Projects

Il progetto WiLIFE ha lo scopo di proporre e sviluppare un sistema innovativo per la gestione delle emergenze che sia in grado di coniugare efficacemente le nuove richieste operative con gli sviluppi tecnologi del settore. L’elemento principale di WiLIFE sarà un sistema per comunicazioni professionali in grado di combinare l’affidabilità e la sicurezza dei servizi offerti da reti professionali con i vantaggi prestazionali e di servizio di reti broadband di nuova concezione.

The research unit will develop three lines of research related to political institutions, social conflicts and economic policies. At a general level, the aim of this unit is to analyze the endogenous formation of political institutions and beliefs. We want to build dynamic general equilibrium models where institutions and different kind of beliefs affect each other and change endogenously over time in order to better understand the formation of institutions and beliefs in the society. The three directions of our research are the following. A first line focus on the study of the co-evolution of political institutions (such as democracies and dictatorships) and political ideology in terms of democratic culture. A second direction concerns the analysis of the interactions between religion and technology adoption with special attention on their effects on economic growth and fiscal policy outcomes. A third direction of this research focus on the effects of different political ideologies on the behavior of politicians, with special attention on their choices about reforms affecting their constituencies.

 Affiancamento del personale di Fabio Perini S.p.A. nell’individuazione e nella valutazione di progetti di innovazione per i propri prodotti.

 The MOBY-DIC project will research and develop a unique paradigm and supporting tool chain for the design of embedded control systems, based on modelling of the physical process and integrated design of both control algorithms and embedded circuits.

Il presente progetto si colloca nell’ambito delle attività del polo di innovazione Innopaper, che si pone tra le sue finalità la promozione di azioni di scouting e marketing nelle imprese per sostenere l’innovazione, lo sviluppo ed il trasferimento di competenze, il consolidamento dei rapporti tra università ed imprese, l’acquisizione di servizi avanzati e qualificati e la realizzazione — da parte delle imprese — di progetti innovativi di ricerca e sviluppo. In questo contesto, IMT ha il ruolo di identificare e validare una metodologia per il benchmarking dei processi aziendali, con un focus particolare per i processi che incidono maggiormente sul livello di integrazione della filiera produttiva.

 ICT developments both enable and also enforce large-scale, highly-connected systems in society and industry. Knowledge to cope with these emerging systems is lacking. HYCON2 will stimulate and establish the long-term integration of the European research community, leading institutions and industry in the strategic field of control of complex, large-scale, and networked dynamical systems. It will interconnect scattered groups to create critical mass and complementarity, and will provide the necessary visibility and communication with the European industries. HYCON2 will assess and coordinate basic and applied research, from fundamental analytical properties of complex systems to control design methodologies with networking, self-organizing and system-wide coordination. HYCON2 has identified several applications domains to motivate, integrate, and evaluate research in networked control. These domains are ground and aerospace transportation, electrical power networks, process industries, and biological and medical systems.

Analisi dell'impatto economico della ricerca scientifica e tecnologica nel settore delle scienze della vita applicate alla salute.

 The EU electric power system experiences a fundamental change in the quasi-monopolistic, top-down oriented, stable, and reasonable predictable arrangements of the past. It now spans continents, has hundreds of millions consumers and hundreds of thousand producers, from nuclear power plants to privately-owned and operated badly predictable renewables such as solar cells, wind and microturbines and operates in an increasingly liberalized market. These developments pose huge challenges for its reliable and economic operation. This proposal focuses on the real-time power imbalance in the power net, which arises as a consequence of errors in the prediction of both production and demand. As this power imbalance will increase both in size and in frequency, presents arrangements to cope with this imbalance are no longer valid. They are neither reliable nor economic anymore. This project proposes an advanced ICT and control framework for ancillary services (reserve capacity) which allows a more intelligent solution by giving consumers and producers clear, real-time financial incentives to adapt their consumption/production according to the actual needs of the power system. This design is based on a distributed control structure, enabled by a fast ICT infrastructure and advanced control theory to reliably and economically deal with the necessary ancillary services. Decisions by consumers, producers, power exchanges and TSOs can be taken locally, based on local or national preferences and regulation. Still, the embedded incentives of the proposed framework can guarantee that all these local decisions together contribute to the global objectives of the EE power net: a reliable electric energy supply at the lowest costs. Instead of investing in additional expensive and environment-unfriendly reserve production or storage facilities with a low utilization rate, the reliability and e4conomy are enforced by intelligent ICT and control.

L’Obiettivo principale del programma è il miglioramento della fruizione dei servizi pubblici e della qualità della vita nei contesti urbani attraverso la virtualizzazione e la digitalizzazione del cose. Il perseguimento di tale obiettivo deve passare attraverso il raggiungimento dei seguenti due grandi sotto-obiettivi: 1. sviluppo di una piattaforma Web aperta per la virtualizzazione degli oggetti e la loro gestione. 2. sviluppo di una soluzione wireless mobile basata sull’innovativa tecnologia multi-antenna che vada a superare il trade-off banda/costi/copertura attualmente presente nel mercato dei sistemi di comunicazione wireless.

