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Focuses on modelling and simulation of an experimental test performed on the Italian HV network near the French border. Restoration plan; Load and network modeling; Field test scenario; Description of operative sequence.

Reports on the rain attenuation's long term probability distribution in communication and broadcasting satellite systems, in Italy. Indication that the systems were at 11.6 GHz; In-depth look at actual satellite TV and radio broadcasting; Application of the synthetic storm technique.

One of the main goals of software engineering is to provide methods to master complexity by practitioning large software systems into simpler components that can be addressed separately. A number of methods and techniques, distilled from experience and best practices, have been published in the literature to help software engineers in the application of the principle of divide and conquer to software systems development. A complex system can be characterized as a system whose properties cannot be studied by suitably decomposing it into components, but rather depend heavily on the interactions among such components. Some systems are inherently complex, that is, there is no way to identify components that simplify the analysis, in other cases, complexity may derive from the current lack of knowledge or experience, especially when new technologies are introduced and new application areas are discovered. The papers selected for this special section of the January/February issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, are representative of the ideas presented at the IEEE International Conference on Engineering Complex Computer Systems, held in Como, Italy. This special section presents four papers selected from those presented at the conference.

Describes the history of four Italian projects aimed at either constructing computers from scratch or installing and making operational computers built in the United States and Great Britain. CRC 102A in the Numerical Computations Center of Milan Polytechnic; FINAC installed in the Istituto Nazionale per le Applicazioni del Calcolo of Rome; Olivetti ELEA 9003 at the Fermi School of Bibbiena in Arezzo, Italy.

The article presents information on the International Conference on Software Maintenance held in Bari, Italy which was sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering in 1997. The program for this conference addressed important maintenance issues, such as the year 2000 problem and preparing for the transition to network computing through paper presentations, industry reports panel discussions, tools demonstration and keynote addresses. The first paper under the title "Identifying Modules via Concept Analysis," by Michael Siff and Thomas Reps, presents a technique that addresses an important problem in reengineering and restructuring legacy code that is identifying modules. The second paper under the title "Measuring and Evaluating Maintenance Process Using Reliability, Risk and Test Metrics," by Norman F. Schneidewind, presents a measurement model that addresses an important problem in software maintenance measurement, measuring the stability of the maintenance process.

Presents the results of the research carried out at the European Microwave Signature Laboratory of the Joint Research Centre of Ispra, Italy for validating electromagnetic models. Description of the three experimental dielectric models; Electromagnetic modeling; Conclusion.

Tests user acceptance and evaluation of hypermedia guides run on palmtop computers at Costa Aquarium in Genoa, Italy. Experimental framework; Expected advantages of automated tour guides; Interface structure; Evaluation of overall user acceptance; Knowledge acquisition experiment. INSET: Museum Multimedia.

Provides information on the regulation of radio frequency (RF) in Italy. Sources of RF; Comparison of the attention levels in the Italian limits for electromagnetic fields at selected frequencies with the International Commission in Nonionizing Radiation Protection limits as of December 2002; Incidence of leukemia in children in concentric rings around the station of the Vatican radio transmitters.

Presents information on a study which analyzed the seismic signals produced by explosions of the Stromboli volcano using independent component analysis (ICA). Description of the seismological environment; Implementation of the ICA method; Data analysis and results; Conclusions.

Highlights the 2003 High Performance Switching and Routing Workshop, which was held in Torino, Italy on June 24-27, 2003. Number of papers submitted for the conference; Keynote speeches delivered during the event.

