Italy’s constitutional referendum: a roundup of the political commentary

On Sunday, 4 December, Italians are going to the polls to approve or reject the proposed constitutional reform, promoted by PM Matteo Renzi. The referendum may also carry political and economic consequences, as Renzi has stated he would resign in case the reform should not be approved. In the run up to the vote, Silvia Merler summarises some of the most interesting commentary on the topic

Critical functions and public interest in banking services: Need for clarification? Banking Union Scrutiny. Bruegel Report, November 2017

Under the EU framework for dealing with banking problems, resolution is seen as an exception to be granted only if liquidation under national insolvency proceedings is not warranted. We look at the recent liquidation of two Italian banks to show how resolution and liquidation differ substantially when it comes to the scope of legislation applicable to the use of public funds. We argue that more clarity would be needed as to the role that the concepts of critical functions and public interest play in Member States’ decision to grant liquidation aid, and that the two-tier system – in which resolution is done at the EU level but insolvency remains a national prerogative – raises issues in the context of Banking Union

Income convergence during the crisis: did EU funds provide a buffer? Bruegel Working Paper Issue 6 2016

This paper shows that economic convergence continued during the crisis for the EU as a whole, although at a slower pace, but for regions in the EU14, and especially in the euro area, convergence appears to have stopped during the crisis, or even switched to a divergence path

Società, cultura e ambiente in Barbagia: il parco possibile

Una domanda per partire: è possibile l'istituzione di un parco naturale in Barbagia? Lo è non solo da un punto di vista tecnico-ingegneristico o burocratico-istituzionale, ma in rapporto alla storia, alle aspirazioni, alla cultura, ai bisogni sociali, alle forme di autonomia comunitaria che abitano le Barbagie? Il parco o riserva naturale è uno strumento adeguato oggi per far partecipare i cittadini, per tentare di fornire loro una risposta a pressanti problemi economici, per permettere di far sopravvivere e di sviluppare pienamente il proprio patrimonio etnico-culturale, per consentire un uso pieno e cosciente del proprio territorio, rispettandone anche le valenze ambientalistiche? Il parco può significare una ulteriore imposizione proveniente da centri esterni o può stimolare il cosciente autogoverno comunitario, facendo partecipare le popolazioni alla gestione delle autonomie comunali o in qualche modo locali

Bank liquidation in the European Union: clarification needed. Bruegel Policy Contribution Issue n˚01 | January 2018

Critical functions and public interest. What role do they play in Member States’ decision to grant liquidation aid? The author of this paper looks at how resolution and liquidation differ substantially when it comes to the scope of legislation applicable to the use of public funds and how the diversity in national insolvency regimes is a source of uncertainty about the outcome of liquidation procedures

Alle origini della cooperazione europea fra organizzazioni di studi latinoamericani

L’espansione degli studi sull’America Latina in Europa, avutasi soprattutto negli ultimi decenni e nel campo delle scienze sociali, fornisce all’Autore l'occasione per riproporre la questione del modo in cui l’Università decide «politicamente» e opera «socialmente» superando il puro ambito di organizzazione della singola ricerca e di comunicazione del suoi risultati. L’Autore tenta di aprire un dibattito tendente a individuare «motori» europei di coordinamento e informazione, secondo uno schema pluridimensionale «a continuum», capace pure di elaborare proprie specializzazioni professionali funzionali, in un rapporto biunivoco con l’America Latina e sottolineando la funzione delle associazioni e delle organizzazioni più che il ruolo dei singoli ricercatori e studiosi.La expansión de los estudios sobre América Latina en Europa ha alcanzado especial relieve en los últimos decenios y en al área de las ciencias sociales. El análisis de tal expansión conduce al Autor a replantearse el modo en que la universidad decide «políticamante» y opera «socialmente» superando el ámbito de la organización de cada investigación y al de la comunicación de sus resultados. El Autor trata de abrir una discusión que tiende a individualizar «motores» europeos de coordinación e información, según un esquema pluridimensional «a continuum», capaz de elaborar incluso sus propias especializaciones profesionales funcionales, en una relación biunívoca con América Latina y haciendo hincapié en la función de las asociaciones y organizaciones en lugar de la función de los investigadores y estudiosos individuales.The increasing number of European studies on Latin America, particularly in the last few decades and in the field of social science, is the starting point for the Author to discuss the issue of how the University comes to take "political" decisions and to operate socially well over the mere organization of research work and the communica-tion of its results. The Author tries to start a debate in order to single out some European "propelling centres" of coordination and information in a multidimensional "continuum-type" scheme, also capable to elaborate professional functional specialization of its own in biunivocal relation with Latin America and emphasizing the function of associations and organizations rather than the role of individual researchers and scholars

Multimodal Indexing of Presentation Videos

This thesis presents four novel methods to help users efficiently and effectively retrieve information from unstructured and unsourced multimedia sources, in particular the increasing amount and variety of presentation videos such as those in e-learning, conference recordings, corporate talks, and student presentations. We demonstrate a system to summarize, index and cross-reference such videos, and measure the quality of the produced indexes as perceived by the end users. We introduce four major semantic indexing cues: text, speaker faces, graphics, and mosaics, going beyond standard tag based searches and simple video playbacks. This work aims at recognizing visual content "in the wild", where the system cannot rely on any additional information besides the video itself. For text, within a scene text detection and recognition framework, we present a novel locally optimal adaptive binarization algorithm, implemented with integral histograms. It determines of an optimal threshold that maximizes the between-classes variance within a subwindow, with computational complexity independent from the size of the window itself. We obtain character recognition rates of 74%, as validated against ground truth of 8 presentation videos spanning over 1 hour and 45 minutes, which almost doubles the baseline performance of an open source OCR engine. For speaker faces, we detect, track, match, and finally select a humanly preferred face icon per speaker, based on three quality measures: resolution, amount of skin, and pose. We register a 87% accordance (51 out of 58 speakers) between the face indexes automatically generated from three unstructured presentation videos of approximately 45 minutes each, and human preferences recorded through Mechanical Turk experiments. For diagrams, we locate graphics inside frames showing a projected slide, cluster them according to an on-line algorithm based on a combination of visual and temporal information, and select and color-correct their representatives to match human preferences recorded through Mechanical Turk experiments. We register 71% accuracy (57 out of 81 unique diagrams properly identified, selected and color-corrected) on three hours of videos containing five different presentations. For mosaics, we combine two existing suturing measures, to extend video images into in-the-world coordinate system. A set of frames to be registered into a mosaic are sampled according to the PTZ camera movement, which is computed through least square estimation starting from the luminance constancy assumption. A local features based stitching algorithm is then applied to estimate the homography among a set of video frames and median blending is used to render pixels in overlapping regions of the mosaic. For two of these indexes, namely faces and diagrams, we present two novel MTurk-derived user data collections to determine viewer preferences, and show that they are matched in selection by our methods. The net result work of this thesis allows users to search, inside a video collection as well as within a single video clip, for a segment of presentation by professor X on topic Y, containing graph Z