Exploiting Recurring Patterns to Improve Scalability of Parking Availability Prediction Systems

Parking Guidance and Information (PGI) systems aim at supporting drivers in finding suitable parking spaces, also by predicting the availability at driver’s Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA), leveraging information about the general parking availability situation. To do these predictions, most of the proposals in the literature dealing with on-street parking need to train a model for each road segment, with significant scalability issues when deploying a city-wide PGI. By investigating a real dataset we found that on-street parking dynamics show a high temporal auto-correlation. In this paper we present a new processing pipeline that exploits these recurring trends to improve the scalability. The proposal includes two steps to reduce both the number of required models and training examples. The effectiveness of the proposed pipeline has been empirically assessed on a real dataset of on-street parking availability from San Francisco (USA). Results show that the proposal is able to provide parking predictions whose accuracy is comparable to state-of-the-art solutions based on one model per road segment, while requiring only a fraction of training costs, thus being more likely scalable to city-wide scenarios

Micro finance in Palestine: issues, performance, and trajectories

Despite the growing interest in the subject of micro finance very little, if any, academic research on the Palestinian case exists. This paper starts filling this gap by analysing the development of the micro credit industry in Palestine between 2000 and 2008. This paper shows that at macro level the industry has a strong potential for growth, but its full development is frustrated by inefficiencies in credit allocation and high level of risk, whose most evident sign being the problem of late or no re-payment of loans. By using data from one of the most important micro credit agencies, the Arab Centre for Agricultural Development (ACAD), we analyse the determinants of late payment. The most important results are that high interest rates increase the probability of late repayment, loan size, when above the “micro” threshold has no impact, while female customers and the one with banks guarantees are less likely to pay late. The policy implications are that while going towards a more “market-based” approach might provide some advantages in terms of risk reduction, it will not per se solve the problem while will certainly expose the most vulnerable sectors of the population to further credit rationingPalestine; micro finance; economic development

Size, Structure, and Strategies: Insolvency and "The Nature of the Firm" in Italy, 1920S-1970S

During the Twentieth century, Italian joint-stock companies remained relatively small and tended to die young. This fact constrained the development of the full potential of the Italian industry, as small-dimensioned companies struggled to implement the most efficient technologies and managerial techniques. This paper analyses this problem by looking at the functioning of insolvency procedures. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence, we show how various devices that progressively appeared on the scene failed in providing efficient solutions to re-start worthy companies. Insolvency procedures thus remained liquidation-prone, a factor that contributes to explain the peculiarity and the limits of Italian industrial capitalism.

Nonstandard Methods in Ramsey Theory and Combinatorial Number Theory

The goal of this present manuscript is to introduce the reader to the nonstandard method and to provide an overview of its most prominent applications in Ramsey theory and combinatorial number theory.Comment: 126 pages. Comments welcom

Entanglement and quantum combinatorial designs

We introduce several classes of quantum combinatorial designs, namely quantum Latin squares, cubes, hypercubes and a notion of orthogonality between them. A further introduced notion, quantum orthogonal arrays, generalizes all previous classes of designs. We show that mutually orthogonal quantum Latin arrangements can be entangled in the same way than quantum states are entangled. Furthermore, we show that such designs naturally define a remarkable class of genuinely multipartite highly entangled states called $k$-uniform, i.e. multipartite pure states such that every reduction to $k$ parties is maximally mixed. We derive infinitely many classes of mutually orthogonal quantum Latin arrangements and quantum orthogonal arrays having an arbitrary large number of columns. The corresponding multipartite $k$-uniform states exhibit a high persistency of entanglement, which makes them ideal candidates to develop multipartite quantum information protocols.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. Comments are very welcome

The Pr.O.F. project: orienting late High School students to University methodology in Chemistry and other Sciences

The P.r.O.F. project has been presented at the ECTN meeting and positively evaluated. The project aims to help high school students in the transition to University. It covers the areas of Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Mathematics. In the Chemistry section, methodological issues were emphasized. The specific subject, selected jointly by University and School teachers, was Solutions and Solubility. Short and long-time tests were performed to check the effectiveness of the intervention

Dynamics of a particle confined in a two-dimensional dilating and deforming domain

Some recent results concerning a particle confined in a one-dimensional box with moving walls are briefly reviewed. By exploiting the same techniques used for the 1D problem, we investigate the behavior of a quantum particle confined in a two-dimensional box (a 2D billiard) whose walls are moving, by recasting the relevant mathematical problem with moving boundaries in the form of a problem with fixed boundaries and time-dependent Hamiltonian. Changes of the shape of the box are shown to be important, as it clearly emerges from the comparison between the "pantographic", case (same shape of the box through all the process) and the case with deformation.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure