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The synchronization between atomic clocks plays an important part in both radio astronomical and geodetic Very Long Baseline Interferometry, as the clocks are responsible for providing time and frequency reference at radio stations. The availability of highly stable optical fiber links from a few radio observatories and their national metrological institutes has recently allowed the streaming of frequencies from optical clocks based on the Sr/Yb lattice technology (even two order of magnitudes more stable than H-maser clocks). We will present the current status of the Italian Link for Frequency and Time (LIFT) and the ongoing e orts to realize a geodetic experiment utilizing the radio stations in Medicina and Matera connected in common clock via the optical fiber link. We will then show the results from the latest VLBI clock timing experiments also making use of the LIFT link to compare atomic clocks of the three italian radio VLBI antennas (Mc, Sr and Nt) using the rms noise in the interferometric phase. VLBI clock timing proves more e ective than Global Navigation Satellite System and less expensive than Two-Way Satellite Frequency and Time Transfer in synchronizing remote clocks.

Zoos are an ex-situ form of conservation were animals are breed in confined areas for recreational exhibition, educational or research and conservation purposes. Parasites and infectious diseases have become a major concern in conservation of endangered species as they can lead to mortality, dramatic population declines and even contribute to local extinction events. Some studies have showed that gastrointestinal parasites of wild animals in captivity included zoonotic species and rise public health concerns. According to Italian law (D.Lgs 73/2005), zoos housing domestic, wild and exotic animals are required to address both animal health and welfare. The last two words are suggestive for parasites control mainly in a more extensive space where many animals of different species share the same environment as in safari park. The study was carried out to know the prevalence of gastrointestinal parasites of captive animals at Zoo Safari Ravenna in the Emilia-Romagna region. Fecal samples were collected in the biennium 2014/2016. The first year were recovered 94 samples, the second one 99. The seemingly low number of samples is due to the difficulties of getting the fecal material by a well known individual subject. In fact, we considered of little interest to analyze a fecal pool, much easier to get but poorly indicative; in this safari park many animals are not confined to a specific area but are free to move throughout the park area. The totality of fecal samples were screened using classical qualitative and quantitative analyzes. The species were grouped by theriological affinity in 3 groups: poligastric (18 species) and monogastric (4 species) herbivores and carnivores (2 species). In the first year, out of 94 fecal samples examined, 70 were positive for parasitic eggs/oocysts of different species indicating an overall prevalence of 74.5%, of which 4/17 carnivores 23.5%, 54/59 (91.5%) poligastric and 12/18 (66.6%) monogastric herbivores. The second year, out of 99 samples 56 were positive with a prevalence of 56.6% for gastrointestinal parasites, 6/16 (37.5%) among carnivores, 40/65 (61.5%) ruminants and finally 10/18 (55.5%) monogastric herbivores. Parasites recovered were: coccidia; Toxascaris leonina and Parascaris equorum; gastrointestinal strongyles and Nematodirus spp.; Capillaria spp. and Trichuris spp. McMaster examination showed an aggregate distribution (high proportion of parasite is concentrated in a few host individuals) of parasitic fauna inside the area. The Chi-square test revealed a significant difference (χ2=6.05; P

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to evaluate the surgical treatment of acute pancreatitis in Italy and to assess compliance with international guidelines. METHODS: A series of 1173 patients in 56 hospitals were prospectively enrolled and their data analysed. RESULTS: Twenty-nine patients with severe pancreatitis underwent surgical intervention. Necrosectomy was performed in 26 patients, associated with postoperative lavage in 70% of cases. A feeding jejunostomy was added in 37% of cases. Mortality was 21%. Of the patients with mild pancreatitis, 714 patients with a biliary aetiology were evaluated. Prophylactic treatment of relapses was carried out in 212 patients (36%) by cholecystectomy and in 161 using a laparoscopic approach. Preoperative endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography was associated with cholecystectomy in 83 patients (39%). Forty-seven patients (22%) were treated at a second admission, with a median delay of 31 days from the onset of pancreatitis. Eighteen patients with severe pancreatitis underwent cholecystectomy 37.9 days after the first admission. There were no deaths. DISCUSSION: The results indicate poor compliance with published guidelines. In severe pancreatitis, early surgical intervention is frequently performed and enteral feeding is seldom used. Only a small number of patients with mild biliary pancreatitis undergo definitive treatment (i.e. cholecystectomy) within 4 weeks of the onset of pancreatitis.

This document accompanies deliverable D3.4, which contains the software modules implementing the methods that form the core of the Mobility Pattern Mining module within the PETRA architecture, as presented in D2.2, devoted to deal with GPS and mobile phone (GSM) individual data. The rationale, motivations and some possible applications of such methods have been described in D3.3. The algorithms learn to identify the role or purpose of each trip or location within the history of a user, in terms of activity to be performed, whether it is a systematic trip or location, etc., and exploit such derived information for prediction purposes. The document briefly summarizes the interfaces and the functionalities provided.

