The Italian expenditure in transport infrastructure: a survey

The aim of the paper is to analyse the most important quantitative data on Italian expenditures in transport infrastructures (investment and maintenance costs), linking the expenditure with traffic flows. The analysis concerns rail and road networks (both for national and local roads), over the last ten years, and a possible forecast for the next years, thanks to the official previsions of the “Objective Law”. The whole analysis is based on official data. The planned infrastructures will analyzed with taxonomical and cost – benefit approaches, in order to provide a ranking of priority. The results show how the planning of the investment expenditure is still based on different criteria than efficiency. So, the foreseen expenditure will not able to give relevant effects in order to improve the efficiency of the transport system and to obtain better allocative issues.transport expenditure; italy; infrastructure; investment

Equity in the City: On Measuring Urban (Ine)Quality of Life

We merge contributions from the New Urban Economics and inequality measurement to assess quality of life (QOL) in a given city. We take the point of view of a city planner in favor of an even accessibility to amenities within the city. Instead of the average value of amenities computed in the Roback (1982) QOL index, our index captures the value of its multidimensional "certainty equivalent". We apply this methodology to derive a QOL index for the city of Milan.Urban quality of life, amenities, hedonic prices, inequality index, just city.

DataScience-Polimi at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Stacking Language Models to Predict News Article Similarity

In this paper, we describe the approach we designed to solve SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. We collect and use exclusively textual features (title, description and body) of articles. Our best model is a stacking of 14 Transformer-based Language models fine-tuned on single or multiple fields, using data in the original language or translated to English. It placed fourth on the original leaderboard, sixth on the complete official one and fourth on the English-subset official one. We observe the data collection as our principal source of error due to a relevant fraction of missing or wrong fields

Business Process Modeling and Quick Prototyping with WebRatio BPM

We describe a software tool called WebRatio BPM that helps close the gap between the modeling of business processes and the design and implementation of the software applications that support their enactment. The main idea is to enhance the degree of automation in the conversion of business process models into application models, defined as abstract, platform-independent representations of the application structure and behavior. Application models are themselves amenable to the semiautomatic transformation into application code, resulting in extremely rapid prototyping and shorter time-to-market. Thanks to the proposed chain of model transformations it is also possible to fine tune the final application in several ways, e.g., by integrating the visual identity of the organization or connecting the business process to legacy applications via Web Services

Scaling collaborative policymaking: how to leverage on digital co-creation to engage citizens

n recent years, new methods to engage citizens in deliberative processes of governments and institutions have been studied. Such methodologies have become a necessity to assure the efficacy and sustainability of policies. Several tools and solutions have been proposed while trying to achieve such a goal. The dual problem to citizen engagement is how to provide policymakers with useful and actionable insights and data stemming from those processes. The following paper has the aim to share with the audience of the Data for Policy Conference 2021 an innovative tool based on the concept of participatory policymaking with the scope of collecting feedback and comments to enhance the consistency and the usefulness of the tool. We propose research featuring a method and implementation of a crowdsourcing and co-creation technique that can provide value to both citizens and policymakers engaged in the policy-making process. Thanks to our methodology, policymakers can design challenges for citizens to take part, cooperate and provide their input to policymakers. We also propose a web-based tool that allows citizens to participate and produce content to support the policymaking processes through a gamified interface that focuses on emotional and vision-oriented content

A remark on 'Decomposition of bivariate inequality indices by attributes' by Abul Naga and Geoffard, Economics Letters 90 (2006), pp. 362-367

We correct the generalized version of the decomposition of multivariate inequality indices by attributes proposed by Abul Naga and Geoffard "Abul Naga, R. H. and Geoffard, P. Y., 2006. Decomposition of bivariate inequality indices by attributes. Economic Letters 90, pp. 362-367."Multidimensional inequality; Correlation increasing transfers