University of Trento

About: University of Trento is a education organization based out in Trento, Italy. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 10527 authors who have published 30978 publications receiving 896614 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitá degli Studi di Trento & Universita degli Studi di Trento.

BART: A modular toolkit for coreference resolution

Abstract: Developing a full coreference system able to run all the way from raw text to semantic interpretation is a considerable engineering effort. Accordingly, there is very limited availability of off-the shelf tools for researchers whose interests are not primarily in coreference or others who want to concentrate on a specific aspect of the problem. We present BART, a highly modular toolkit for developing coreference applications. In the Johns Hopkins workshop on using lexical and encyclopedic knowledge for entity disambiguation, the toolkit was used to extend a reimplementation of Soon et al.’s proposal with a variety of additional syntactic and knowledge-based features, and experiment with alternative resolution processes, preprocessing tools, and classifiers. BART has been released as open source software and is available from http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~versley/BART

Distributed Compressive Sampling for Lifetime Optimization in Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: The problem of data sampling and collection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is becoming critical as larger networks are being deployed. Increasing network size poses significant data collection challenges, for what concerns sampling and transmission coordination as well as network lifetime. To tackle these problems, in-network compression techniques without centralized coordination are becoming important solutions to extend lifetime. In this paper, we consider a scenario in which a large WSN, based on ZigBee protocol, is used for monitoring (e.g., building, industry, etc.). We propose a new algorithm for in-network compression aiming at longer network lifetime. Our approach is fully distributed: each node autonomously takes a decision about the compression and forwarding scheme to minimize the number of packets to transmit. Performance is investigated with respect to network size using datasets gathered by a real-life deployment. An enhanced version of the algorithm is also introduced to take into account the energy spent in compression. Experiments demonstrate that the approach helps finding an optimal tradeoff between the energy spent in transmission and data compression.

Searches for gravitational waves from known pulsars with science run 5 LIGO data

Abstract: We present a search for gravitational waves from 116 known millisecond and young pulsars using data from the fifth science run of the LIGO detectors. For this search ephemerides overlapping the run period were obtained for all pulsars using radio and X-ray observations. We demonstrate an updated search method that allows for small uncertainties in the pulsar phase parameters to be included in the search. We report no signal detection from any of the targets and therefore interpret our results as upper limits on the gravitational wave signal strength. The most interesting limits are those for young pulsars. We present updated limits on gravitational radiation from the Crab pulsar, where the measured limit is now a factor of seven below the spin-down limit. This limits the power radiated via gravitational waves to be less than ~2% of the available spin-down power. For the X-ray pulsar J0537-6910 we reach the spin-down limit under the assumption that any gravitational wave signal from it stays phase locked to the X-ray pulses over timing glitches, and for pulsars J1913+1011 and J1952+3252 we are only a factor of a few above the spin-down limit. Of the recycled millisecond pulsars several of the measured upper limits are only about an order of magnitude above their spin-down limits. For these our best (lowest) upper limit on gravitational wave amplitude is 2.3x10^-26 for J1603-7202 and our best (lowest) limit on the inferred pulsar ellipticity is 7.0x10^-8 for J2124-3358.

Digital Detection of Exosomes by Interferometric Imaging.

Abstract: Exosomes, which are membranous nanovesicles, are actively released by cells and have been attributed to roles in cell-cell communication, cancer metastasis, and early disease diagnostics. The small size (30–100 nm) along with low refractive index contrast of exosomes makes direct characterization and phenotypical classification very difficult. In this work we present a method based on Single Particle Interferometric Reflectance Imaging Sensor (SP-IRIS) that allows multiplexed phenotyping and digital counting of various populations of individual exosomes (>50 nm) captured on a microarray-based solid phase chip. We demonstrate these characterization concepts using purified exosomes from a HEK 293 cell culture. As a demonstration of clinical utility, we characterize exosomes directly from human cerebrospinal fluid (hCSF). Our interferometric imaging method could capture, from a very small hCSF volume (20 uL), nanoparticles that have a size compatible with exosomes, using antibodies directed against tetraspanins. With this unprecedented capability, we foresee revolutionary implications in the clinical field with improvements in diagnosis and stratification of patients affected by different disorders.

Accuracy of RSS-Based Centroid Localization Algorithms in an Indoor Environment

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the accuracy of indoor localization measurement based on a wireless sensor network. The position estimation procedure is based on the received-signal-strength measurements collected in a real indoor environment. Two different classes of low-computational-effort algorithms based on the centroid concept are considered, i.e., the weighted centroid localization method and the relative-span exponential weighted localization method. In particular, different sources of measurement uncertainty are analyzed by means of theoretical simulations and experimental results.