Five empirical and nonempirical parametric topographic normalization methods (the cosine, SCS, Minnaert, b correction, and c correction methods) were applied to multitemporal Landsat Thematic Mapper data (bands 1-5 and 7) collected in different periods of the growing season (April, June, and July) of a mixed deciduous forest area (340 ha) in the northern Apennines. The effectiveness of the models at removing topographic control, preserving internal data variability, and consistently normalizing radiance for flat pixels from band to band and image to image was evaluated. The entirely empirical b correction outperformed the other considered methods without relying on any photometric function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The southern area of Italy is characterized by the presence of many active volcanic areas. In Pozzuoli (Naples, Italy), an urban area characterized by high volcanic risk, a gas emitting site is present. An high percentage of CO2 is emitted, whose atmospheric concentration measurement is an important task in many environmental and scientific applications. In this paper, we describe the utilization over that area of a mobile infrared (IR) laser system, able to measure the CO2 concentration along rectilinear atmospheric paths up to 1-km length, and the result of tomographic processing applied to retrieve a two-dimensional CO2 concentration field. The laser system computes the link averaged concentration by processing the received IR laser radiation propagated along an open-air rectilinear link connecting the transmitter/receiver laser unit and a passive retroreflector device. A one-day measurement campaign has been made and 15 different atmospheric propagation links were considered moving the transmitter/receiver unit and some retroreflectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the events during the International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications held September 8 to 12, 2003 in Torino, Italy. Sponsors; Registrant distribution; Offer of plenary sessions providing maximum interaction among attendees; Presentation of papers on wireless communications chaired by Danilo Erricolo; Session on electromagnetic modeling chaired by N.J. Champagne.

