Fernanda Strozzi

This work aims to figure out a landscape of the scientific and technological production on the Smart City concept. Smart cities have attracted the attention of both academia and industry. However, the state of the art is still unclear and most of the focus has been on literature reviews without looking at technological aspects. To achieve this objective, a scientometric dynamic methodology has been applied on paper and patent data. This methodology combines traditional systematic reviews with the analysis of networks and keywords. These dynamic analyses allow depicting the evolution of Smart City, the research and technological directions, the critical areas, the emerging topics and it reveals the position of the technological evolution with respect to the scientific one. These techniques reveal that while research papers are concerned with social aspect, the technology is mainly focused on specific technical solutions without completely looking at the citizen role. Moreover, patents are not fully embodying sustainability concepts yet.

A quantitative analysis is conducted of the distribution of budgets, participants and host countries from a compilation of EU-funded CORDIS projects with starting dates from Q2 2007 till Q3 2019. The projects are selected on the basis of containing the word 'quantum' in their objectives description texts. An accompanying semantic analysis of the concatenated texts is conducted by mapping the projects budget timeline to the word associations of the word quantum to its related technical fields.

A divergence-based procedure is applied to trading in the S&P 500 stock index. Such a procedure has previously and successfully been applied to trading in foreign currencies. Performance is tested against a benchmark, i.e. a passive portfolio replicating the S&P 500 stock index; its robustness is also checked in a few subperiods. According to our numerical evidence, higher annualised mean returns, i.e. higher final portfolio values, as well as lower annualised standard deviations can be obtained in all subperiods. However, basic Montecarlo tests are failed. The on-line extension of the present off-line implementation is taken into consideration, as it is more suited for an operational use.

Local public transport can promote private economic activities in the area that it serves. In being part of a "Public-Private Partnership" (PPP), the economic agents who benefit from a public service can participate to its definition and its costs. This paper studies the public transport in the town of Castellanza (Varese, Italy), where Cattaneo University is located, together with some major private clinics, schools and supermarkets. The techniques of the theory of cooperative games have been used to allocate the costs of the service and to identify the most convenient coalitions for Cattaneo University.

Networks can be used to represent objects embedded in Euclidian space or symbolize multi-dimensional links between heterogeneous objects ranging from words or logical associations to social relationships and natural phenomena. In view of their size and range of applications, percolation in networks is a phenomenon that can simulate many types of processes progressing through a network. In our study we take a particular interest in understanding how percolation can be applied to understand the propagation of signals through a sensor network field; more specifically we consider percolation from a source to some arbitrary destination.

The present paper aims at presenting the results obtained by four work groups made of Engineering students of the Mathematical Methods for Industrial Application class at LIUC-Università Cattaneo in Castellanza. In particular, the present paper shows the areas of interest of the work groups, whose analyses have focused on, and how Literature has previously addressed them. In addition, the present paper describes the research questions proposed by the groups and which measures of the complex networks theory are used to respond them. Last, the present paper points out the managerial implications recommended by the work groups, advised by the authors, due to the network analysis.

The necessity to include environmental considerations in the assessment of supply chain performance is gaining increasing attention from both a research and practical perspective. Scientific contributions focusing on this topic are progressively being submitted to the academic community consideration. Given this trend towards a proliferation of papers, the need to systematically review and classify the existing contributions provides the motivation for this study. The methodology adopted consists is applying the Systematic Literature Network Analysis (SLNA) that combines a Systematic Literature Review approach to identify the most relevant articles to be included in the analysis and Citation Network Analysis in order to unfold the dynamics of the field under study and to identify clusters of papers. From this analysis a classification of papers emerges in accordance with ISO14000 framework. This paper contributes to the growing debate on environmental indicators for supply chains, by analyzing the existing body of knowledge on this topic and providing a classification of the environmental indicators.

Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di eseguire una revisione della letteratura dei concetti di robustezza e resilienza nel Supply Chain Design (SCD) definiti secondo la teoria delle reti complesse. Per fare ciò è stata utilizzata la Citation Network Analysis ed il relativo pacchetto software Citation Network Analyzer (CNA). Esistono banche dati di contributi che considerano i concetti di robustezza e resilienza nel SCD (http://www.husdal.com/2008/04/28/robustness-flexibility-and-resilience-in- la fornitura-catena), ma pochi di loro tentano di quantificare questi concetti utilizzando l’analisi della rete di citazioni ovvero appicando misure in vigore dalla teoria delle Complex Network (CN). La metodologia utilizzata in questo lavoro è stata la seguente: in primo luogo abbiamo individuato le parole chiave pertinenti, poi, con CNA (20Overview.pdf http://www.lecy.info/resources/CNA%), abbiamo cercato in Google Scholar utilizzando stringhe, derivate dal raggruppamento delle parole chiave, per trovare i documenti contenenti queste parole chiave nel summary o nel testo, e quindi rilevanti per i nostri scopi. Utilizzando il software CNA abbiamo costruito una rete di citazioni ed, infine, alla rete generata è stata applicata l’ analisi tipica delle reti di citazioni che permette di individuare i paper più rilevanti ed i cluster in cui si possono raggruppare i diversi articoli. Anche se il soggetto di questa revisione della letteratura può essere di scarso interesse per un vasto pubblico, riteniamo che la metodologia impiegata sia di applicabilità generale. Qualsiasi ricercatore, che vuole studiare o applicare i concetti di altre discipline, necessita di competenze in diversi campi. La metodologia proposta è conveniente, veloce ed obiettiva, anche se presenta ovviamente i limiti derivanti dalla considerazione del solo processo di citazione. ; Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di eseguire una revisione della letteratura dei concetti di robustezza e resilienza nel Supply Chain Design (SCD) definiti secondo la teoria delle reti complesse. Per fare ciò è stata utilizzata la Citation Network Analysis ed il relativo pacchetto software Citation Network Analyzer (CNA). Esistono banche dati di contributi che considerano i concetti di robustezza e resilienza nel SCD (http://www.husdal.com/2008/04/28/robustness-flexibility-and-resilience-in- la fornitura-catena), ma pochi di loro tentano di quantificare questi concetti utilizzando l’analisi della rete di citazioni ovvero appicando misure in vigore dalla teoria delle Complex Network (CN). La metodologia utilizzata in questo lavoro è stata la seguente: in primo luogo abbiamo individuato le parole chiave pertinenti, poi, con CNA (20Overview.pdf http://www.lecy.info/resources/CNA%), abbiamo cercato in Google Scholar utilizzando stringhe, derivate dal raggruppamento delle parole chiave, per trovare i documenti contenenti queste parole chiave nel summary o nel testo, e quindi rilevanti per i nostri scopi. Utilizzando il software CNA abbiamo costruito una rete di citazioni ed, infine, alla rete generata è stata applicata l’ analisi tipica delle reti di citazioni che permette di individuare i paper più rilevanti ed i cluster in cui si possono raggruppare i diversi articoli. Anche se il soggetto di questa revisione della letteratura può essere di scarso interesse per un vasto pubblico, riteniamo che la metodologia impiegata sia di applicabilità generale. Qualsiasi ricercatore, che vuole studiare o applicare i concetti di altre discipline, necessita di competenze in diversi campi. La metodologia proposta è conveniente, veloce ed obiettiva, anche se presenta ovviamente i limiti derivanti dalla considerazione del solo processo di citazione.

In this work we have analysed correlations between electricity price, total consumption and disturbances using the data of the Nordic electricity market, that is monthly spot prices, disturbances and consumption from the beginning of January 2000 until the end of December 2006. The preliminary data treatment included the elimination of trends by applying the difference operator and subtracting the regression line. In addition we considered the volatilities of price, disturbances and total consumption. Addressed questions were: are monthly spot prices correlated with disturbances? Can we increase the correlation by shifting the time series and can we use the evolution of one time series to anticipate the behaviour of the other? Can we detect at least some windows of correlation? The main conclusion of this work is that there is correlation between disturbances and prices: by using the Cross Correlation function we found a strong correlation between the volatility of disturbances and de-trended prices or the volatility of prices, but only on windows of six or twelve months – that is, elevated price volatility precedes elevated disturbance volatility. To analyse the information on a shorter period, we have also applied Cross Recurrence Plot (CRP) analysis.

Chemical toxicity in most of the cases has a metabolic component and metabolic pathways are the most studied biochemical reactions. For these reasons we have started to analyze modelling approaches for studying toxicity at molecular level using the metabolism and focusing in HepG2 cell lines. Two approaches have been investigated. The first consists on the analysis of metabolic fluxes in HepG2 under different toxicants concentrations by complex network analysis tools. This is important when a correlation between dose-response curves and metabolomic data has to be established. The second approach is based on the development and application of a simplified dynamic model of metabolism. This approach requires the specification of the biochemical reactions as well as their kinetic parameters and, therefore, at the moment, the degree of detail in the description of HepG2 metabolism is reduced. The results suggest that a combined approach starting from metabolic fluxes and then solving the kinetic equations as our experimental data and knowledge of metabolic pathways increases is the most promising avenue to develop a quantitative approach of toxicity at molecular level. In addition, there is the necessity to link the molecular level approach with the cell growth and mortality with an intermediate level that translates metabolism changes into measurable parameters in cell-based assays.