4,481 research outputs found
Human brain distinctiveness based on EEG spectral coherence connectivity
The use of EEG biometrics, for the purpose of automatic people recognition,
has received increasing attention in the recent years. Most of current analysis
rely on the extraction of features characterizing the activity of single brain
regions, like power-spectrum estimates, thus neglecting possible temporal
dependencies between the generated EEG signals. However, important
physiological information can be extracted from the way different brain regions
are functionally coupled. In this study, we propose a novel approach that fuses
spectral coherencebased connectivity between different brain regions as a
possibly viable biometric feature. The proposed approach is tested on a large
dataset of subjects (N=108) during eyes-closed (EC) and eyes-open (EO) resting
state conditions. The obtained recognition performances show that using brain
connectivity leads to higher distinctiveness with respect to power-spectrum
measurements, in both the experimental conditions. Notably, a 100% recognition
accuracy is obtained in EC and EO when integrating functional connectivity
between regions in the frontal lobe, while a lower 97.41% is obtained in EC
(96.26% in EO) when fusing power spectrum information from centro-parietal
regions. Taken together, these results suggest that functional connectivity
patterns represent effective features for improving EEG-based biometric
systems.Comment: Key words: EEG, Resting state, Biometrics, Spectral coherence, Match
score fusio
The MEV project: design and testing of a new high-resolution telescope for Muography of Etna Volcano
The MEV project aims at developing a muon telescope expressly designed for
the muography of Etna Volcano. In particular, one of the active craters in the
summit area of the volcano would be a suitable target for this experiment. A
muon tracking telescope with high imaging resolution was built and tested
during 2017. The telescope is a tracker based on extruded scintillating bars
with WLS fibres and featuring an innovative read-out architecture. It is
composed of three XY planes with a sensitive area of \SI{1}{m^2}; the angular
resolution does not exceeds \SI{0.4}{\milli\steradian} and the total angular
aperture is about \SI{45}{\degree}. A special effort concerned the design
of mechanics and electronics in order to meet the requirements of a detector
capable to work in a hostile environment such as the top of a tall volcano, at
a far distance from any facility. The test phase started in January 2017 and
ended successfully at the end of July 2017. An extinct volcanic crater (the
Monti Rossi, in the village of Nicolosi, about 15km from Catania) is the target
of the measurement. The detector acquired data for about 120 days and the
preliminary results are reported in this work
La gestione degli autori di reati sessuali tra psicopatologia e rischio di recidiva, prospettive trattamentali
Sex crimes provoke alarm and strong reactions from the public to a greater extent than any other type of crimes; this occurs especially when the victims are perceived to be particularly weak subjects and/or the perpetrators are affected by psychiatric disease.
For these reasons, over the last few years a growing attention has been paid to abusive sex behaviors in the medical and legal fields, leading to the introduction and development of legal procedures and alternative treatments to allow comprehensive management of the different aspects of the phenomenon.
This paper analyzes the relationship between mental disorders and sex crimes. Moreover, we focus on the treatment programs offered to sex offenders in some European and North American countries and, in view of the reported results, evaluate their possible introduction in Italy. Such programs are currently in force in many countries, including the United States, Scandinavia, France, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom.
They include a first phase of evaluation of the level of risk posed by the perpetrator, followed by a treatment phase, that often includes psychiatric therapy and the use of drugs. To illustrate this type of approach, we describe the U.S. and the German experiences of subject evaluation and classification, as well as the treatments administered and the benefits observed.
