An Integration by Parts Formula for Functionals of the Dirichlet-Ferguson Measure, and Applications

The Dirichlet-Ferguson measure is a random probability measure that has seen widespread use in Bayesian nonparametrics. Our main results can be seen as a first step towards the development of a stochastic analysis of the Dirichlet-Ferguson measure. We define a gradient that acts on functionals of the measure and derive its adjoint. The corresponding integration by parts formula is used to prove a covariance representation formula for square integrable functionals of the Dirichlet-Ferguson measure and to provide a quantitative central limit theorem for the first chaos.

Low energy configurations of topological singularities in two dimensions: A Gamma-convergence analysis of dipoles

This paper deals with the variational analysis of topological singularities in two dimensions. We consider two canonical zero-temperature models: the core radius approach and the Ginzburg-Landau energy. Denoting by epsilon the length scale parameter in such models, we focus on the vertical bar log epsilon VERBAR; energy regime.

In silico designing of vaccine candidate against Clostridium difficile

Clostridium difficile is a spore-forming gram-positive bacterium, recognized as the primary cause of antibiotic-associated nosocomial diarrhoea. Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) has emerged as a major health-associated infection with increased incidence and hospitalization over the years with high mortality rates. Contamination and infection occur after ingestion of vegetative spores, which germinate in the gastro-intestinal tract.

Data Confidentiality and Availability via Secret Sharing and Node Mobility in UWSN

In Mobile Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (MUWSNs), nodes sense the environment and store the acquired data until the arrival of a trusted data sink. In this paper, we address the fundamental issue of quantifying to which extent secret sharing schemes, combined with nodes mobility, can help in assuring data availability and confidentiality. We provide accurate analytical results binding the fraction of the network accessed by the sink and the adversary to the amount of information they can successfully recover. Extensive simulations support our findings.

A Model for Urban Social Networks

Defining accurate and flexible models for real-world networks of human beings is instrumental to understand the observed properties of phenomena taking place across those networks and to support computer simulations of dynamic processes of interest for several areas of research - including computational epidemiology, which is recently high on the agenda. In this paper we present a flexible model to generate age-stratified and geo-referenced synthetic social networks on the basis of widely available aggregated demographic data and, possibly, of estimated age-based social mixing patterns.

Investigating new forms of gravity-matter couplings in the gravitational field equations

This paper proposes a toy model where, in the Einstein equations, the right-hand side is modified by the addition of a term proportional to the symmetrized partial contraction of the Ricci tensor with the energy-momentum tensor, while the left-hand side remains equal to the Einstein tensor. Bearing in mind the existence of a natural length scale given by the Planck length, dimensional analysis shows that such a term yields a correction linear in ? to the classical term that is instead just proportional to the energy-momentum tensor.

The core-radius approach to supercritical fractional perimeters, curvatures and geometric flows

We consider a core-radius approach to nonlocal perimeters governed by isotropic kernels having critical and supercritical exponents, extending the nowadays classical notion of s-fractional perimeter, defined for 0<s<1, to the case s>=1. We show that, as the core-radius vanishes, such core-radius regularized s-fractional perimeters, suitably scaled, ?-converge to the standard Euclidean perimeter.