Some observations about ETRF2000 in reference to Cartography and GIS

Andrea Favretto, Massimo Zia, "Alcune considerazioni in merito a ETRF2000 con riferimento alla Cartografia e ai GIS = Some observations about ETRF2000 in reference to Cartography and GIS" in: Bollettino dell'Associazione Italiana di Cartografia, 153 (2015), pp. 45-50Il contributo riporta alcune osservazioni sul sistema di riferimento geodetico nazionale denominato ETRF2000 e introdotto dall'art.5 del Decreto 10 novembre 2011 della Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri ('Adozione del sistema di riferimento geodetico nazionale"), espresse dal punto di vista di un operatore nel campo della cartografia digitale ed i Sistemi Informativi Geografici. Si parte dalla constatazione di un’inequivocabile ed immediata esigenza di chiarezza su ETRF2000, in particolare su ciò che la sua adozione comporta a livello operativo presso i diversi enti locali che operano sul territorio nazionale ed usano a tal scopo la cartografia digitale ed i database cartografici. Vengono poi fornite alcune indicazioni sui possibili e corretti impieghi delle basi di dati geografici globali e locali nel nuovo quadro di riferimento imposto dal decreto in oggetto, in attesa della completa trasformazione di tutti i dati nel nuovo sistema di riferimento. Chiudono la nota alcune considerazioni sulle difficoltà in cui versa attualmente il settore cartografico nazionale, condizionato da un lato dalla sfavorevole congiuntura economica dei nostri giorni, dall'altro dalle intrusioni, a volte poco ortodosse, dei produttori massivi di cartografia in rete collegati al Web.The paper gives some observations about the ETRF2000 National geodetic reference system, which has been introduced on November, 10th 2011 by one Italian Minister Council Presidency Act. These observations are given from an operator of digital cartography and GIS point of view. We begin highlighting the need of clarity on ETRF2000and, moreover, on what its adoption entails at a operative level to the local authorities which employ digital maps and cartographic databases. Then we give some recommendations on how use local and global geographic databases in a correct way, according to the new reference frame imposed by the said Act This while waiting to totally transform all the local cartographic data into the new coordinate reference system. A few ending remarks on some current problems of the Italian mapping sector are given, considering the nowadays economic trends and the activities of the massive web mapping producers like Google and/or Microsoft

HMM-MIO: An enhanced hidden Markov model for action recognition

Generative models can be flexibly employed in a variety of tasks such as classification, detection and segmentation thanks to their explicit modelling of likelihood functions. However, likelihood functions are hard to model accurately in many real cases. In this paper, we present an enhanced hidden Markov model capable of dealing with the noisy, high-dimensional and sparse measurements typical of action feature sets. The modified model, named hidden Markov model with multiple, independent observations (HMM-MIO), joins: a) robustness to observation outliers, b) dimensionality reduction, and c) processing of sparse observations. In the paper, a set of experimental results over the Weizmann and KTH datasets shows that this model can be tuned to achieve classification accuracy comparable to that of discriminative classifiers. While discriminative approaches remain the natural choice for classification tasks, our results prove that likelihoods, too, can be modelled to a high level of accuracy. In the near future, we plan extension of HMM-MIO along the lines of infinite Markov models and its integration into a switching model for continuous human action recognition. © 2011 IEEE

THE GIS OF THE AUTONOMOUS REGION OF FRIULI VENEZIA GIULIA AND THE INTEGRATION WITH THE LOCAL INSTITUTIONS AND CADASTRE DATABASES

La Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia è stata tra le prime a dotarsi di una Carta Tecnica Regionale Numerica, strumento di conoscenza del territorio a supporto di una moderna pianificazione per la realizzazione di complessi interventi tecnicoamministrativi. e presupposto per la realizzazione di applicazioni GIS per gli EELL. In un contesto territoriale dove vige anche il sistema tavolare, da diversi anni collabora con l’Agenzia del Territorio sui temi della cartografia e del catasto; lo testimoniano la realizzazione sia di importanti lavori sui dati, in ufficio ed in campagna, che lo studio e la realizzazione di tecniche e strumenti innovativi per il trattamento e l’utilizzo integrato dei dati. La Regione ha avviato da tempo con Insiel (azienda informatica in house) la realizzazione di strumenti sw per la gestione integrata del dato territoriale e ne ha curato la distribuzione nei confronti degli EELL, favorendo la creazione di una cultura e di una sensibilità diffusa ai temi dei SIT ed all’utilizzo dei software. Questi sono evoluti nel tempo fino a costituire, ad oggi, un insieme di applicazioni web interoperanti dove il dato geografico viene messo in relazione con i dati tipicamente alfanumerici degli EELL, ad esempio anagrafe e tributi.The Friuli Venezia Giulia Region has been among the first Public Administrations to acquire a digital technical map of its whole land, a knowledge tool of the territory that can support a modern planning activity for the realization of complex technical and administrative activities, and a condition for implementing GIS applications for the EELL (local administrations). In a country where, along with the standard Italian cadastre, in a part of its territory also the “tavolare” system is in force, the FVG Region administration cooperated for many years with the Agenzia del Terriitorio (National cadastre Agency) on the cartographic mapping and cadastral topics. This is witnessed by the realization of important works on the data, both in office and on the field, and by the study and the realization of innovative software tools and techniques for data processing and integration. The FVG Region has started long time ago with Insiel (the EDP “in house” company) the realization of sw applications for the integrated management of geo data, and it has been taking care of their distribution to the EELL, favouring the creation of a culture and a diffuse sensibility about GIS topics and the related software usage. These evolved during time, and form now a system of web co-operating software applications, where the geographic data are related with the typical alphanumeric data of the EELL, for instance pertaining to registry or local income and taxes offices

Singularity free dilaton-driven cosmologies and pre-little-bang

There are no reasons why the singularity in the growth of the dilaton coupling should not be regularised, in a string cosmological context, by the presence of classical inhomogeneities. We discuss a class of inhomogeneous dilaton-driven models whose curvature invariants are all bounded and regular in time and space. We prove that the non-space-like geodesics of these models are all complete in the sense that none of them reaches infinity for a finite value of the affine parameter. We conclude that our examples represent truly singularity-free solutions of the low energy beta functions. We discuss some symmetries of the obtained solutions and we clarify their physical interpretation. We also give examples of solutions with spherical symmetry. In our scenario each physical quantity is everywhere defined in time and space, the big-bang singularity is replaced by a maximal curvature phase where the dilaton kinetic energy reaches its maximum. The maximal curvature is always smaller than one (in string units) and the coupling constant is also smaller than one and it grows between two regimes of constant dilaton, implying, together with the symmetries of the solutions, that higher genus and higher curvature corrections are negligible. We argue that our examples describe, in a string cosmological context, the occurrence of ``little bangs''(i.e. high curvature phases which never develop physical singularities). They also suggest the possibility of an unexplored ``pre-little-bang'' phase.Comment: 25 pages in LaTex style, 3 encapsulated figure

Effective bandwidth of non-Markovian packet traffic

We demonstrate the application of recent advances in statistical mechanics to a problem in telecommunication engineering: the assessment of the quality of a communication channel in terms of rare and extreme events. In particular, we discuss non-Markovian models for telecommunication traffic in continuous time and deploy the "cloning" procedure of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to efficiently compute their effective bandwidths. The cloning method allows us to evaluate the performance of a traffic protocol even in the absence of analytical results, which are often hard to obtain when the dynamics are non-Markovian

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Evaluation of the Impact of Interventricular and Intraventricular Dyssynchrony on Cardiac Ventricular Systolic and Diastolic Function in Patients With Isolated Left Bundle Branch Block

Ventricular dyssynchrony significantly impairs cardiac performance. However, the independent role of interventricular dyssynchrony (interVD) and intraventricular dyssynchrony (intraVD) in the development of abnormalities of systolic and diastolic performance is unclear. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging was performed in 39 patients with left bundle branch block and 13 healthy patients. Structural and functional parameters of the left ventricle and degrees of interVD and intraVD were measured. We found that interVD was inversely correlated with left ventricular (LV) ejection fraction (r = -0.8, p <0.0001) and positively correlated with LV end-diastolic volume (r = 0.4, p <0.01), LV end-systolic volume (r = 0.6, p <0.0001), and LV mass (r = 0.4, p <0.01), thus indicating that interVD significantly affects systolic function and favors ventricular remodeling. Multivariate analysis further confirmed that interVD was an independent predictor of systolic dysfunction. Interestingly, we found that interVD was not associated with abnormalities of diastolic performance. Conversely, we found that intraVD significantly impaired diastolic function, whereas it had no effect on systolic function. IntraVD was inversely correlated with peak filling rate (r = -0.7, p <0.0001) and 1/2 filling fraction (r = 0.4, p = 0.04) and positively correlated with time to peak filling rate (r = 0.6, p <0.0001), validated parameters of diastolic function. Multivariate analysis confirmed that intraVD was an independent predictor of diastolic dysfunction. In conclusion, our study suggests that the 2 components of ventricular dyssynchrony differently affect cardiac performance. If confirmed in prospective studies, our results may help to predict the prognosis of patients with left bundle branch block and different degrees of interVD and intraVD, particularly those subjects undergoing cardiac resynchronization therapy. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (Am J Cardiol 2012;110:1651-1656

An easy and reproducible parameter for the assessment of the pressure gradient in patients with aortic stenosis disease: a magnetic resonance study

Aim: Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) has been increasingly used as an alternative method to evaluate the severity of aortic stenosis. The aim of our study was to evaluate whether the indirect measurement of the aortic gradient (Calc-PG), derived from Gorlin's formula, is a reproducible parameter for gradient assessment. Then, we evaluated if this parameter is correlated with left ventricular hypertrophy, considered as a marker of severity of aortic stenosis, better than phase-contrast sequences-derived pressure gradient (PC-PG) and aortic valve area. Methods: Forty-one patients with isolated aortic stenosis underwent CMR. Calc-PG was obtained from the formula (cardiac output/aortic valve area)2, and it was compared to PC-PG. Results: We found that the Calc-PG has higher correlation with left ventricle mass than PC-PG (r2 0.44, p < 0.001 vs. r2 0.26, p < 0.01), also after multivariate analysis adjusting for age, gender and hypertension (p < 0.001). Furthermore, Calc-PG was more reproducible than PC-PG. The receiver operating characteristic comparison curve analysis showed that Calc-PG has a significantly higher ability to describe the presence of left ventricular hypertrophy than PC-PG (area under the curve 0.85, 95% CI 0.70-0.94, p < 0.0001 vs. 0.74, 95% CI 0.58-0.87, p = 0.03). Conclusions: We propose that transaortic gradient indirectly calculated by using the simplified Gorlin's equation could be an alternative method to assess the severity of aortic stenosis. © 2014 Japanese College of Cardiology

Experimental property reconstruction in a photonic quantum extreme learning machine

Recent developments have led to the possibility of embedding machine learning tools into experimental platforms to address key problems, including the characterization of the properties of quantum states. Leveraging on this, we implement a quantum extreme learning machine in a photonic platform to achieve resource-efficient and accurate characterization of the polarization state of a photon. The underlying reservoir dynamics through which such input state evolves is implemented using the coined quantum walk of high-dimensional photonic orbital angular momentum, and performing projective measurements over a fixed basis. We demonstrate how the reconstruction of an unknown polarization state does not need a careful characterization of the measurement apparatus and is robust to experimental imperfections, thus representing a promising route for resource-economic state characterisation.<br/