Reconfiguration of Distributed Information Fusion System ? A case study

Information Fusion Systems are now widely used in different fusion contexts, like scientific processing, sensor networks, video and image processing. One of the current trends in this area is to cope with distributed systems. In this context, we have defined and implemented a Dynamic Distributed Information Fusion System runtime model. It allows us to cope with dynamic execution supports while trying to maintain the functionalities of a given Dynamic Distributed Information Fusion System. The paper presents our system, the reconfiguration problems we are faced with and our solutions.Comment: 6 pages - Preprint versio

Numerical simulation of turbulent gas-particle flow in a riser using a quadrature-based moment method

Gas-particle flows are used in many industrial applications in the energy, oil and gas fields, such as coal gasification, production of light hydrocarbons by fluid catalytic cracking, catalytic combustion and different treatments aiming to reduce or eliminate pollutants. The particle phase of a gas-particle flow is described by analogy to a granular gas, by finding an approximate solution of the kinetic equation in the velocity-based number density function. In the recent past, many studies have been published on the mathematical modeling of gas-particle flows using hydrodynamic models (e.g. Enwald et al. 1996), where Navier-Stokes-type equations are solved to describe the particle phase as a continuum, computing its stress tensor using moment closures from kinetic theory (Gidaspow 1994). These closures, however, are obtained assuming that the flow is dominated by collisions and near equilibrium, which corresponds to considering a very small particle-phase Knudsen number. This assumption leads to inconsistencies and erroneous predictions of physical phenomena when these models are applied to dilute fluid-particle flows, where rarefaction effects are not negligible. In these flows, the wall Knudsen layers extend inside the bulk of the fluid, and cannot be accounted for with the simple addition of partial-slip boundary conditions. Recently Desjardin et al. (2008) showed that two-fluid models are unable to correctly capture particle trajectory crossing, seriously compromising their ability to correctly describe any velocity moment for finite Stokes numbers. These authors clarified that the particle segregation captured by two-fluid models for finite Knudsen numbers is artificially high due to their mathematical formulation, which leads to the formation of delta-shocks. In order to overcome these shortcomings, Fox (2008) developed a third-order quadrature-based moment method for dilute gas-particle flows, which has been successfully coupled to a fluid solver to compute dilute and moderately dilute gas-particle flows by Passalacqua et al. (2010) in two dimensions. These authors validated their model against Euler-Lagrange and two-fluid simulations. In this work, the fully coupled quadrature-based fluid-particle code described in Passalacqua et al. (2010) is applied to simulate turbulent gas-particle flow in the riser described by He et al. (2009), using a three-dimensional configuration. This application shows the predictive capabilities and the robustness of the quadrature-based moment method to predict the behavior of gas-particle flows in accordance with experiments (He et al. 2009)

Simulation of Mono- and Bidisperse Gas-Particle Flow in a Riser with a Third-Order Quadrature-Based Moment Method

Gas-particle flows can be described by a kinetic equation for the particle phase coupled with the Navier−Stokes equations for the fluid phase through a momentum exchange term. The direct solution of the kinetic equation is prohibitive for most applications due to the high dimensionality of the space of independent variables. A viable alternative is represented by moment methods, where moments of the velocity distribution function are transported in space and time. In this work, a fully coupled third-order, quadrature-based moment method is applied to the simulation of mono- and bidisperse gas-particle flows in the riser of a circulating fluidized bed. Gaussian quadrature formulas are used to model the unclosed terms in the moment transport equations. A Bhatnagar−Gross−Krook (BGK) collision model is used in the monodisperse case, while the full Boltzmann integral is adopted in the bidisperse case. The predicted values of mean local phase velocities, rms velocities, and particle volume fractions are compared with the Euler−Lagrange simulations and experimental data from the literature. The local values of the time-average Stokes, Mach, and Knudsen numbers predicted by the simulation are reported and analyzed to justify the adoption of high-order moment methods as opposed to models based on hydrodynamic closures

Il contratto di lavoro subordinato a tempo determinato e la somministrazione di lavoro alla prova del decreto dignità = The fixed-term subordinate employment contract and the administration of work to the test of the dignity decree. WP C.S.D.L.E. “Massimo D’Antona”.IT – 380/2018

This paper deals with the recent reform of fixed-term contracts and agency work introduced by Law Decree law n° 87/2018, converted into Law n° 96/2018. It analyses the contents and the main implications of this reform. The analysis is divided into two parts, In the first part the author examines the news concerning fixed-term contracts: conditions to use; maximum duration; extensions and renewals. There is also analyzed the role of collective bargaining. In the second part the paper examines the news concerning agency work, with particular reference to the rules on fixed-term contracts applicable in this context

A framework for structuring prerequisite relations between concepts in educational textbooks

In our age we are experiencing an increasing availability of digital educational resources and self-regulated learning. In this scenario, the development of automatic strategies for organizing the knowledge embodied in educational resources has a tremendous potential for building personalized learning paths and applications such as intelligent textbooks and recommender systems of learning materials. To this aim, a straightforward approach consists in enriching the educational materials with a concept graph, i.a. a knowledge structure where key concepts of the subject matter are represented as nodes and prerequisite dependencies among such concepts are also explicitly represented. This thesis focuses therefore on prerequisite relations in textbooks and it has two main research goals. The first goal is to define a methodology for systematically annotating prerequisite relations in textbooks, which is functional for analysing the prerequisite phenomenon and for evaluating and training automatic methods of extraction. The second goal concerns the automatic extraction of prerequisite relations from textbooks. These two research goals will guide towards the design of PRET, i.e. a comprehensive framework for supporting researchers involved in this research issue. The framework described in the present thesis allows indeed researchers to conduct the following tasks: 1) manual annotation of educational texts, in order to create datasets to be used for machine learning algorithms or for evaluation as gold standards; 2) annotation analysis, for investigating inter-annotator agreement, graph metrics and in-context linguistic features; 3) data visualization, for visually exploring datasets and gaining insights of the problem that may lead to improve algorithms; 4) automatic extraction of prerequisite relations. As for the automatic extraction, we developed a method that is based on burst analysis of concepts in the textbook and we used the gold dataset with PR annotation for its evaluation, comparing the method with other metrics for PR extraction

Un umanista del XX secolo.Paul Oskar Kristeller

L'articolo offre un ritratto di uno dei più importanti studiosi della scuola nel Rinascimento nel XX secolo: Paul Oskar Kristeller