Research and development of advanced technologies for landslide hazard analysis in Italy

The Research Centre on Prediction, Prevention and Control of Georisks, "Sapienza Università di Roma" (CERI) was selected as one of the World Centres of Excellence on Landslide Risk Reduction (WCoE) under the title of “Research and development of advanced technologies for landslide hazard analysis in Italy” in the period 2008–2011. The present paper provides background information on the activities carried out by the CERI, in the frame of the WCoE network. Pre-defined purposes have been achieved by the implementation of integrated monitoring systems and early warning systems for landslides movements. The application of GBInSAR technique for monitoring landslides interacting with infrastructures is discussed, and two case histories are presented. It is shown that this technique is particularly suitable for the displacements monitoring of landslides interacting with infrastructures, thanks to its peculiar features (i.e. areal mapping, operability under every weather and lighting conditions and continuous and completely remote monitoring). Hence, it can be considered a very important tool for the reduction of risks connected to the realisation and activity of large infrastructures.     

What determines galactic evolution?

We are briefly introducing the most important ingredients to study galactic evolution. In particular the roles of star formation, nucleosynthesis and gas flows. Then we are discussing the two different approaches to galactic evolution: the stellar population approach (chemical evolution models) and the hierarchical clustering scenario for galaxy formation. It is shown that there are still some controversial points in the two approaches, as is evident in the brief summary of the discussion. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Digitization and Scientific Exploitation of the Italian and Vatican Astronomical Plate Archives

There is a widespread interest to digitize the precious information contained in the astronomical plate archives, both for the preservation of their content and for its fast distribution to all interested researchers in order to achieve their better scientific exploitation. This paper presents the first results of our large-scale project to digitize the archive of plates of the Italian Astronomical Observatories and of the Specola Vaticana. Similar systems, composed by commercial flat-bed retro-illuminated scanners plus dedicated personal computers and acquisition and analysis software, have been installed in all participating Institutes. Ad-hoc codes have been developed to acquire the data, to test the suitability of the machines to our scientific needs, and to reduce the digital data in order to extract the astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic content. Two more elements complete the overall project: the provision of high quality BVRI CCD sequences in selected fields with the Campo Imperatore telescopes, and the distribution of the digitized information to all interested researchers via the Web. The methods we have derived in the course of this project have been already applied successfully to plates taken by other Observatories, for instance at Byurakan and at Hamburg.     

Automatic inspection and analysis of digital waveform images by means of convolutional neural networks

Journal of Seismology - Analyzing seismic data to get information about earthquakes has always been a major task for seismologists and, more in general, for geophysicists. Recently, thanks to the...