyzed. Among the 6 bacterial species, the most frequent was Fusobacterium nucleatum (95%), while the most abundant was Tannerella forsythia. Bacterial load for Porphyromonas gingivalis, Treponema denticola, Tannerella forsythia and Fusobacterium nucleatum showed a direct correlation with BOP and suppuration. Moreover, the bacterial load raised at probing pocket deepening for each studied bacteria (with the exception of Aggregatibacterium actinomycetemcomitans). Among the investigated variables, PPD resulted as the most relevant risk indicator for presence of periodontal pathogens and BOP appeared as a risk indicator for Red Complex detection

IPR Centered Institutional Service and Tools for Content and Metadata Management

Multimedia services of cultural institutions need to be supported by content, metadata and workflow management systems to efficiently manage huge amount of content items and metadata production. Online digital libraries and cultural heritage institutions, as well as portals of publishers need an integrated multimedia back office in order to aggregate content collection and provide them to national and international aggregators, with respect to Intellectual Property Rights, IPR. The aim of this paper is to formalize and discuss requirements, modeling, design and validation of an institutional aggregator for metadata and content, coping with IPR Models for conditional access and providing content towards Europeana, the European international aggregator. This paper presents the identification of the Content Aggregator requirements for content management and IPR, and thus the definition and realization of a corresponding distributed architecture and workflow solution satisfying them. The main contributions of this paper consist of the formalization of IPR Model that enable the shortening of the activities for the IPR resolution, and avoid the assignment of conflicting rights/permissions during IPR model formalization, and thus of licensing. The proposed solution, models and tools have been validated in the case of the ECLAP service and results are reported in the paper. ECLAP Content Aggregator has been established by the European Commission to serve Europeana for the thematic area of Performing Arts institutions. </jats:p

Snap4City Platform to Speed Up Policies

AbstractIn the development of smart cities, there is a great emphasis on setting up so-called Smart City Control Rooms, SCCR. This paper presents Snap4City as a big data smart city platform to support the city decision makers by means of SCCR dashboards and tools reporting in real time the status of several of a city's aspects. The solution has been adopted in European cities such as Antwerp, Florence, Lonato del Garda, Pisa, Santiago, etc., and it is capable of covering extended geographical areas around the cities themselves: Belgium, Finland, Tuscany, Sardinia, etc. In this paper, a major use case is analyzed describing the workflow followed, the methodologies adopted and the SCCR as the starting point to reproduce the same results in other smart cities, industries, research centers, etc. A Living Lab working modality is promoted and organized to enhance the collaboration among municipalities and public administration, stakeholders, research centers and the citizens themselves. The Snap4City platform has been realized respecting the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and it is capable of processing every day a multitude of periodic and real-time data coming from different providers and data sources. It is therefore able to semantically aggregate the data, in compliance with the Km4City multi-ontology and manage data: (i) having different access policies; and (ii) coming from traditional sources such as Open Data Portals, Web services, APIs and IoT/IoE networks. The aggregated data are the starting point for the services offered not only to the citizens but also to the public administrations and public-security service managers, enabling them to view a set of city dashboards ad hoc composed on their needs, for example, enabling them to modify and monitor public transportation strategies, offering the public services actually needed by citizens and tourists, monitor the air quality and traffic status to establish, if impose or not, traffic restrictions, etc. All the data and the new knowledge produced by the data analytics of the Snap4City platform can also be accessed, observing the permissions on each kind of data, thanks to the presence of an APIs complex system

TRAFAIR: Understanding Traffic Flow to Improve Air Quality

Environmental impacts of traffic are of major concern throughout many European metropolitan areas. Air pollution causes 400 000 deaths per year, making it first environmental cause of premature death in Europe. Among the main sources of air pollution in Europe, there are road traffic, domestic heating, and industrial combustion. The TRAFAIR project brings together 9 partners from two European countries (Italy and Spain) to develop innovative and sustainable services combining air quality, weather conditions, and traffic flows data to produce new information for the benefit of citizens and government decision-makers. The project is started in November 2018 and lasts two years. It is motivated by the huge amount of deaths caused by the air pollution. Nowadays, the situation is particularly critical in some member states of Europe. In February 2017, the European Commission warned five countries, among which Spain and Italy, of continued air pollution breaches. In this context, public administrations and citizens suffer from the lack of comprehensive and fast tools to estimate the level of pollution on an urban scale resulting from varying traffic flow conditions that would allow optimizing control strategies and increase air quality awareness. The goals of the project are twofold: monitoring urban air quality by using sensors in 6 European cities and making urban air quality predictions thanks to simulation models. The project is co-financed by the European Commission under the CEF TELECOM call on Open Data