Constitutional Development Without Constitutional Amendments. The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

openThe Western Balkan has always been a borderland between East and West and represented, for the 21st century, the scene of important geopolitical changes. Within the region, present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina can be observed as a place of great complexity: just think of the religious mix that has solidified over hundreds of years or the role that the murder of Archduke Francesco Ferdinando played in Sarajevo to understand the role more central than ever in the country in defining today's Europe. Outskirts and capital at the same time, Sarajevo represented a fruitful experiment in multiculturalism and inter-religiousness until the beginning of the Nineties, when, following the dissolution of Tito’s Yugoslavia, conflicts of independence broke out. Episodes, those of the war, which appear to be indissoluble from the current situation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on all fronts. The Peace Agreements for Bosnia and Herzegovina signed in Dayton and the subsequent actions of reconstruction of the state are at the centre of this work that moves its steps starting from key questions such as: What years of conflict have produced in Bosnian society? How have national and international actors moved to ensure peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina? What were and still are the main effects of the Daytonian system? Why do many believe that the Dayton Peace Agreement represent an element of instability in the framework of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina? Through the study of the parties in conflict and of the different motivations, in order to explain the desire to create an ethnically divided state, we will come to observe how Bosnia and Herzegovina presents itself today using different angles. The paradoxes contained in the Dayton Agreement; its top-bottom application without a real process of citizen involvement; and the prospects for improvement through the involvement of civil society are the three main fields of analysis used for this work. The objective, here, will be to observe the peace created by Dayton and the socio-political ecosystem created by it after the thirty anniversary of the signing of the 8 pax daytoniana. It will shed light on the limits created by it as regards a possible peaceful coexistence between the Croatian, Bosniaks and Serbian communities, focusing the observation on the important role that the citizens themselves could play in Bosnia and Herzegovina for the real overcoming of the sectarian division between ethnic groups. The constitutional ban imposed on those who belong to the "Others" category to access the highest political arenas of the country represented a crucial node in Bosnia in recent years and in its delicate relationship with the European institutions

Forest ecotone survey by line intersect sampling

Given their ecological relevance, the survey of ecotones is of considerable interest in forest multiresource inventory. To this end, it is useful to set up survey procedures to provide efficient and reliable information about the length of such elements within the landscape mosaic. This note demonstrates a procedure based upon line intersect sampling on remotely sensed imagery. The estimate of ecotone length per unit area is obtained by visual interpretation of the changes from forest to other land use classes along each sampling line. The experimentation carried out in two test areas within forest landscapes of central Italy proves the operative soundness of the proposed procedure, which is more efficient than the classical approach by forest polygon delineation and perimeter mensuration in a GIS environment. Under the examined conditions, samples based on a moderately high number of lines characterized by relatively long length prove to be more efficient than those based on shorter survey units.L'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore www.nrcresearchpress.co

General purpose readout board {\pi} LUP: overview and results

This work gives an overview of the PCI-Express board $\pi$LUP, focusing on the motivation that led to its development, the technological choices adopted and its performance. The $\pi$LUP card was designed by INFN and University of Bologna as a readout interface candidate to be used after the Phase-II upgrade of the Pixel Detector of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at LHC. The same team in Bologna is also responsible for the design and commissioning of the ReadOut Driver (ROD) board - currently implemented in all the four layers of the ATLAS Pixel Detector (Insertable B-Layer, B-Layer, Layer-1 and Layer-2) - and acquired in the past years expertise on the ATLAS readout chain and the problematics arising in such experiments. Although the $\pi$LUP was designed to fulfill a specific task, it is highly versatile and might fit a wide variety of applications, some of which will be discussed in this work. Two 7$^{th}$-generation Xilinx FPGAs are mounted on the board: a Zynq-7 with an embedded dual core ARM Processor and a Kintex-7. The latter features sixteen 12.5$\,$Gbps transceivers, allowing the board to interface easily to any other electronic board, either electrically and/or optically, at the current bandwidth of the experiments for LHC. Many data-transmission protocols have been tested at different speeds, results will be discussed later in this work. Two batches of $\pi$LUP boards have been fabricated and tested, two boards in the first batch (version 1.0) and four boards in the second batch (version 1.1), encapsulating all the patches and improvements required by the first version.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures, 21th Real Time Conference, winner of "2018 NPSS Student Paper Award Second Prize

