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Raising concerns on global environment poor air quality and greenhouse gas effects on the environment have led policy makers and governments all around the world to embrace political agendas aiming to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Transportation is responsible for 24% of direct CO2 emissions from fuel combustion. Road vehicles – cars, trucks, buses account for almost 75% of total transport CO2 emissions, and emissions from aviation and shipping continue to rise (IEA 2020, Tracking Transport 2020). In this scenario it has become extremely important to develop a new powertrain system for vehicles that could reduce the dependence on carbon fossil fuel. The ICE – Internal Combustion Engines have represented for decades the uncontested form of technology used by vehicles to generate movement. Since a few years different solutions have made their way to the market: fuel cell, electric, hybrid, compressed gas. Of all these configurations, ICE still represents the dominant alternative, but it seems reasonable today to forecast that battery electric vehicles will finally substitute the thermal motors. The objective of this thesis is to retrieve the most important predictions that have been made for battery electric vehicles, both in terms of technical specifications and in market diffusion projections, and to compare those predicted values with the real outcome. Being a thesis of management engineering, the purpose of this analysis is to find out more on the methods and tools of forecasting that have generated accurate predictions and on those that instead have produced misleading information. At the same time we want to find out more about the complex dynamics of the automotive ecosystem, trying to explain why some predictions turned out to be inaccurate and instead what was correctly predicted. Le crescenti preoccupazioni riguardanti il surriscaldamento globale, la scarsa qualità dell'aria e gli effetti dei gas serra sull'ambiente, hanno portato i responsabili dei governi di tutto il mondo ad abbracciare programmi politici volti a ridurre le emissioni di gas serra nell'atmosfera. Il trasporto è responsabile del 24% delle emissioni dirette di CO2, dovute alla combustione del carburante. I veicoli stradali - automobili, camion, autobus rappresentano circa il 75% delle emissioni totali di CO2 dei trasporti e le emissioni del trasporto aereo e marittimo continuano ad aumentare (IEA 2020, Tracking Transport 2020). In questo scenario è diventato estremamente importante sviluppare un nuovo sistema di propulsione per veicoli che potrebbe ridurre la dipendenza dal combustibile fossile. Gli ICE - Internal Combustion Engine (motori a combustione interna) rappresentano da decenni la forma incontrastata di tecnologia utilizzata dai veicoli. Da qualche anno si sono fatte strada sul mercato diverse soluzioni: auto elettriche, ibride, a gas compresso, a idrogeno. Di tutte queste configurazioni, l'ICE rappresenta ancora l'alternativa dominante, ma oggi sembra ragionevole pensare che nel futuro i veicoli elettrici a batteria sostituiranno i motori termici. L'obiettivo di questo studio è quello di recuperare le previsioni che sono state fatte in passato per i veicoli elettrici a batteria, sia in termini di specifiche tecniche che di proiezioni di diffusione del mercato, e di confrontare quei valori previsti con il risultato realmente realizzatosi. Trattandosi di una tesi di ingegneria gestionale, lo scopo di questa analisi è anche quello di approfondire i metodi di previsione che hanno generato previsioni accurate e su quelli che invece hanno prodotto informazioni fuorvianti. Allo stesso tempo comprendere meglio le complesse dinamiche dell'ecosistema automobilistico, cercando di interpretare perché alcune previsioni si sono rivelate imprecise e altre hanno prodotto risultati accurati.

Planing craft are the most common boats used all around the world for small commercial, military and pleasure craft. Hulls available for planing craft are many, differing for geometry, shape and dimensional ratios. Despite of that, there is a lack of experimental data on these hulls and there are no effective and user-friendly tools, available for Power and Resistance Assessment in the Preliminary Design Phase, except in the case of very simple hull geometry. The goal of this PhD Thesis work is to try out a new effective and robust tool useful to the Resistance Assessment of a non-monohedral planing craft in calm water.