This document presents the algorithms developed within PETRA to monitor the performances of the main predictive models built in the project, in order to provide feedbacks and possibly trigger updates or re-computation of the models. The algorithms are based on the comparison of the models against GPS mobility data. The document briefly summarizes the interfaces and the functionalities provided.

This document presents the key algorithms that form the core of the Mobility Pattern Mining module within the PETRA architecture, as presented in D2.2, devoted to deal with GPS and mobile phone (GSM) individual data. The algorithms learn to identify the role or purpose of each trip or location within the history of a user, in terms of activity to be performed, whether it is a systematic trip or location, etc., and exploit such derived information for prediction purposes. This document provides some preliminaries, the rationale of the methods, highlighting the improvement over the state-of-art, and a brief summary of performances.

This document presents a set of methods for exploiting individual patterns and measures developed within WP3, and described in D3.3, to produce collective indicators. Such indicators will be used for various applications purposes, some of which are described as representative examples. This document provides preliminaries and the rationale of the methods, highlighting how they are used (or can be used) for the showcases of PETRA.

OBJECTIVE: To compare longitudinal changes in angle of progression (AoP) and midline angle (MLA) during the active second stage of labor according to the mode of delivery. METHODS: A three-dimensional transperineal ultrasound volume was acquired in a series of nulliparous women at the beginning of the active second stage (T1) and every 20 min thereafter (T2, T3, T4, T5 and T6). Following delivery, all ultrasound volumes were analyzed and AoP and MLA were measured. RESULTS: Among 71 women included in the study, 58 underwent spontaneous vaginal delivery (group A) and 13 underwent operative delivery (group B) (eight by vacuum extraction and five by Cesarean section). When compared with Group B, Group A had a wider AoP only at T1 (140.0 +/- 20.2 degrees vs. 122.9 +/- 16.7 degrees ; P = 0.010) and T2 (149.7 +/- 20.7 degrees vs. 126.9 +/- 17.5 degrees ; P = 0.006). MLA was narrower in group A only at T3 (21.2 +/- 11.7 degrees vs. 40.8 +/- 27.9 degrees ; P = 0.043), T4 (18.2 +/- 15.0 degrees vs. 47.4 +/- 29.6 degrees ; P = 0.020) and T5 (18.3 +/- 6.0 degrees vs. 34.7 +/- 4.2 degrees ; P = 0.034). On stepwise forward multiple logistic regression analysis, both AoP and MLA were independently associated with operative delivery (OR = 0.955 and OR = 1.018, respectively). CONCLUSION: Ultrasonographic assessment of fetal head descent in the second stage of labor may play a role in the prediction of the mode of delivery.

In the era of the proliferation of Geo-Spatial Data, induced by the diffusion of GPS devices, the map matching problem still represents an important and valuable challenge. The process of associating a segment of the underlying road network to a GPS point gives us the chance to enrich raw data with the semantic layer provided by the roadmap, with all contextual information associated to it, e.g. the presence of speed limits, attraction points, changes in elevation, etc. Most state-of-art solutions for this classical problem simply look for the shortest or fastest path connecting any pair of consecutive points in a trip. While in some contexts that is reasonable, in this work we argue that the shortest/fastest path assumption can be in general erroneous. Indeed, we show that such approaches can yield travel times that are significantly incoherent with the real ones, and propose a Time-Aware Map matching process that tries to improve the state-of-art by taking into account also such temporal aspect. Our algorithm results to be very efficient, effective on low- sampling data and to outperform existing solutions, as proved by experiments on large datasets of real GPS trajectories. Moreover, our algorithm is parameter-free and does not depend on specific characteristics of the GPS localization error and of the road network (e.g. density of roads, road network topology, etc.).

The widespread use of mobile devices allows gathering large amounts of moving objects' trajectories. However, just trajectories are often not enough to enable movements understanding. On the other hand, users' posts in social media can be regarded as sparse and freely annotated movement traces, which can also be collected via mobile devices. This paper proposes a method for automatically fusing trajectories with social media users' posts based on their spatiotemporal compatibility. The results are trajectories annotated with posts contents, that may help to explain movement goals, and relations with places and events, among other information. The proposed method has been implemented and evaluated in experiments with real GPS trajectories and tweets.