This work is concerned with the effects of γ-rays on the static, signal and noise characteristics of JFET-based circuits belonging to a fabrication technology made available by the Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (ITC-IRST), Trento, Italy. Such a process has been tuned with the aim of monolithically integrating the readout electronics on the same highly resistive substrate as multielectrode silicon detectors. The radiation tolerance of some test structures, including single devices and charge sensitive amplifiers, was studied in view of low-noise applications in industrial and medical imaging, X-and γ-ray astronomy and high energy physics experiments. This paper intends to fill the gap in the study of gamma radiation effects on JFET devices and circuits belonging to detector-compatible technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real laboratory experiments can help students to gain a better understanding of theoretical problems. Great efforts are needed, however, to improve the quality of laboratory sessions, and a large number of tutors are usually required. Moreover, students may lose time because of hardware failure or an inefficient experimental setup. Several educational tools (based on virtual instruments) have been developed allowing for optimized time scheduling and remote access to laboratory sessions. Drawbacks related to hardware failure have not, however, been seriously addressed. This paper proposes an educational tool made up of a user-friendly interface controlling experimental boards. It basically consists of an array of optical sensing devices connected to suitable conditioning circuits, which are interfaced to a virtual instrument by means of a data acquisition system. To solve the previously mentioned drawbacks, a solution based on both pre-cabled hardware and PC-based measurement stations has been adopted. Moreover, the ability to configure self-educational tasks optimizes time scheduling for students during laboratory activities. The proposed system allows students to improve their knowledge in the field of optical sensing devices, virtual instrumentation, data acquisition systems, and signal processing. The paper describes an application of the tool as a simple system for surface recognition. This application is one of the laboratory tasks performed in measurement classes during this engineering course at the University of Catania, Catania, Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract-In the framework of the ITALSAT campaign various European institutions carried out propagation measurements at V band. In this frequency band, signal reception in a satellite-to- Earth or Earth-to-satellite path may suffer severely from signal attenuation due to meteorological effects such as rain, snow, hail, fog, clouds, etc., where rain provides the most significant contribution. In this paper, a joint analysis of the ITALSAT propagation measurement campaigns at 39.6 GHz (precisely 39.592 GHz) carried out at both Oberpfaffenhofen, close to Munich, Germany, and Spino d'Adda, close to Milan, Italy, is presented. For both stations long-term attenuation statistics are available and reveal that signal attenuation due to meteorological effects depends very much on the season and on the time of the day. Signal attenuation can be compensated by an appropriate fade margin. In this paper, we show that the required fade margin to guarantee a target link availability has to be chosen very carefully, since it depends very much on the time interval upon which availability is defined. We consider complete years, ITU-R recommendations, all single months of the year, worst months, and spring, summer, fall, and winter. Furthermore, we evaluate diurnal variations for four time intervals: 00:00-06:00, 06:00-12:00, 12:00-18:00, and 18:00-24:00. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gamma-ray large area space telescope (GLAST) is a next generation high-energy gamma-ray space observatory designed for observations of celestial gamma-ray sources in the energy band extending from 10 MeV to more than 100 GeV. The main instrument, the large area telescope (LAT), consists of a microstrip silicon tracker, a calorimeter, an anticoincidence detector, and the data acquisition (DAQ) system. This paper summarizes the results obtained during the radiation testing of the ASIC chips used in the LAT tracker. Both single event effects (SEE) and total ionizing dose effect (TID) tests have been performed, as part of the radiation hardness assurance (RHA) for the planned 5-yr mission. Heavy-ion SEE tests have been performed at the SIRAD irradiation facility at the INFN National Laboratories of Legnaro, Italy (LNL) and at the Texas A&M University (TAMU) Cyclotron Institute, with LET values ranging up to ∼80 MeV × cm²/mg. The tolerance of the chips to ionizing radiation has been evaluated with heavy ions and by irradiating chips with the spherical 60Co gamma source of the LNL CNR-ISOF laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a differential synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (DIFSAR) approach for investigating deformation phenomena on full-resolution DIFSAR interferograms. In particular, our algorithm extends the capability of the small-baseline subset (SBAS) technique that relies on small-baseline DIFSAR interferograms only and is mainly focused on investigating large-scale deformations with spatial resolutions of about 100 x 100 m. The proposed technique is implemented by using two different sets of data generated at low (multilook data) and full (single-look data) spatial resolution, respectively. The former is used to identify and estimate, via the conventional SBAS technique, large spatial scale deformation patterns, topographic errors in the available digital elevation model, and possible atmospheric phase artifacts; the latter allows us to detect, on the full-resolution residual phase components, structures highly coherent over time (buildings, rocks, lava, structures, etc.), as well as their height and displacements. In particular, the estimation of the temporal evolution of these local deformations is easily implemented by applying the singular value decomposition technique. The proposed algorithm has been tested with data acquired by the European Remote Sensing satellites relative to the Campania area (Italy) and validated by using geodetic measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a calendar of events, related to the telecommunication industry. SIP 2004--6th IASTED International, the conference on Signal and Image Processing, is to be held from August 23-25, 2004, in Hawaii. CSIMTA 2004--Complex Systems, intelligence and Modern Technology Applications, will be held from September 19-22, 2004, in France. Allerton Conference 2004--42nd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, will be held from September 29- October 1, 2004, in France. ISITA 2004--International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications, will be held from October 10-13, 2004. ISSSE 2004--International Symposium on Signals, Systems, and Electronics, from August 10-13. SOFTCOM 2004--International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks, will be held from October 11-13, in Italy. WNCG 2004--Wireless Networking Symposium, from October 2004. NCSBB 2004--Technology for Life,--North Carolina Symposium on Biotechnology, from October 13-15, 2004, in North Carolina.

In this paper we report the accuracy evaluation of the Italian primary frequency standard IEN-CsF1. We discuss the shifts the frequency standard is corrected for and the procedure used for the accuracy evaluation. In the last section we report frequency comparisons of our fountain with those of remote laboratories and with International Atomic Time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of ground-based radar iterferometry for landslide monitoring is here analyzed: a case study based on an experimental campaign carried out in Italy in the year 2002 is discussed. Interferometric data obtained from coherent synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images acquired by means of C-band ground-based equipment are analyzed. The campaign was aimed at retrieving potential terrain movements of a small landslide observed hundreds of meters away. Critical aspects related to spatial and temporal decorrelation are discussed: the use of optical photogrammetry as a technique for evaluating mechanical stability and correcting geometric distortion is presented. Results also confirmed that the application of ground-based radar interferometry can be attractive and effective if the acquired SAR images maintain an adequate coherence on different dates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR) workshop, which took place in Torino, Italy during June 24-27, 2003 under the technical co-sponsorship of IEEE and was financially supported by a number of other organizations. The workshop is the flagship meeting of the IEEE Communication Society's Technical Committee on Communication Switching and Routing. One hundred thirty participants from 24 countries attended the workshop. The technical program covered a wide spectrum of research topics, such as switch architectures, wavelength- division multiplexiing networks, scheduling algorithms, quality of service issues, metro ring networks, optical burst switching networks, resilience, protection and restoration, traffic engineering, packet lookup, classification and forwarding and routing. A lot of attention was devoted in HPSR 2003 to switch architecture. Traffic engineering is a hot topic that is tightly related to routing. Multipoint-to-point label switched path trees has been proposed as a technique to reduce label space usage.