The data available on sex offenders show a strong risk of reiteration of the crime and therefore the need for a specific management of the problem. This has convinced certain countries to adopt specific treatment strategies, even mandatory ones, that raise ethical and legal issues, especially when they involve the mandatory use of drugs. We believe these issues warrant further in-depth analysis, as well as evaluation of the role that such programs could have in Italy
Synchronization in Scale Free networks: The role of finite size effects
Synchronization problems in complex networks are very often studied by
researchers due to its many applications to various fields such as
neurobiology, e-commerce and completion of tasks. In particular, Scale Free
networks with degree distribution , are widely used in
research since they are ubiquitous in nature and other real systems. In this
paper we focus on the surface relaxation growth model in Scale Free networks
with , and study the scaling behavior of the fluctuations, in
the steady state, with the system size . We find a novel behavior of the
fluctuations characterized by a crossover between two regimes at a value of
that depends on : a logarithmic regime, found in previous
research, and a constant regime. We propose a function that describes this
crossover, which is in very good agreement with the simulations. We also find
that, for a system size above , the fluctuations decrease with
, which means that the synchronization of the system improves as
increases. We explain this crossover analyzing the role of the
network's heterogeneity produced by the system size and the exponent of the
degree distribution.Comment: 9 pages and 5 figures. Accepted in Europhysics Letter
On a non-isothermal model for nematic liquid crystals
A model describing the evolution of a liquid crystal substance in the nematic
phase is investigated in terms of three basic state variables: the {\it
absolute temperature} \teta, the {\it velocity field} \ub, and the {\it
director field} \bd, representing preferred orientation of molecules in a
neighborhood of any point of a reference domain. The time evolution of the
velocity field is governed by the incompressible Navier-Stokes system, with a
non-isotropic stress tensor depending on the gradients of the velocity and of
the director field \bd, where the transport (viscosity) coefficients vary
with temperature. The dynamics of \bd is described by means of a parabolic
equation of Ginzburg-Landau type, with a suitable penalization term to relax
the constraint |\bd | = 1. The system is supplemented by a heat equation,
where the heat flux is given by a variant of Fourier's law, depending also on
the director field \bd. The proposed model is shown compatible with
\emph{First and Second laws} of thermodynamics, and the existence of
global-in-time weak solutions for the resulting PDE system is established,
without any essential restriction on the size of the data
A-DInSAR performance for updating landslide inventory in mountain areas. An example from Lombardy region (Italy)
This work focuses on the capabilities and limitations of the Advanced Satellite SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) Interferometry (A-DInSAR) in wooded and mountainous regions, with the aim to get insights on the performances for studying slow-moving landslides. The considered critical issues are related to the SAR acquisition geometries (angle of incidence of the satellite line of sight, ascending and descending geometries) and to the physical and morphological features of the slopes (land use, aspect and slope angles), which influence the measuring points coverage. 26 areas in Lombardy Region (Italy), affected by known slope instability phenomena, have been analyzed through A-DInSAR technique, using COSMO-SkyMed images. The results allowed to outline general considerations about the effectiveness of A-DInSAR analysis of a single dataset (descending or ascending dataset), selected accordingly to the aspect of the slopes. Moreover, we aimed to quantitatively describe the capability to update the state of activity of several previously mapped landslides using satellite SAR Interferometry results. Although in a wooded and mountainous region, where the chances of retrieving radar targets for satellite SAR analysis are generally low, the A-DInSAR results have allowed to detect landslides’ reactivations or new landslides and to update the inventory for about 70% of the investigated areas
Super-KMS functionals for graded-local conformal nets
Motivated by a few preceding papers and a question of R. Longo, we introduce
super-KMS functionals for graded translation-covariant nets over R with
superderivations, roughly speaking as a certain supersymmetric modification of
classical KMS states on translation-covariant nets over R, fundamental objects
in chiral algebraic quantum field theory. Although we are able to make a few
statements concerning their general structure, most properties will be studied
in the setting of specific graded-local (super-) conformal models. In
particular, we provide a constructive existence and partial uniqueness proof of
super-KMS functionals for the supersymmetric free field, for certain subnets,
and for the super-Virasoro net with central charge c>= 3/2. Moreover, as a
separate result, we classify bounded super-KMS functionals for graded-local
conformal nets over S^1 with respect to rotations.Comment: 30 pages, revised version (to appear in Ann. H. Poincare
Synthesis and characterisation of a new benzamide-containing nitrobenzoxadiazole as a GSTP1-1 inhibitor endowed with high stability to metabolic hydrolysis
The antitumor agent 6-((7-nitrobenzo[c][1,2,5]oxadiazol-4-yl)thio)hexan-1-ol (1) is a potent inhibitor of GSTP1-1, a glutathione S-transferase capable of inhibiting apoptosis by binding to JNK1 and TRAF2. We recently demonstrated that, unlike its parent compound, the benzoyl ester of 1 (compound 3) exhibits negligible reactivity towards GSH, and has a different mode of interaction with GSTP1-1. Unfortunately, 3 is susceptible to rapid metabolic hydrolysis. In an effort to improve the metabolic stability of 3, its ester group has been replaced by an amide, leading to N-(6-((7-nitrobenzo[c][1,2,5]oxadiazol-4-yl)thio)hexyl)benzamide (4). Unlike 3, compound 4 was stable to human liver microsomal carboxylesterases, but retained the ability to disrupt the interaction between GSTP1-1 and TRAF2 regardless of GSH levels. Moreover, 4 exhibited both a higher stability in the presence of GSH and a greater cytotoxicity towards cultured A375 melanoma cells, in comparison with 1 and its analog 2. These findings suggest that 4 deserves further preclinical testing
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