The Big Data, originating from the digital breadcrumbs of human activities, sensed as a by-product of the technologies that we use for our daily ctivities, let us to observe the individual and collective behavior of people at an unprecedented detail. Many dimensions of our social life have big data "proxies", as the mobile calls data for mobility. In this paper we investigate to what extent such "big data",in integration with administrative ones, could be a support in producing reliable and timely estimates of inter-city mobility. The study has been jointly developed by Istat, CNR, University of Pisa in the range of interest of the "Commssione di studio avente il compito di orientare le scelte dellIstat sul tema dei Big Data ". In an ongoing project at ISTAT, called "Persons and Places" - based on an integration of administrative data sources, it has been produced a first release of Origin Destination matrix - at municipality level - assuming that the places of residence and that of work (or study) be the terminal points of usual individual mobility for work or study. The coincidence between the city of residence and that of work (or study) - is considered as a proxy of the absence of intercity mobility for a person (we define him a static resident). The opposite case is considered as a proxy of presence of mobility (the person is a dynamic resident: commuter or embedded). As administrative data do not contain information on frequency of the mobility, the idea is to specify an estimate method, using calling data as support, to define for each municipality the stock of standing residents, embedded city users and daily city users (commuters).

This paper presents a real case study were several mobility data sources are collected in a urban context, integrated and analyzed in order to answer a set of key questions about mobility. The study of the human mobility is a very sensitive topic for both public transport (PT) companies and local administrations. This work is a contribution in the understanding of some aspects of the mobility in Cosenza, a town in the South of Italy, and the realization of corresponding services in order to aswer to the following questions identi- fied in collaboration with the PT experts. Question 1: How is PT able to substitute private mobility? The objective is to compare public and private mobility to verify the capability of PT to satisfy the user mobility needs. Question 2: How di!erent zones of the city are reachable using PT? This question focuses on understanding how much di!erent zones of the city are served by PT considering di!erent times of the day. Question 3: Are there usual time deviations between real travel times and o"cial time tables? We want to verify if usual time deviations between real travel times and o"cial time tables exist highlighting chronic delays in the service. Question 4: Can we spot visitors and commuters by their behavior? We aim at identifying important categories of people estimating their segmentation in order to evaluate the corresponding demand of services.

The paper discusses in detail the problem of the privacy of the users of the original phone data, demonstrating the possibility to measure the risk of identification from the compact representation of the profiles.

This project aims to create a tool that uses mobile phone transaction (trajectory) data that will be able to address transportation related challenges, thus allowing promotion and facilitation of sustainable urban mobility planning in Third World countries. The proposed tool is a transport demand model for Ivory Coast, with emphasis on its major urbanization Abidjan. The consortium will bring together available data from the internet, and integrate these with the mobility data obtained from the mobile phones in order to build the best possible transport model. A transport model allows an understanding of current and future infrastructure requirements in Ivory Coast. As such, this project will provide the first proof of concept. In this context, long-term analysis of individual call traces will be performed to reconstruct systematic movements, and to infer an origin-destination matrix. A similar process will be performed using the locations of caller and recipient of phone calls, enabling the comparison of socio-economic ties vs. mobility. The emerging links between different areas will be used to build an effective map to optimize regional border definitions and road infrastructure from a mobility perspective. Finally, we will try to build specialized origin-destination matrices for specific categories of population. Such categories will be inferred from data through analysis of calling behaviours, and will also be used to characterize the population of different cities. The project also includes a study of data compliance with distributions of standard measures observed in literature, including distribution of calls, call durations and call network features.

Due to the diffusion of location-aware devices and location- based services, it is now possible to analyse the digital trajectories of human mobility through the use of mining algorithms. However, in most cases, these algorithms come with little support for the analyst to actu- ally use them in real world applications. In particular, means for under- standing how to choose the proper parameters are missing. This work improves the state-of-the-art of mobility data analysis by providing an experimental study on the use of data-driven parameter estimation mea- sures for mining flock patterns. Experiments were conducted on two real world datasets, one dealing with pedestrian movements in a recreational park and the other with car movements in a coastal area. The study has shown promising results for estimating suitable values for parameters for flock patterns envisaging a formal framework for parameter evaluation in the near future, since the advent of more complex pattern algorithms will require the use of a larger number of parameters.

VIMOS is a spectrograph with imaging capabilities which will be mounted on the Nasmyth B focus of VLT UT. The main characteristics of VIMOS are the multiplexing spectral capabilities up to spectra per exposure and the presence of an Integral Field Unit IFU which allows spectrophotometry of 1 squared arcmin field. To reach the goal of 800 spectra per field VIMOS has been designed with a large field of view divided into quadrants each quadrant being by all means a full spectrograph on its own Spectra are obtained using masks with slits which are designed by the astronomer. The ESO VLT Project has devised a general Data Flow within which all VLT instruments have to operate During design and development of VIMOS instrument software we had to deal with the VLT general concept and adapt it to our needs.