We have performed a propagation measurement campaign at the University of Rome br Vergata, Rome, Italy. We have sounded the channel by a probing signal at a carrier frequency of 4.78 GHz modulated by a train of pulses having a duration of 0.4 ns shaped by a pseudonoise (PN) sequence. The measurement band falls (3.6-6 GHz) in the frequency range allowed by the FCC ruling for ultrawide-band (UWB) operations. To characterize the channel behavior over the large and the small scale, the transmitter is moved in six different positions on the floor, while the receiver is moved in 625 different locations within each room. The receiver locations are arranged in a square grid of 25 × 25 points with 2 cm spacing, i.e., less than half of the minimum wavelength of the transmitted signal. A total of 625 × 16 impulse responses are recorded in nonline-of-sight (NLOS) conditions, 625 in line-of-sight (LOS) conditions within the rooms and 11 LOS measurements are made in the corridor at incremental spacing of 1 m. We describe the measurement technique as well as the procedure by which we process the experimental data to extract the amplitude, phase and delay associated to each component of the multipath profiles. We also derive path-loss and shadowing models for the UWB indoor channel in both LOS and NLOS conditions. Finally, we present an accurate analysis of the time dispersion of the UWB channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the possibility of installing a double-circuit gas insulated transmission line (GIL) in the pilot tunnel of the planned new railway galleries Bolzano (Italy)- Innsbruck (Austria). This EHV transmission line could represent a new fundamental step in reconstructing the transnational networks. The high GIL power ratings together with very low power losses would be a strong and highly efficient transmission tie between Italy and Austria particularly useful for the future European Market. The steady-state regime of the line and the electro-magnetic field impact are analyzed. Moreover, the paper discusses the necessary studies to be carried out and the problems that have to be faced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Measurement results concerning rail-to-rail conductance are presented, based on two measurement campaigns performed in Italy at Rigutino (AR) and Anagni (FR) in spring/summer 2003. Rails in the two sites are isolated from the sleepers and the earth and the weather conditions were hot and dry, so the measured conductance values represent a lower bound. Results cover more than three frequency decades from 10 Hz to 10 kHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Announces the First International Conference on Open-Source Systems slated in July 2005 in Genoba, Italy.

This paper deals with power system restoration and discusses the connection of pumped storage loads to restoration paths. This new strategy allows avoiding any disturbance to customers during field tests of restoration paths and improves as well the reliability of restoration plans. The first application of the new strategy concerned the field test of a new path in central Italy. This paper reports the test and analyzes the main novel features of the considered path: complete separation from subtransmission and distribution networks and use of pumped storage loads during its energization. These aspects and their consequences are discussed with reference to both field testing of restoration paths and effectiveness of system restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several popular bistatic calibration techniques are investigated and comparisons made between the relative merits of the various techniques. The analysis addresses sensitivity to object alignment error, sensitivity to polarization impurity, and ease of implementation. Both theoretical concepts and practical considerations are discussed based on measurements accomplished at the European Microwave Signature Laboratory of the European Come mission Joint Research Center, Ispra, Italy. This facility has the capability to produce far-field fully polarimetric precision bistatic measurements in a 30-cm-diameter quiet zone, suitable for comparing different calibration methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the European Robotics Network's launching of the first European Robotics Symposium (EUROS). The symposium is a response to demands for a high-quality scientific event to present the best research on robotics across applications and topics. EUROS will be organized every two years at European locations, with the first taking place from March 16-17, 2006 in Palermo, Italy.