Future advancements in ICT domain are closely linked to the understanding about how multi-level complex systems function. Indeed, multi-level dependencies may amplify cascade failures or make more sudden the collapse of the entire system. Recent large-scale blackouts resulting from cascades in the power-grid coupled to the control communication system witness this point very clearly. A better understanding of multi-level systems is essential for future ICT’s and for improving life quality and security in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. In this respect, complex networks science is particularly suitable for the many challenges that we face today, from critical infrastructures and communication systems, to techno-social and socio-economic networks. MULTIPLEX proposes a substantial paradigm shift for the development of a mathematical, computational and algorithmic framework for multi-level complex networks. Firstly, this will lead to a significant progress in the understanding and the prediction of complex multi-level systems. Secondly, it will enable a better control, and optimization of their dynamics. By combining mathematical analyses, modelling approaches and the use of massive heterogeneous data sets, we shall address several prominent aspects of multi-level complex networks, i.e. their topology, dynamical organization and evolution.

 Sviluppo su Lucca di una piattaforma di competenze e di tecnologie in tre ambiti ad alta rilevanza per la crescita del territorio: a) risparmio energetico e urbano b) sviluppo di tecnologie per la valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale locale c) sviluppo di un polo di competenze per analisi e servizi ad alto valore aggiunto per il sistema delle imprese; concorrendo a sviluppare Lucca come polo di rilevanza nazionale a tre linee di ricerca ad alta rilevanza applicativa per lo sviluppo del territorio, contribuendo a qualificare Lucca come filiera della Ricerca e dell’Innovazione.

The DOLFINS project addresses the global challenge of making the financial system better serve society by placing scientific evidence and citizens participation at the centre of the policy process in finance. The project strives to give scientific evidence and citizens participation central roles in the policy process concerning finance. DOLFINS will focus on two crucial and interconnected policy areas that will shape the public debate in the coming 5 years: How to achieve financial stability and how to facilitate the long-term investments required by the transition to a more sustainable, more innovative, less unequal and greener EU economy. The expected impact is to achieve crucial advances in reshaping the policy process to overcome the financial and political crisis faced by the EU. We will deliver quantitative tools to evaluate policies aiming to tame systemic risk and to foster sustainable investing. The tools will be based on fundamental research combining network models and algorithmic game theory with broader economic insights. 

 Crisis Lab, is a novel strategic research project financed by Italian Government (Progetti di Interesse CNR). The aim is of creating an Observatory of risks in domains ranging from finance, energy, markets, transport and urban systems, with interdisciplinary methodology based on the new science of Complex Networks. The focus of the Crisis lab is to develop models using empirical data to describe the vulnerabilities of diverse socio-technical systems which have a complex underlying dependency structure. The globalization of our planet requires state-of-the-art methodologies for better understanding the dependency structure of multi-level systems which can be vulnerable to catastrophic failure. The Crisis Lab project is an international movement for the development of a new economic thinking, which has the strategic aim to develop new ideas, which lead our economic future and the recovery of the financial sector of its supporting role to society and to the real economy.

One of the most pressing and fascinating challenges scientists face today, is understanding the complexity of our globally interconnected society. The big data arising from the digital breadcrumbs of human activities promise to let us scrutinize the ground truth of individual and collective behaviour at an unprecedented detail and scale. There is an urgent need to harness these opportunities for scientific advancement and for the social good. The main obstacle to this accomplishment, besides the scarcity of data scientists, is the lack of a large-scale open infrastructure, where big data and social mining research canbe carried out.  To this end, SoBigData proposes to create the Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem: a research infrastructure (RI) providing an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life, as recorded by “big data”. Building on several established national infrastructures, SoBigData will open up new research avenues in multiple research fields, including mathematics, ICT, and human, social and economic sciences, by enabling easy comparison, re-use and integration of state-of-the-art big social data, methods, and services, into new research. It will not only strengthen the existing clusters of excellence in social data mining research, but also create a pan-European, inter-disciplinary community of social data scientists, fostered by extensive training, networking, and innovation activities. In addition, as an open research infrastucture, SoBigData will promote repeatable and open science. Although SoBigData is primarily aimed at serving the needs of researchers, the openly available datasets and open source methods and services provided by the new research infrastructure will also impact industrial and other stakeholders (e.g. government bodies, non-profit organisations, funders, policy makers).

L’obiettivo è sviluppare un algoritmo per il calcolo dell’età vascolare, basato sul database europeo SCORE. In particolare verrà sviluppata una App rivolta ai medici, che sarà validata mediante misurazioni dirette vascolari con diagnostica strumentale non invasiva. A tale scopo saranno sottoposti alla valutazione dei fattori di rischio cardiovascolare e a valutazioni strumentali soggetti di età superiore ai 40 anni, i cui risultati saranno successivamente confrontati con la valutazione dell’età vascolare calcolata mediante algoritmo. Il progetto potrebbe avere una concreta ricaduta operativa sulle Aziende Sanitarie del territorio della Provincia di Lucca, permettendo di migliorare il servizio di prevenzione cardiovascolare ai pazienti.