Nell'ultimo decennio i settori di ricerca nell'ambito dell'elaborazione automatica del linguaggio naturale (NLP) hanno acquisito sempre maggiore interesse, in concomitanza con l'introduzione continua di strumenti di machine learning innovativi. In generale, seppur sia comunque presente un'ambizione ideologica, l'interesse principale è riconducibile ad un piano prettamente applicativo, di natura sociale o politica, dove l'introduzione di nuove informazioni può apportare un notevole miglioramento in molti processi di interesse reale e contribuire all'indagine di nuove tendenze e/o conflitti. Il potenziale riscontrato nei presenti ambiti di ricerca ha attirato l'attenzione di aziende di notevole portata, al punto da finanziare progetti ambiziosi volti a rispondere a necessità emergenti proprie di molteplici realtà di diversa natura. A partire da queste premesse, il presente elaborato si pone come obiettivo la definizione di un modello atto a individuare punti di affinità tra due specifiche attività di recente interesse, denominate stance classification e argument structure prediction. I primi due capitoli introducono rispettivamente i concetti di stance classification e argumentation mining, soffermandosi, in particolar modo, sulle tecniche e le metodologie impiegate. Il terzo capitolo affronta il tema della definizione di uno strumento di classificazione comparabile con lo stato dell'arte nell'ambito della stance classification. Il quarto capitolo si interessa principalmente dell'individuazione di un legame tra i due settori di ricerca presi in esame, per poi mettere a confronto alcune tecniche specifiche attualmente impiegate per l'argument structure prediction con le principali adottate nell'ambito della stance classification. Infine, nel quinto e ultimo capitolo viene proposto un nuovo corpus per la sperimentazione degli stessi approcci impiegati nel capitolo precedente, con particolare attenzione a proporre degli opportuni test di confronto e di verifica.

The paper reviews the philosophical literature on the epistemology of modelling in contemporary economics. In particular, it focuses on open questions concerning the epistemic role of models, the validity of inferences from the models to the world, and the legitimacy of their use for purposes of explanation, prediction and intervention. ; In questa rassegna esaminiamo la letteratura filosofica che si occupa della funzione epistemologica dei modelli economici, mettendo in evidenza gli aspetti del dibattito che rimangono ancora irrisolti. In particolare, ci concentriamo sul loro ruolo epistemico, sulla validità delle inferenze da modello a mondo reale e sulla legittimità del loro utilizzo per spiegare i fenomeni economici, prevederne gli sviluppi, e guidare interventi efficaci di politica economica.

Many intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) may undergo liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) and participate in the formation of membraneless organelles in the cell, thereby contributing to the regulation and compartmentalization of intracellular biochemical reactions. The phase behavior of IDPs is sequence dependent, and its investigation through molecular simulations requires protein models that combine computational efficiency with an accurate description of intramolecular and intermolecular interactions. We developed a general coarse-grained model of IDPs, with residue-level detail, based on an extensive set of experimental data on single-chain properties. Ensemble-averaged experimental observables are predicted from molecular simulations, and a data-driven parameter-learning procedure is used to identify the residue-specific model parameters that minimize the discrepancy between predictions and experiments. The model accurately reproduces the experimentally observed conformational propensities of a set of IDPs. Through two-body as well as large-scale molecular simulations, we show that the optimization of the intramolecular interactions results in improved predictions of protein self-association and LLPS. ; We thank Veronica Ryan and Nicolas L. Fawzi for sharing the PRE data for FUS LCD, FUS12E LCD, and A2 LCD as well as Robert Konrat for sharing the intramolecular PRE data for Osteopontin. We thank Robert B. Best for sharing data on compaction of IDPs; Gregory L. Dignon and Jeetain Mittal for help setting up simulations with the HPS model; and Tanja Mittag, Massimiliano Bonomi, and Benjamin Schuler for helpful discussions. We acknowledge funding from the BRAINSTRUC structural biology initiative from the Lundbeck Foundation (Grant R155-2015-2666) and acknowledge access to computational resources from the Resource for Biomolecular Simulations (ROBUST) (supported by Novo Nordisk Foundation Grant NNF18OC0032608) and Biocomputing Core Facility at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen. T.K.S. acknowledges support from the Novo Scholarship Programme 2021. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement 101025063. ; Peer reviewed