The article presents a corporate profile of TechImp Systems Srl, a small Italian company established as an academic spin-off by a group of professors and researchers from the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Bologna. The main objective of the company is to provide innovative products and services for the diagnosis of electrical systems.

The adoption of High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) tapes is becoming a suitable and interesting alternative to copper for windings in transformers, thanks to the improvement in performance and the lowering of costs. Of course, optimized designs, different with respect to usual layouts, must be considered, due to the additional requirements of HTS tapes, such as minimization of orthogonal magnetic fields and consideration of additional losses in the HTS. In the framework of a scientific cooperation among some Italian Universities and private companies, a test model for a 10 KVA transformer with HTS secondary windings has been developed, and validated against a demonstrative prototype, manufactured during the project. In the paper, the device model performance is assessed, with particular care to the HTS losses modeling, and some comparisons to the experimental results are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Department of Physics of the University of Pisa, Italy, a new and fully engineered version of the YAP-(S)PET small animal scanner has been recently installed. The new YAP-(S)PET is able to perform both PET and SPECT studies on small animals. The scanner is made up of four heads: each one is composed of a 4 × 4 cm² YAIO3:Ce (or YAP:Ce) matrix of 20 × 20 elements, 2 × 2 × 25 mm³ each, coupled to a Position Sensitive Photomultiplier (PS-PMT) (Hamamatsu R2486). The four modules are positioned on a rotating gantry. The switching to the SPECT modality is easily made by mounting a high resolution parallel hole (0.6 mm ⊘, 0.15 mm septum) lead collimator in front of each crystal. This paper reports the performance of the system in terms of absolute sensitivity and spatial resolution for both PET and SPECT modalities. The scatter fraction and noise-equivalent count rate (NEC) for a mouse phantom for different energy windows have been measured in PET modality. Images of phantoms and animals are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LiF based thermoluminescent materials are the most used passive detectors in the field of radiation protection. For personal and area dosimetry in mixed neutron and photon fields, 6LiF and 7LiF TLD pairs are employed for the simultaneous determination of neutron and photon doses. Therefore, an accurate knowledge of their sensitivity to photons and thermal neutrons is essential. Aimed at providing reliable sensitivity data for new LiF based TL materials, an experimental study was performed in the framework of collaboration between INFN Frascati National Laboratories and ENEA, Italy. The 6LiF(Mg, Cu, P) material from TLD Poland, was specially manufactured in six versions with different sensitive thickness (t = 40, 60, 80, 100, 150 and 230 mg·cm-2), which implies different neutron and photon sensitivity. Together with the 7LiF(Mg, Cu, P) material, namely MCP-7, all seven type of TLDs were irradiated in reference beams of photons and thermal neutrons, at the calibration facilities of INFN and ENEA. The study provides a set of sensitivity data and discusses the performance of the investigated materials for the dosimetry of mixed neutron and photon fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several topics discussed at the European Robotics Symposium (EUROS) meeting held in Palermo, Italy, on March 16-19, 2006 is presented. The meeting initiated by EUROS is aimed to match the tradition of other strong European meetings, and seeks submission of high-quality, original research from scholars throughout the world. Meeting organizers include Henrik Christensen who served as general chair, and Antonio Chella who is in charge of local arrangements.