Machine Learning inference using PYNQ environment in a AWS EC2 F1 Instance

In the past few years, using Machine and Deep Learning techniques has become more and more viable, thanks to the availability of tools which make the need of specific knowledge in the realm of data science and complex networks less vital to achieve a satisfactory final result in a variety of research fields. This process has caused an explosion in the adoption of such techniques, e.g. in the context of High Energy Physics. The range of applications for ML becomes even larger if we consider the implementation of these algorithms on low-latency hardware like FPGAs which promise smaller latency with respect to traditional inference algorithms running on general purpose CPUs. This paper presents and discusses the activity running at the University of Bologna and INFN-Bologna where a new open-source project from Xilinx called PYNQ is being tested. Its purpose is to grant designers the possibility to exploit the benefits of programmable logic and microprocessors using the Python language and libraries. This new software environment can be deployed on a variety of Xilinx platforms, from the simplest ones like ZYNQ boards, to more advanced and high performance ones, like Alveo accelerator cards and AWS EC2 F1 instances. The use of cloud computing in this work lets us test the capabilities of this new workflow, from the creation and training of a Neural Network and the creation of a HLS project using HLS4ML, to testing the predictions of the NN using PYNQ APIs and functions written in Pytho

Potenzialità del telerilevamento laser scanner aereo per la classificazione delle coperture forestali in funzione della forma di governo

In questo studio è stata valutata la potenzialità del telerilevamento laser scanner aereo (ALS) per classificare le forme di governo forestale in un bosco misto di latifoglie. La metodologia applicata prevede l’utilizzo del modello digitale delle chiome (CHM) ottenuto da dati ALS e l’impiego di procedure automatizzate per la segmentazione object-oriented delle immagini telerilevate. La classificazione delle forme di governo si basa sulle metriche estratte dal CHM. I risultati ottenuti indicano che la media delle altezze e il coefficiente di variazione delle altezze estratti dal CHM sono utili per distinguere i boschi governati a ceduo da quelli governati a fustaiaIn this study aerial laser scanning (ALS) data has been tested to classify coppice stands and high forest stands in a mixed broadleaved forest. The method is based on a canopy height model (CHM) obtained from ALS data. Forest stands have been delineated using a object-oriented approach. The polygons have been classified into coppices and high forests based on the metrics derived from CHM. Our results indicate that the mean of the heights and the coefficient of variation of the heights extracted from CHM are useful to discriminate coppices from high forests.L'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore www.asita.i

Assessment of UAV photogrammetric DTM-independent variables for modelling and mapping forest structural indices in mixed temperate forests

Abstract In the EU 2020 biodiversity strategy, maintaining and enhancing forest biodiversity is essential. Forest managers and technicians should include biodiversity monitoring as support for sustainible forest management and conservation issues, through the adoption of forest biodiversity indices. The present study investigates the potential of a new type of Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry derived variables for modelling forest structure indicies, which do not require the availability of a digital terrain model (DTM) such as those obtainable from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) surveys. The DTM-independent variables were calculated using raw 3D UAV photogrammetric data for modeling eight forest structure indices which are commonly used for forest biodiversity monitoring, namely: basal area (G); quadratic mean diameter (DBHmean); the standard deviation of Diameter at Breast Height (DBHσ); DBH Gini coefficient (Gini); the standard deviation of tree heights (Hσ); dominant tree height (Hdom); Lorey's height (Hl); and growing stock volume (V). The study included two mixed temperate forests areas with a different type of management, with one area, left unmanaged for the past 50 years while the other being actively managed. A total of 30 field sample plots were measured in the unmanaged forest, and 50 field plots were measured in the actively managed forest. The accuracy of UAV DTM-independent predictions was compared with a benchmark approach based on traditional explanatory variables calculated from ALS data. Finally, DTM-independent variables were used to produce wall-to-wall maps of the forest structure indices in the two test areas and to estimate the mean value and its uncertainty according to a model-assisted regression estimators. DTM-independent variables led to similar predictive accuracy in terms of root mean square error compared to ALS in both study areas for the eight structure indices (DTM-independent average RMSE% = 20.5 and ALS average RMSE% = 19.8). Moreover, we found that the model-assisted estimation, with both DTM-independet and ALS, obtained lower standar errors (SE) compared to the one obtained by model-based estimation using only field plots. Relative efficiency coefficient (RE) revealed that ALS-based estimates were, on average, more efficient (average RE ALS = 3.7) than DTM-independent, (average RE DTM-independent = 3.3). However, the RE for the DTM-independent models was consistently larger than the one from the ALS models for the DBH-related variables (i.e. G, DBHmean, and DBHσ) and for V. This highlights the potential of DTM-independent variables, which not only can be used virtually on any forests (i.e., no need of a DTM), but also can produce as precise estimates as those from ALS data for key forest structural variables and substantially improve the efficiency of forest inventories