Is it possible to think progress and history not as a mere succession of facts but as a process involving a complex and determinate meaning? Marxism (and its political history, which cannot be reduced to crime nor completely justified in the name of an ideal) still offers us a critical-conceptual apparatus, able to analyze the concrete reality of our times with lucidity and accuracy. The quality of its methodology and tools is the most important inheritance of Marx and Engels' lesson. In this perspective, we absolutely need to keep philosophical criticism and historical memory together. This choice implies the loss of that side of Marxism that indulges to philosophical-ideological predictions (and therefore to forms of prophetism) and the pursuit of a critical theory of society that, thanks to Gramsci's indication, gives us a dynamic conception of history. A conception that moves from the objectivity of history, but at the same time emphasizes the role of subjectivity and its freedom.Keywords: Progress; Historicism; Marxism; Gramsci.

In 2008 Chris Anderson wrote a provocative piece titled The End of Theory. The idea being that we no longer need to abstract and hypothesis; we simply need to let machines lead us to the patterns, trends, and relationships in social, economic, political, and environmental relationships. According to Anderson, the new availability of huge amounts of data offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models and unified theories. But numbers, contrary to Anderson's assertion, do not, in fact, speak for themselves. From the neuroscience's standpoint, every choice we make is a reflection of an, often unstated, set of assumptions and hypotheses about what we want and expect from the data: no assertion, no prediction, no decision making is possible without an a priori opinion, without a project. Data-driven science essentially refers to the application of mathematics and technology on data to extract insights for problems, which are very clearly defined. In the real world, however, not all problems are such. To help solve them, one needs to understand and appreciate the context. The problem of landscape becomes, for this reason, critical and decisive. It requires an interdisciplinary approach consisting of several different competencies and skills. ; 8 ; 1 ; 117 ; 146 ; 8 ; Ethics in Progress

This collection of essays examines various aspects of regional development and the issues of internationalization. The first essay investigates the implications of the impressive growth of China from a rural-urban perspective and addresses the topic of convergence in China by employing a non-parametrical approach to study the distribution dynamics of per capita income at province, rural and urban levels. To better understand the degree of inequality characterizing China and the long-term predictions of convergence or divergence of its different territorial aggregations, the second essay formulates a composite indicator of Regional Development (RDI) to benchmark development at province and sub-province level. The RDI goes beyond the uni-dimensional concept of development, generally proxied by the GDP per capita, and gives attention to the rural-urban dimension. The third essay "Internationalization and Trade Specialization in Italy. The role of China in the international intra-firm trade of the Italian regions" - deals with another aspect of regional economic development: the progressive de-industrialisation and de-localization of the local production. This essay looks at the trade specialization of selected Italian regions (those regions specialized in manufacturing) and the fragmentation of the local production on a global scale. China represents in this context an important stakeholder and the paper documents the importance of this country in the regional intra-firm trade.

open ; Trying to formulate sustainability in the context of innovative practices emerges a new pervasive idea recognized in the international debate by the smart city concept. To plan sustainability aiming to govern competitiveness may appear as a new key factor in any urban area dealing with globalization process, but actual problems like population dynamics, social cohesion and urban efficiency require better understanding about meanings and strategies for transition. The thesis attempts to outline how some categories such as innovation, sustainability and global interconnection, underlying in the smart city concept, are absorbed in the exercises of prediction of the future and visioning that many governments in Europe and in the world are beginning to experiment. The discourses and narratives on smart cities have to be compared into a globalized, competitive and extremely changeable reality; strategies that different cities try to improve to respond the need for transition require different resources and capabilities over time and space. In these terms smart city becomes an opportunity to build a new vision of the future capable to bring coherence through shared strategies of action, but if we want to be successful throughout this process, we need to recognize the importance of proceeding to a new definition of objectives to be achieved. The research aims to investigate the issue of smart cities by two different aspects: on the one hand trying to understand how smart city defines a new paradigm for urban development; on the other investigates practices related to that concept to highlight possible operational tools or any unexpected consequences. ; Pianificazione Territoriale E Urbana ; open ; Reginaldi, Michele ; Reginaldi, Michele

