Search

Introduction. Here we reported the virological, entomological and epidemiological characteristics of the large autochthonous outbreak of dengue (DENV) occurred in a small village of the Lombardy region (Northern Italy) during summer 2023. Methods. After the diagnosis of the first autochthonous case on 18 August 2023, public health measures, including epidemiological investigation and vector control measures, were carried out. A serological screening for DENV antibodies detection was offered to the population. In the case of positive DENV IgM, a second sample was collected to detect DENV RNA and verify seroconversion. Entomological and epidemiological investigations were also performed. A modeling analysis was conducted to estimate the dengue generation time, transmission potential, distance of transmission, and assess diagnostic delays. Results. Overall, 416 subjects participated to the screening program and 20 were identified as DENV-1 cases (15 confirmed and 5 probable). In addition, DENV-1 infection was diagnosed in 24 symptomatic subjects referred to the local Emergency Room Department for suggestive symptoms and 1 case was identified through blood donation screening. The average generation time was estimated to be 18.3 days (95% CI: 13.1-23.5 days). R0 was estimated at 1.31 (95% CI: 0.76-1.98); 90% of transmission occurred within 500m. Entomological investigations performed in 46 pools of mosquitoes revealed the presence of only one positive pool for DENV-1. Discussion. This report highlights the importance of synergic surveillance, including virological, entomological and public health measures to control the spread of arboviral infections.

The rise of neurotechnologies, especially in combination with AI-based methods for brain data analytics, has given rise to concerns around the protection of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty - often framed as 'neurorights' in ethical, legal and policy discussions. Several states are now looking at including 'neurorights' into their constitutional legal frameworks and international institutions and organizations, such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, are taking an active interest in developing international policy and governance guidelines on this issue. However, in many discussions of 'neurorights' the philosophical assumptions, ethical frames of reference and legal interpretation are either not made explicit or are in conflict with each other. The aim of this multidisciplinary work here is to provide conceptual, ethical and legal foundations that allow for facilitating a common minimalist conceptual understanding of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty to facilitate scholarly, legal and policy discussions.

Developers of AI-Intensive Systems--i.e., systems that involve both "traditional" software and Artificial Intelligence"are recognizing the need to organize development systematically and use engineered methods and tools. Since an AI-Intensive System (AIIS) relies heavily on software, it is expected that Software Engineering (SE) methods and tools can help. However, AIIS development differs from the development of "traditional" software systems in a few substantial aspects. Hence, traditional SE methods and tools are not suitable or sufficient by themselves and need to be adapted and extended. A quest for "SE for AI" methods and tools has started. We believe that, in this effort, we should learn from experience and avoid repeating some of the mistakes made in the quest for SE in past years. To this end, a fundamental instrument is a set of concepts and a notation to deal with AIIS and the problems that characterize their development processes. In this paper, we propose to describe AIIS via a notation that was proposed for SE and embeds a set of concepts that are suitable to represent AIIS as well. We demonstrate the usage of the notation by modeling some characteristics that are particularly relevant for AIIS.