La crisi di impresa e i metodi previsionali. Il caso Alfa SpA.

Tale lavoro concerne la problematica della crisi di impresa ed i modelli di previsione della medesima, con particolare riguardo agli indici di bilancio e al modello di Altman. Inoltre, viene presentato un caso pratico di un'azienda in crisi nell'ambito del quale vengono applicati due dei modelli teoricamente descritti

The psychophysics of comic: effects of incongruity in causality and animacy

According to several theories of humour (see Berger, 2012; Martin, 2007), incongruity - i.e., the presence of two incompatible meanings in the same situation - is a crucial condition for an event being evaluated as comical. The aim of this research was to test with psychophysical methods the role of incongruity in visual perception by manipulating the causal paradigm (Michotte, 1946/1963) to get a comic effect. We ran three experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested the role of speed ratio between the first and the second movement, and the effect of animacy cues (i.e. frog-like and jumping-like trajectories) in the second movement; in Experiment 2, we manipulated the temporal delay between the movements to explore the relationship between perceptual causal contingencies and comic impressions; in Experiment 3, we compared the strength of the comic impressions arising from incongruent trajectories based on animacy cues with those arising from incongruent trajectories not based on animacy cues (bouncing and rotating) in the second part of the causal event. General findings showed that the paradoxical juxtaposition of a living behaviour in the perceptual causal paradigm is a powerful factor in eliciting comic appreciations, coherently with the Bergsonian perspective in particular (Bergson, 2003), and with incongruity theories in general

La costruzione sociale del concetto di CSR: analisi del discorso pubblico di GAFA

La Corporate Social Responsibility è un aspetto strategico a carattere etico con cui le imprese, soprattutto le multinazionali, devono confrontarsi se vogliono mantenersi competitive e solide nel mercato. L’elaborato "La costruzione sociale del concetto di CSR: analisi del discorso pubblico di GAFA" ha rincorso l’obiettivo di approfondire tale tematica, dapprima offrendone un quadro generale, poi indagandone nel dettaglio l’approccio rivoltole dalle grandi imprese hi-tech, quali le imprese GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), confrontando il pensiero dell’opinione pubblica sul loro agire etico con le dichiarazioni ufficiali rilasciate nei report aziendali. Lo studio dell’approccio GAFA alla CSR si è concretizzato nella ricerca degli articoli inerenti all’operato di queste imprese in alcuni ambiti specifici della CSR come l’ambiente, i diritti umani, la privacy, la trasparenza, la tutela dei lavoratori e, in seguito, nell’analisi automatica di questi, tramite il software di Topic Modeling MALLET, allo scopo di individuare gli argomenti preponderanti, negativi e positivi, sia a livello comunitario GAFA, sia a livello di singola impresa GAFA. L’analisi automatica degli articoli ha messo così in luce aspetti che, un’analisi manuale, avrebbe faticato ad individuare perché nascosti in profondità, creando i presupposti per uno sviluppo dettagliato ed accurato dell’obiettivo prefissato

Condition-Based Maintenance of HVAC on a High-Speed Train for Fault Detection

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a well-established method for preventive maintenance planning. This paper focuses on the optimization of a maintenance plan for an HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system located on high-speed trains. The first steps of the RCM procedure help in identifying the most critical items of the system in terms of safety and availability by means of a failure modes and effects analysis. Then, RMC proposes the optimal maintenance tasks for each item making up the system. However, the decision-making diagram that leads to the maintenance choice is extremely generic, with a consequent high subjectivity in the task selection. This paper proposes a new fuzzy-based decision-making diagram to minimize the subjectivity of the task choice and preserve the cost-efficiency of the procedure. It uses a case from the railway industry to illustrate the suggested approach, but the procedure could be easily applied to different industrial and technological fields. The results of the proposed fuzzy approach highlight the importance of an accurate diagnostics (with an overall 86% of the task as diagnostic-based maintenance) and condition monitoring strategy (covering 54% of the tasks) to optimize the maintenance plan and to minimize the system availability. The findings show that the framework strongly mitigates the issues related to the classical RCM procedure, notably the high subjectivity of experts. It lays the groundwork for a general fuzzy-based reliability-centered maintenance method.This research received no external fundin

