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Dissecting the cross-talk between deregulated insulin/IGF axis and RAGE signaling in breast cancer
(Università della Calabria, 2022-10-17) Muoio, Maria Grazia; Maggiolini, Marcello; De Francesco, Ernestina
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BIOMATERIALS AS ADDITIVES IN THE SYNTHESIS AND RECYCLING OF SUSTAINABLE ASPHALT ECOBINDERS
(Università della Calabria, 2023-05-26) Abe, Abraham; Cerra, Carmela; Oliviero Rossi, Cesare; Caputo, Paolino
In recent years, the course of research has significantly shifted towards the development and testing of eco-friendly practices, products, technologies, policies, initiatives and incentives which are aimed at reducing or even reversing the effects of pollution and several other environmental issues facing the modern society. This approach, in the long run, will also bring about some form of green circular economy where resources are recycled in such a way that the environment is also protected. The use of biomaterials as additives in the production of sustainable asphalt ecobinders is a promising strategy to improve the performance and sustainability of asphalt pavements while safeguarding the environment. Biomaterials such as cellulose, lignin, and chitin, can be derived from renewable sources and have shown potential to enhance the mechanical, rheological, and environmental properties of asphalt mixtures. Materials also derived from waste recycling or blends of bio-based materials and their derivatives also have a huge potential in this regard. This dissertation provides a comprehensive review of bitumen, its structure, the role of additives in asphalt mixes, and the current state of research on the use of biomaterials as additives in sustainable asphalt ecobinders, including their effects on performance and sustainability. The experimental studies carried out in the course of the realization of this body of work revolve around rejuvenation of bitumen obtained from Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP), the development and use of several bio-based materials (especially from waste) as additives to improve the physico-chemical properties of bituminous mixes and emulsions, conversion of waste materials to substances used for the total or partial replacement of conventional asphalt binders and so on. This body of work also employed the use of innovative practices towards sustainability such as Warm Mix Asphalt (WMA) technology, recycling of RAP, Polymer-modified bitumen (PmB), Bitumen recycling agents and so on. All of this adds up to a significant effort towards a circular economy, resource and environmental conservation, and in general, sustainability. The use of bio-based materials in asphalt industry practices also significantly reduces the health hazards faced by the asphalt workers and the society at large as a result of the mitigation of the issue of greenhouse gas emissions. Several techniques such as Rheology, Scanning Electron Microscopy, Differential Scanning Calorimetry, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Infrared Spectroscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy, Light microscopy amongst others were used in the studies carried out in the course of the actualization of this body of work. Some of the results obtained indicate that these biomaterials have huge potential in replacing conventional synthetic additives on an industrial scale and also highlights the need for standardized testing methods and protocols to evaluate the performance and sustainability of these ecobinders. Ultimately, the use of biomaterials as additives in sustainable asphalt ecobinders coupled with recycling of aged bitumen has the potential to reduce the environmental impact of asphalt pavements while maintaining or improving their performance.
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SPARQL-QA: A system for Question Answering over RDF(S) Knowledge Bases
(Università della Calabria, 2023-04-29) Borroto Santana, Manuel Alejandro; Terracina, Giorgio; Ricca, Francesco
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Enhancing DLV for reasoning over streams: the LDSR language and its expressiveness
(Università della Calabria, 2024-04-09) Morelli, Maria Concetta; Terracina, Giorgio; Manna, Marco; Perri, Simona
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Design and Implementation of an ASP-based Stream Reasoner
(Università della Calabria, 2023-07-04) Mastria, Elena; Calimeri, Francesco; Perri, Simona; Zangari, Jessica
Stream Reasoning (SR) is a relatively young research field that evolved from Stream Processing (SP) more than a decade ago. It focuses on studying and developing advanced approaches and techniques for the continuous application of inference techniques to highly dynamic data streams. Data streams are (theoretically) infinite streams of information that dynamically change over time. These are generated by sources (e.g., sensors, devices, social networks, etc.) that monitor a physical or virtual environment, continuously reporting the relative state and changes. While SP aims at quickly processing data streams while answering continuous queries on their elements, SR tackles inferencing new information taking into account the content of data streams along with background knowledge on the application domain. Recently, SR has been studied in several fields, and has become more and more relevant in diverse application scenarios, such as IoT, Smart Cities, Emergency Management, and Healthcare. In such types of context, applications require complex query answering in a minimal amount of time. This amount is defined from the application domain at hand and is typically real-time (< 1 second) or near real-time(< 1 minute). Therefore, an SR system (i.e., stream reasoner) must be able to perform complex reasoning tasks while efficiently processing heterogeneous data streams together with large background knowledge bases. Different SR approaches have been proposed in fields such as Data Stream Management Systems (DSMS), Complex Event Processing (CEP), Semantic Web, and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). Among declarative KRR paradigms, Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established formalism developed in the area of logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. Thanks to the availability of robust and efficient implementations, ASP is successfully employed outside of academia to implement several real-world applications. Recently, ASP gained attention as a basis for SR, and significant steps in this direction have been taken. Several ASP-based solutions have been proposed: some combining SP and ASP implementations into a single engine, others natively extending ASP with SR constructs. However, existing ASP-based stream reasoners appear not mature enough concerning the desirable requirements for SR. This thesis focuses on designing and implementing a novel, reliable ASPbased stream reasoner. The main goal is to obtain a system featuring the following properties: (i) efficiently scale over real-world application domains; (ii) support a language that inherits the highly declarative nature and ease of use from ASP; (iii) easily extendable with new constructs that are relevant for practical SR scenarios. Therefore, we herein present the stream reasoner I-DLVsr. The input language is a straightforward extension of ASP with constructs to reason over data streams. The implementation relies on a tight interaction between two state-of-the-art solutions in ASP and SP: I2-DLV and Apache Flink, respectively. We tested I-DLV-sr on several real-world and synthetic domains to explore its capabilities in modeling SR scenarios and assess its performance. In the conducted experiments, the system obtained good results, proving the viability of the proposed approach and the robustness of the implementation herein presented.