Questa ricerca analizza le implicazioni derivanti dall'introduzione della procedura di co-decisione come procedura legislativa ordinaria nel processo di riforma della politica agricola comune. La diversa distribuzione dei poteri tra le istituzioni europee modifica gli assetti istituzionali e fornisce al Parlamento il ruolo di colegislatore in materia agricola. La forma assunta dalla nuova politica agricola europea scaturisce dalla configurazione dei poteri di contrattazione che ciascun attore ha mostrato nella sede dei triloghi negoziali. La ricerca tenta di verificare la accuratezza predittiva di diversi modelli di contrattazione legislativa attraverso il confronto e la verifica degli errori di predizione sui risultati finali di alcune questioni salienti della riforma della Politica Agricola Comune e allo stesso tempo, cerca di identificare il peso del potere del Parlamento europeo in veste di co-legislatore nel processo di riforma della PAC post-2013. ; This research analyzes the implications of the introduction of the codecision procedure as the ordinary legislative procedure in the process Common Agricultural Policy reform. The different distribution of powers between the European institutions modified the institutional structure and give to the European Parliament the role of colegislator in agricultural matters. The form taken by the new European agricultural policy derives from the configuration of the bargaining power that each actor has shown in the seat of the trialogue negotiations. The research attempts to verify the predictive accuracy of different models of legislative bargaining through the comparison and verification of prediction errors on the final results of some salient issues emerged during the Common Agricultural Policy reform process, and at the same time, try to identify the weight of the power of European Parliament as colegislator in the of CAP reform process post-2013.

International audience ; The tale of a meeting between Leonardo and Savonarola in the summer of 1495, later reported by Vasari (1550 and 1568) but confirmed by a memorandum remained in Leonardo's possession (Codex Atlanticus, f. 628 r), which refers explicitly to a "mission" assigned to him (presumably by Ludovico Sforza) to go to Florence, in order to get (through a competent mediator, probably Bernardo Rucellai) a detailed report about the new political rules promoted by the friar, lends credibility to a hypothesis of comparison between their anthropological conceptions, especially as they emerge from their "transfigured" use of the prophetic semantics, despite their shared repudiation of astrological quackery. If, on the one hand, Savonarola's preaching does not have any properly predictive character, in terms of intentional "divination", standing rather as a projection or representation of the contingency of the current days, in purely political terms, Leonardo's riddles, which he literally called "prophecies", on the other hand - and similarly - transform the genre of presages or predictions into entertainment tools for courtly audiences, that, however, in some cases, become a vehicle for a critical evaluation of the troubles of contemporary society. The likelihood that, on the occasion of his convocation in Florence in 1495, Leonardo was able to listen to Savonarola's sermons, so steeped in apocalyptic prophecy, may provide an explanation to the appearance of writings called "prophecies", among his notes, just in the last five years of the century. Their underlying vision of man, clearly pessimistic, offers significant points of contact with the negative anthropology advocated by Savonarola's preaching, which also makes use of animal apology, especially in the conceptual and ideological interpretation of the "anti-human" conflictuality among men, that makes them "beasts" towards themselves, in a sort of anticipation of Hobbes' famous motto homo homini lupus.