The alpine village of Lamosano, Belluno, Italy, located near a wide and active landslide, has been seriously threatened by ground instabilities since 1960. In this paper, the results obtained by two different remote-monitoring techniques, synthetic aperature radar interferometry and three-dimensional laser-scanner imaging, planned for Lamosano hazard assessment, are presented. Both techniques compare images taken at different times to map and classify changes that occurred on the imaged scenario. The radar and laser data are gathered at the same dates with about ten-month temporal separation. The displacements measured separately by each of the two techniques highlight a similar sliding motion on the Lamosano village area, providing a good validation to each other and contributing to the definition of the village instability hazard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuity of the European Remote Sensing Satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (ERS SAR) archive by means of Envisat Advanced SAR (ASAR) data acquired from March 2002 has introduced the problem of the coherent combination of images coming from sensors with slightly different frequencies. The spectral shift principle states that in case of extended distributed targets, the frequency shift is equivalent to a change of looking angle. In this paper, the same principle is exploited to analyze the behavior of permanent scatterers (PSs) with an extension that is smaller than the ground resolution cell. The conditions under which the PSs identified by ERS can be continued by Envisat are then theoretically determined and experimentally validated. Moreover, this analysis shows that acquisitions characterized by different frequencies can be used to identify the slant-range position of scatterers with high subcell accuracy (tens of centimeters). From the processing side, a very precise images coregistration step is required to get the results described in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2005, a special selection of images concerning the development of telecommunications, kept in the archives of the Italian Navy, were collected, selected, and organized in a panel exhibition held at the Italian Navy Academy. A selection of the rarest of these images is presented here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The factorization method (FM) has been applied to measurement data from a multistatic ground-penetrating radar operating in close proximity to the ground, which was used in a measurement campaign on the Joint Research Centre mine test lane in Ispra, Italy. This paper is targeted toward a future hand-held demining system. The according space limits restrict an independent positioning of transmit and receive antennas. Hence, very small multistatic datasets are obtained, representing a difficult case for the reconstruction with the FM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grading programming assignments of courses on distributed programming can greatly benefit from extensive testing, especially if quality aspects such as portability, robustness, security, and performance have to be evaluated. This paper presents a framework that was developed at the Turin Polytechnic, Turin, Italy, to enable seamless and fast implementation of Web portals for automated management of student programming assignments. By using a computational grid facility to schedule testing jobs on different hosts, the framework offers high flexibility and scalability, thus enabling computationally intensive tests and some kinds of distributed tests, such as portability tests and field tests, which otherwise would be difficult to automate. The grid can be made of ordinary and even nondedicated or dismissed PCs, which, according to the authors' experience, is enough to offer students online extensive testing services. The framework was successfully used in two courses on distributed programming, located at different sites, partially overlapped in time, and attended by a total of 60 students. However, the framework should be scalable enough to work with increasing numbers of students and courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses display technology developed by the Dutch company Polymer Vision. The company developed what is believed to be the first hand-held device with a large, flexible, roll-out display, which could be used like a PDA or an electronic book. The black-and-white display consumes less energy than standard hand-held device screens. Polymer Vision is working on future versions that could show color and video. By the end of 2007 Telecom Italia Mobile plans to sell the device under the name Readius, and Librofonino in Italy.

A list of winners and finalists at the 2007 International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Rome, Italy on April 13 is presented. It includes "Design of a Biomimetic Controlled-Curvature Robotic Pectoral Fin" for Best Conference Paper, "Whole Body Adhesion: Hierarchical, Directional and Distributed Control of Adhesive Forces for a Climbing Robot" for Best Student Paper, and "A Humanoid Upper Body System for Two-Handed Manipulation" for Best Video Award.

Information on the Industry Forum on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation (IERA) held on April 10, 2007 in Rome, Italy is presented. The morning session consisted of plenary addresses by the finalists of the IERA Awards and presentation of the award. The afternoon workshop consisted of six presentations and a panel discussion.

