In this study, the immersed boundary-thermal lattice Boltzmann method has been used to simulate non-Newtonian fluid flow over a heated circular cylinder. The direct-forcing algorithm has been employed to couple the off-lattice obstacles and on-lattice fluid nodes. To investigate the effect of boundary sharpness, two different diffuse interface schemes are considered to interpolate the velocity and temperature between the boundary and computational grid points.

By using fluid-kinetic simulations of confined and concentrated emulsion droplets, we investigate the nature of space non-homogeneity in soft-glassy dynamics and provide quantitative measurements of the statistical features of plastic events in the proximity of the yield-stress threshold. Above the yield stress, our results show the existence of a finite stress correlation scale, which can be mapped directly onto the cooperativity scale, recently introduced in the literature to capture non-local effects in the soft-glassy dynamics.

A method to generate first passage times for a class of stochastic processes is proposed. It does not require construction of the trajectories as usually needed in simulation studies, but is based on an integral equation whose unknown quantity is the probability density function of the studied first passage times and on the application of the hazard rate method. The proposed procedure is particularly efficient in the case of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, which is important for modeling spiking neuronal activity.

With the aim to describe the interaction between a couple of neurons a stochastic model is proposed and formalized. In such a model, maintaining statements of the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire framework, we include a random component in the synaptic current, whose role is to modify the equilibrium point of the membrane potential of one of the two neurons and when a spike of the other one occurs it is turned on. The initial and after spike reset positions do not allow to identify the inter-spike intervals with the corresponding first passage times.

Given a simple undirected graph G and a positive integer s, the maximum vertex coverage problem (MVC) is the problem of finding a set U of s vertices of G such that the number of edges having at least one endpoint in U is as large as possible. The problem is NP-hard even in bipartite graphs, as shown in two recent papers [N. Apollonio and B. Simeone, Discrete Appl. Math., 165 (2014), pp. 37-48; G. Joret and A. Vetta, Reducing the Rank of a Matroid, preprint, arXiv: 1211.4853v1 [cs.DS], 2012].