Why some powers manage to coordinate their security efforts while others confront each other as rivals is still one of the most relevant and debated questions in the field of IR theory. The dissertation wants to give a contribution to this important debate. In particular, the main goal of the research is to analyse the dynamics of great power interactions after the end of hegemonic conflicts, that is to understand why, following the defeat of the common enemies, some of the winning allies continue to cooperate, while others begin to engage in political and military competition. In order to understand this difference, the study compares the explanatory value of two rival theoretical perspectives: neorealism, in its main version of the balance of power framework, and a liberal approach focused on domestic politics. The thesis is divided in two sections. In the first, I do summarize the main assumptions and predictions of the theories, from which I derive two different sets of hypotheses on the evolution of post-war great power relations. In the second part, I test the hypotheses by focusing on two cases of post-war alignment dynamics: 1) the relations among Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain and France after the Napoleonic wars; 2) the relations among the US, the UK, France and Italy after the end of WWI. The historical cases disconfirm the logic of the balance of power and confirm the liberal hypotheses, seeing that the results of the analysis show changes in the domestic structures of the great powers had a much larger impact on the emergence of new alliances and rivalries than did the international distribution of power. In the conclusion of the dissertation, I provide the reader with a discussion of the main theoretical implications of the empirical findings.

We critically depend on the Internet for our professional, personal and political lives. Researchers have been developing monitoring and measurement techniques to gather an accurate and exhaustive knowledge about how this complex, critical and largely opaque ecosystem of independent networks actually operates. Among the aspects of interest, tracing Internet paths (i.e. routers and links traversed by the network traffic sent towards a given destination) has attracted large interest from the research community with several applications including the reverse engineering of the network infrastructure, the monitoring and prediction of Internet paths and their performance, the management and troubleshooting of the network, the organization of efficient overlay networks and the investigation of the network routing and its pathologies. However, the techniques developed for tracing Internet paths are affected by several severe limitations causing the information obtained about the paths under investigation to be potentially incomplete or inaccurate with a significant impact on the applications relying on them. For instance, state of the art path tracing techniques may provide inaccurate topological information causing a distortion of the inferred network topology. Furthermore, by reviewing the literature, we notice how researchers, network administrators and systems relying on path tracing techniques are often interested in exploring specific Internet paths about which they know only some characteristics such as the traversed Autonomous Systems (AS). However, the ability to explore particular Internet routes strongly depends on (i) the availability of multiple vantage points well-distributed in the Internet (i.e. the machines issuing path tracing measurement) and (ii) the ability of identifying which specific vantage point to use and destination to target in order to explore the path of interest. Regarding the first challenge, researchers might use the vantage points made available by several public experimental testbeds. However, the great heterogeneity of interfaces and internal mechanisms of these testbeds represented a strong disincentive: as a consequence, researchers tend to use always the same testbed and its relatively small amount of vantage points. Regarding the second point, to the best of our knowledge, there are no available methodologies to identify which particular path tracing measurements to perform in order to explore a particular path of interest. In this thesis, we developed methodologies, techniques and a system for advancing the state of the art in the field of Internet path tracing. After having detailed the Internet path tracing techniques currently available, we critically analize their limitations as well as the partial solutions documented in literature: while some limitations attracted great interest from the community (e.g. load balancing), several other limitations have been largely ignored or not exhaustively investigated or resolved. As a first contribution, we present a set of innovative active probing techniques augmenting state of the art path tracing techniques with the specific goal to address unresolved limitations in Internet path tracing. More precisely, we present measurement techniques to (i) detect and locate hidden routers (i.e. network device invisible to path tracing techniques); (ii) detect third-party addresses (i.e. an anomaly causing the inference of AS not actually traversed on the path towards the destination); (iii) dissect in chunks the overall delay experienced along the path; (iv) trace the path towards the destination with a totally alternative path tracing approach complementary to the one universally adopted. As a second contribution, we identify two additional limitations in Internet path tracing: state of the art path tracing techniques may induce one to overestimate the number of equal-cost paths towards the destination and to infer non-existing changes in the network routing. For this analysis, we rely on alias resolution techniques (including a technique we present in this thesis) whose goal is to identify the addresses belonging to the same network device. As a third contribution, we designed, implemented and evaluated PANDA, a first implementation of a general architecture providing a path tracing on-demand service that aggregates under a unique simple interface the vantage points made available by different experimental testbeds very rarely jointly used due to the great heterogeneity of the exposed interfaces. PANDA is designed to satisfy complex user queries requesting path tracing measurements for Internet path with a priori known characteristics. This goal is reached by relying on a BGP-based prediction engine.

Engine development has nowadays to deal with a stringent legislation on the pollutant emissions, and a constant attempt to reduce the fuel consumption, as required from the marketing, the governments and the customers. The engine development is high complicated process and CFD simulations play a significant role. They are used at various stages of the design process with different purposes. The goal of this work is to develop a procedure to simulate the mixture formation and wall impingement in GDI engines. In particular, the work is focused on the air motion in-cylinder, on the injection phase, until the mixture formation before the ignition and the research of a correlation between the wall impingement and soot measurement. The ideal workflow is to consider also combustion simulation to relate soot formation estimation with experimental data of emission. The simulation of combustion in gasoline engines is nowadays still in the research phase, and it is generally not used for the engine design. Although it constitutes an interesting research topic, it requires a computation and experimental effort far beyond the current state of the art in the daily engine development process, and it is not covered in this work. On the other end the experimental procedure to measure liquid film formation in engines during the injection process is highly complicated and require facilities not available for this work. All these limitation from simulation and experiments point of view lead us to the decision of correlating wall wet formation of simulation with PN measurement from experiments. The methodology developed is divided in three main simulation: cold flow simulation, injection simulation and wall wet analysis. In the first part the engine flow is validated focusing the attention on velocity magnitude and turbulent kinetic energy fields. In parallel the injection model is calibrated and validate in the spray box, using as target the experimental spray penetration length and droplets size distribution. Once the first 2 simulation are validate, the injection model is implemented in the engine simulation to evaluate the liquid film formation. If a correlation between the in-cylinder wet surface and soot measurement is found, in the future engine development process will be possible to use CFD to estimate liquid film and from that have a prediction of soot formation. This methodology allows to save time and money that always represents a critical point in the engine development.

In the last years the interest in the study and monitoring of the Earth has been gradually growing, and many institutions have planned missions for these purposes. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is one of the most promising approaches to acquire images of every part of the world in short time. The characteristics that make the SAR a very powerful instrument are its capability to operate independently of weather conditions, at day and night, and to reach target that are inaccessible to ground measurement. There are many fields of interest for Earth Observation (both civilian and military), such as the detection and surveillance of ships or marine traffic, monitoring of agricultural fields, study of the winds in tropical storms and study of oceanic current, monitoring the damage caused by earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, inundation or other natural disasters, and more over. Natural disasters, in particular landslides, frequently affect our country, Italy. The hydrogeological risk is very high during rainy periods, and a space observation can be useful as support to civil protection in times of emergency, but also in the next phase of damage assessment. The knowledge of soil moisture behaviour is critical in different environmental and land activities; for example is the basis for prediction of river floods, rainfalls, avalanches and landslides. Given the link between specific soil parameters (such as moisture and surface roughness) and permittivity, it is possible to accurately measure these parameters with SAR data, starting from the measurements of the dielectric constant. The main problem is to separate the individual effects of the various parameters on the backscattered signal. However, this is possible using polarimetric data, in fact this data permits to minimize the effect of vegetation and surface roughness by using polarization ratios: combining cross- and co- polarizations ratios it can be possible to determine the soil moisture regardless of surface roughness. This research is funded by the Italian Space Agency in the framework of Cosmo-SkyMed Seconda Generazione project; it is focused on soil moisture retrieval by using polarimetric data. I analysed some Cosmo-SkyMed first generation polarimetric data (provided by courtesy of Italian Space Agency), in order to demonstrate the capability of the new generation of high resolution SAR system, and to suggest some possible upgrades or improvements for the new generation of ASI satellites.