A spatial characterization of the midlatitude meso-scale rain fields from C-band radar measurements is performed by means of a systematic analysis and modeling of convective rain-cell bidimensional shapes and spatial correlation. A large rainfall dataset that is derived from an operational C-band dual-polarized radar, which is placed in S. Pietro Capofiume near Bologna (Italy), has been collected and analyzed for this purpose. Different models of convective rainy horizontal structures are described and compared. Special attention is devoted to the consolidated unimodal models (or unimodal patterns) like GAUCELL with a Gaussian rain-rate profile and EXCELL with an exponential rain-rate profile, and the hybrid models like HYCELL and DEXCELL based on a proper combination of the previous unimodal models. The new hybrid model DEXELL, which is introduced here, is an extension of the HYCELL model, which is previously proposed in literature. A pixel-by-pixel model numerical integration is carried out in order to perform a homogeneous comparison between the rain-cell model and the measured features such as peak, average, root mean square, gradient average, and gradient deviation of rain rate. A maximum-likelihood algorithm, which is expressed in terms of the principal component of the previous rain-cell features, is introduced to estimate rain-cell pattern parameters from the available radar data. A detailed sensitivity analysis, which is devoted to find the best behavior in terms of root-mean-square error and correlation coefficient between the modeled and measured rain-cell features, is finally carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Italy, the increase of railway traffic and of the power demand by the trains, especially the high-speed trains, has caused a continuous increase of the currents through the electric traction lines rated at 3 kVdc. As a consequence, in some cases, the load currents may approach the value of the fault currents for faults located far from the supply stations. The detection of the faults in such a situation has become difficult for the electromechanical protections at present in operation in Italy in the lines above. In addition, transient phenomena related to the train absorption, frequently cause untimely trippings of the protections above. For such a reason, in the years 1999-2000, a field test campaign was performed in the 3-kVdc lines Campoleone—Cis-terna and Farneta—Montallese in Italy, in order to investigate the phenomena that lead to the untimely trippings above. On the basis of the field test campaign, it was found that such an inconvenience is related to the inner characteristics of the electromechanical protections in use. A digital protection, operating on new protective algorithms, was thus set up and thereafter put in operation in the years 2003-2004. This paper presents the basic principles of the new protection above and the results of the first two years of operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java to be held in Modena, Italy on September 8-11, 2008.

This paper presents the design and implementation of an educational testbed developed for a course on industrial communication networks at the Engineering Faculty, University of Catania. The aim is to realize a platform capable of emulating various network configurations, thus enabling students to find out by themselves through practical experiments how different design choices, parameter settings, network configurations, and algorithms impact on the overall network performance. The test-bed comprises a number of basic components (hosts, routers, and access points) implemented on nodes equipped with operating systems and open source software, which together make up a modular system. Each router can be loaded with data flows and monitored over preestablished time windows so as to evaluate its performance in a wide range of operating conditions. The wireless part makes it possible to configure environments with different levels of noise and bandwidth utilization so as to emulate a broad spectrum of real operating environments. The testbed can be used via remote access through a web interface that not only allows the operating conditions to be configured but also permits real-time monitoring. Students can configure the testbed on the basis of the network they are studying and can measure its performance for evaluation purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote laboratories are laboratories where the hardware devices are accessible through the Internet 24 h a day for running experiments on physical processes. These laboratories are commonly used as complementary tools in engineering education, allowing students to integrate theoretical notions with practical experiments without the necessity of being physically present inside a laboratory. The increased availability of experiments in a remote laboratory is certainly an advantage for students, but it implies an increase of the probability of hardware and software failures. Thus, maintaining physical processes in a remote laboratory may become a heavy task for laboratory administrators. Remote lab- oratory inefficiency due to hardware and software maintenance can be certainly reduced if the time that is required for software reinstallation and/or upgrade is kept as short as possible. In this paper, a technique based on the use of a bootable (live) device on the server side of a remote laboratory is reported. This solution, which, in principle, can be used in almost any remote laboratory, allows an administrator to greatly reduce the time that is needed to fix a hardware/software failure, as well as to add a new process to the laboratory in a faster way. Moreover, the use of such a tool will also increase the reliability of the entire laboratory. The application of the proposed method to the "Automatic Control Telelab," which is a remote laboratory that was developed at the University of Siena, is also described in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]