«Eclissi» o trasformazione? La partecipazione giovanile in un contesto avverso

Il capitolo affronta il complesso tema dei cambiamenti della partecipazione giovanile in Italia. Lo studio di questo topic corre molteplici rischi di riduzionismo: perlomeno quello di sottovalutare le continuità tra giovani e non, quello di trascurare i nessi tra i caratteri della partecipazione dei giovani e il peculiare contesto in cui essi vivono, quello di non considerare adeguatamente le differenze interne al ‘mondo’ giovanile, quello di considerare un repertorio di azione collettiva eccessivamente ristretto. I passi compiuti dal capitolo sono tre. Innanzitutto si cerca di sottrarre all’ovvietà i significati delle nostre due parole-chiave (giovani e partecipazione) (Paragrafo 1). Si prova poi a capire come cambia, da un punto di vista strettamente quantitativo, la partecipazione dei giovani rispetto a quella di altre fasce di età nel nuovo secolo. Lo facciamo nel Paragrafo 2 prendendo rapidamente in rassegna alcuni dati provenienti dalle serie storiche Istat e da altri programmi di ricerca. Nel Paragrafo 3 esploriamo invece i mutamenti della partecipazione giovanile rispetto al contesto socio-economico e politico che la crisi post-2007 ha contribuito a disegnare. Lo facciamo considerando specificamente i dati sulla condizione e la partecipazione dei giovani tra i 20 e i 24 anni dopo il 2007 e considerando le politiche giovanili (quelle che ci sono e quelle che non ci sono) come parte integrante di tale contesto

diBELLA: Distributed Long Read to Long Read Alignment

We present a parallel algorithm and scalable implementation for genome analysis, specifically the problem of finding overlaps and alignments for data from "third generation" long read sequencers. While long sequences of DNA offer enormous advantages for biological analysis and insight, current long read sequencing instruments have high error rates and therefore require different approaches to analysis than their short read counterparts. Our work focuses on an efficient distributed-memory parallelization of an accurate single-node algorithm for overlapping and aligning long reads. We achieve scalability of this irregular algorithm by addressing the competing issues of increasing parallelism, minimizing communication, constraining the memory footprint, and ensuring good load balance. The resulting application, diBELLA, is the first distributed memory overlapper and aligner specifically designed for long reads and parallel scalability. We describe and present analyses for high level design trade-offs and conduct an extensive empirical analysis that compares performance characteristics across state-of-the-art HPC systems as well as a commercial cloud architectures, highlighting the advantages of state-of-the-art network technologies.Comment: This is the authors' preprint of the article that appears in the proceedings of ICPP 2019, the 48th International Conference on Parallel Processin

10 Years Later: Cloud Computing is Closing the Performance Gap

Can cloud computing infrastructures provide HPC-competitive performance for scientific applications broadly? Despite prolific related literature, this question remains open. Answers are crucial for designing future systems and democratizing high-performance computing. We present a multi-level approach to investigate the performance gap between HPC and cloud computing, isolating different variables that contribute to this gap. Our experiments are divided into (i) hardware and system microbenchmarks and (ii) user application proxies. The results show that today's high-end cloud computing can deliver HPC-competitive performance not only for computationally intensive applications but also for memory- and communication-intensive applications - at least at modest scales - thanks to the high-speed memory systems and interconnects and dedicated batch scheduling now available on some cloud platforms

Modelling soil water conent in a tomato field: proximal gamma ray spectroscopy and soil-crop system models

Proximal soil sensors are taking hold in the understanding of soil hydrogeological processes involved in precision agriculture. In this context, permanently installed gamma ray spectroscopy stations represent one of the best space-time trade off methods at field scale. This study proved the feasibility and reliability of soil water content monitoring through a seven-month continuous acquisition of terrestrial gamma radiation in a tomato test field. By employing a 1 L sodium iodide detector placed at a height of 2.25 m, we investigated the gamma signal coming from an area having a ~25 m radius and from a depth of approximately 30 cm. Experimental values, inferred after a calibration measurement and corrected for the presence of biomass, were corroborated with gravimetric data acquired under different soil moisture conditions, giving an average absolute discrepancy of about 2%. A quantitative comparison was carried out with data simulated by AquaCrop, CRITeRIA, and IRRINET soil-crop system models. The different goodness of fit obtained in bare soil condition and during the vegetated period highlighted that CRITeRIA showed the best agreement with the experimental data over the entire data-taking period while, in presence of the tomato crop, IRRINET provided the best results.Comment: 18 pages, 9 Figures, 3 Table

Space Efficient Sequence Alignment for SRAM-Based Computing: X-Drop on the Graphcore IPU

Dedicated accelerator hardware has become essential for processing AI-based workloads, leading to the rise of novel accelerator architectures. Furthermore, fundamental differences in memory architecture and parallelism have made these accelerators targets for scientific computing. The sequence alignment problem is fundamental in bioinformatics; we have implemented the $X$-Drop algorithm, a heuristic method for pairwise alignment that reduces search space, on the Graphcore Intelligence Processor Unit (IPU) accelerator. The $X$-Drop algorithm has an irregular computational pattern, which makes it difficult to accelerate due to load balancing. Here, we introduce a graph-based partitioning and queue-based batch system to improve load balancing. Our implementation achieves $10\times$ speedup over a state-of-the-art GPU implementation and up to $4.65\times$ compared to CPU. In addition, we introduce a memory-restricted $X$-Drop algorithm that reduces memory footprint by $55\times$ and efficiently uses the IPU's limited low-latency SRAM. This optimization further improves the strong scaling performance by $3.6\times$.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 2 table