Automated Mapping of the roof damage in historic buildings in seismic areas with UAV photogrammetry

The paper presents a fast methodology to quantify the damage to the roof in historic buildings, suggested soon after a light seismic event occurs, in order to evaluate the necessity of provisional interventions to prevent further damages. The survey is based on UAV photogrammetry, a well-known technique that allows inspection and digital documentation even in hardly accessible or dangerous areas. The research aims to analyze the feasibility of the automated mapping of roof damage using an image classification procedure based on supervised machine learning. The procedure is summed up in an efficient workflow, where UAV photogrammetry is combined with other 3D survey techniques, such as terrestrial photogrammetry and laser scanning, to provide comprehensive documentation and quantitative data on a historical building. The methodology was validated on a large historical building, now suffering from a serious state of neglect, which roof was never surveyed before and with different damage types. The output orthoimage of the tiled roof allowed us to understand the past interventions and the current serious damage state with promising outcomes regarding the speed of the survey method

A new generation photodetector for astroparticle physics: the VSiPMT

The VSiPMT (Vacuum Silicon PhotoMultiplier Tube) is an innovative design we proposed for a revolutionary photon detector. The main idea is to replace the classical dynode chain of a PMT with a SiPM (G-APD), the latter acting as an electron detector and amplifier. The aim is to match the large sensitive area of a photocathode with the performance of the SiPM technology. The VSiPMT has many attractive features. In particular, a low power consumption and an excellent photon counting capability. To prove the feasibility of the idea we first tested the performance of a special non-windowed SiPM by Hamamatsu (MPPC) as electron detector and current amplifier. Thanks to this result Hamamatsu realized two VSiPMT industrial prototypes. In this work, we present the results of a full characterization of the VSiPMT prototype

U-Sleep's resilience to AASM guidelines

AASM guidelines are the result of decades of efforts aiming at standardizing sleep scoring procedure, with the final goal of sharing a worldwide common methodology. The guidelines cover several aspects from the technical/digital specifications,e.g., recommended EEG derivations, to detailed sleep scoring rules accordingly to age. Automated sleep scoring systems have always largely exploited the standards as fundamental guidelines. In this context, deep learning has demonstrated better performance compared to classical machine learning. Our present work shows that a deep learning based sleep scoring algorithm may not need to fully exploit the clinical knowledge or to strictly adhere to the AASM guidelines. Specifically, we demonstrate that U-Sleep, a state-of-the-art sleep scoring algorithm, can be strong enough to solve the scoring task even using clinically non-recommended or non-conventional derivations, and with no need to exploit information about the chronological age of the subjects. We finally strengthen a well-known finding that using data from multiple data centers always results in a better performing model compared with training on a single cohort. Indeed, we show that this latter statement is still valid even by increasing the size and the heterogeneity of the single data cohort. In all our experiments we used 28528 polysomnography studies from 13 different clinical studies

US Cosmic Visions: New Ideas in Dark Matter 2017: Community Report

This white paper summarizes the workshop "U.S. Cosmic Visions: New Ideas in Dark Matter" held at University of Maryland on March 23-25, 2017.Comment: 102 pages + reference

Darkside latest results and the future liquid argon dark matter program

DarkSide uses a dual-phase Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber running since mid 2015 with a 50-kg-active-mass target from an underground source, to search for WIMP dark matter. The talk will present the latest result on the search for low mass WIMPs (M_{WIMP} <20GeV/c^2 ) extending the exclusion region below previous limits in the range $1.8-6 GeV/c^2$, as well as a search for high mass WIMPs (M_{WIMP}>100GeV/c^2) with 0 background reported in the signal region giving the most competitive result obtained with an Argon target. The next stage of the Darkside program will be a new generation experiment involving a global collaboration from all the current Argon based experiments. DarkSide-20k is designed as a &gt;20-tonne fiducial mass TPC with SiPM based photosensors, expected to achieve an instrumental background well below that from coherent scattering of solar and atmospheric neutrinos. Like its predecessor DarkSide-20k will be housed at the Gran Sasso (LNGS) underground laboratory, and it is expected to attain a WIMP-nucleon cross section exclusion sensitivity of $10^{-47}\, cm^2$ for a WIMP mass of $1 TeV/c^2$ in a 5 yr run.</p