The imbalance of power in the European Union: threats, historical and current issues that may cause its failure

The European Union (EU) is a supranational entity that is formed by twenty-eight European states, and it is both an economic and political entity. The EU is often perceived as an immutable entity and the possibility of its collapse has not been explored in detail by political experts and scholars. However, in the EU are present several issues that might endanger its future existence. Overall, these issues create an imbalance of power that affect the stability and the aims of the EU project. To date, experts have focused on the analysis of the effects rather than the causes of EU’s fragility. This thesis argues that the causes of contemporary issues are found in the past. This thesis focuses on the imbalance of power in the EU, unpacking this through both contemporary and historical analysis of the EU. Due to the broadness of the topic, the thesis focuses mainly on three key aspects: the history of European attempts of unity, the current situation of the EU, and the nationalist-populist sentiment that re-emerged in Europe in the recent years. The thesis examines these three themes from a historical and political point of view, using policy and media analysis as wells as core political theory. It examines the nationalist-populist phenomenon through a case study on the Italian Five Star Movement, arguably the first openly populist party to govern a major EU country. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that the EU is burdened by historical legacies and, if it not solved, these will lead to the failure of the EU project

La modellazione informativa per la mitigazione degli impatti ambientali degli edifici nZEB

Gli scenari della ricerca digitale e delle sue ricadute operative vedono nell’integrazione fra innovazione tecnologica, tecnologie digitali, l’approccio al ciclo di vita e la valutazione ambientale basata sul metodo LCA un percorso d’innovazione ambientale che va in direzione di una visione sistemica della sostenibilità capace di relazionare tecnologia e ambiente in una prospettiva co-evolutiva. Il contributo - partendo dalla digitalizzazione del progetto dimostratore della ricerca Smart Case, una cellula abitativa nZEB - intende evidenziare, come l’informatizzazione del progetto/processo integrato all’utilizzo di strumenti valutativi, possa indirizzare scelte di carattere tecnico-operativo orientate alla riduzione delle emissioni climalteranti

A framework based on real-time OS and multi-agents for intelligent autonomous robot competitions

Robots interacting with human beings are widespread in modern environments, and those performing intelligent tasks without human supervision need to take into account potential criticalities. Making robots compete enable their evaluation with respect to navigation, mapping, object recognition, tracking and manipulation capabilities. Robot competitions date back to the early '80s proving to be useful for educational and research purposes. Several competitions are focused on human-robot interaction, even though they rarely produce as outcome robots capable to seamlessly interact with human beings. The main reason for this is the lack of understanding of human intentions and the failure to rapidly react to human actions. In other words, an ideal robot must be able to communicate and coordinate with humans or with other robots, to act autonomously, and to react under real-Time constraints. This paper proposes a new framework to simplify the development of intelligent robots, testing them in a real robot competition. The framework combines (i) a multi-Agent system to interact with humans, other robots and perform object identification and pathfinding, and (ii) a real-Time motion control deployed on the Erika RTOS, to move the robot and react in a timely fashion to changes in the environment. In the considered competition scenario, the robot is required to identify and collect common objects in a bounded arena with dynamic obstacles in a limited amount of time, receiving commands from humans and competing with other robots. This approach confirms the powerful combination of multi-Agent systems, computer vision, and real-Time systems

SPHERE: the exoplanet imager for the Very Large Telescope

International audienceObservations of circumstellar environments that look for the direct signal of exoplanets and the scattered light from disks have significant instrumental implications. In the past 15 years, major developments in adaptive optics, coronagraphy, optical manufacturing, wavefront sensing, and data processing, together with a consistent global system analysis have brought about a new generation of high-contrast imagers and spectrographs on large ground-based telescopes with much better performance. One of the most productive imagers is the Spectro-Polarimetic High contrast imager for Exoplanets REsearch (SPHERE), which was designed and built for the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. SPHERE includes an extreme adaptive optics system, a highly stable common path interface, several types of coronagraphs, and three science instruments. Two of them, the Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) and the Infra-Red Dual-band Imager and Spectrograph (IRDIS), were designed to efficiently cover the near-infrared range in a single observation for an efficient search of young planets. The third instrument, ZIMPOL, was designed for visible polarimetric observation to look for the reflected light of exoplanets and the light scattered by debris disks. These three scientific instruments enable the study of circumstellar environments at unprecedented angular resolution, both in the visible and the near-infrared. In this work, we thoroughly present SPHERE and its on-sky performance after four years of operations at the VLT