Pervasive mobile and low-end wireless technologies, such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensor networks and the impending vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), make the wireless scenario exciting and in full transformation. For all the above (and similar) technologies to fully unleash their potential in the industry and society, there are two pillars that cannot be overlooked: security and privacy. Both properties are especially relevant if we focus on ad-hoc wireless networks, where devices are required to cooperate - e.g.

Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs), characterized by the intermittent presence of the sink, are exposed to attacks aiming at tampering with the sensors and the data they store. In order to prevent an adversary from erasing any sensed data before the sink collects them, it is common practice to rely on data replication. However, identifying the most suitable replication rate is challenging: data should be redundant enough to avoid data loss, but not so much as to pose an excessive burden on the limited resources of the sensors.

We investigate the rheology of strain-hardening spherical capsules, from the dilute to the concentrated regime under a confined shear flow using three-dimensional numerical simulations. We consider the effect of capillary number, volume fraction and membrane inextensibility on the particle deformation and on the effective suspension viscosity and normal stress differences of the suspension. The suspension displays a shear-thinning behaviour that is a characteristic of soft particles such as emulsion droplets, vesicles, strain-softening capsules and red blood cells.

Background: Mutations of the mitochondrial protein paraplegin cause hereditary spastic paraplegia type 7 (SPG7), a so-far untreatable degenerative disease of the upper motoneuron with still undefined pathomechanism. The intermittent mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) opening, called flickering, is an essential process that operates to maintain mitochondrial homeostasis by reducing intra-matrix Ca and reactive oxygen species (ROS) concentration, and is critical for efficient synaptic function.

This paper studies a scheduling problem application for the optimization of the employees used in aircrafts' refueling in a medium size airport. The problem is modelled as a particular resource leveling problem for which we provide a mixed integer mathematical formulation that we solve with CPLEX. The model allows to evaluate and analyse different scenarios that could be considered by the company in place of the current one in order to rearrange the available human resources used in refueling activity.

We consider a mathematical model describing population dynamics of normal and abnormal cell densities with contact inhibition of cell growth from a theoretical point of view. In the first part of this paper, we discuss the global existence of a solution satisfying the segregation property in one space dimension for general initial data. Here, the term segregation property means that the different types of cells keep spatially segregated when the initial densities are segregated.

In order to solve Prandtl--type equations we propose a collocation--quadrature method based on de la Vallée Poussin (briefly VP) filtered interpolation at Chebyshev nodes. Uniform convergence and stability are proved in a couple of Holder--Zygmund spaces of locally continuous functions. With respect to classical methods based on Lagrange interpolation at the same collocation nodes, we succeed in reproducing the optimal convergence rates of the L2 case and cut off the typical log factor which seemed inevitable dealing with uniform norms.

We analyse the lower ionosphere disturbances in the time period around the Mw 5.4 Kraljevo earthquake (EQ), which occurred on 3 November 2010 in Serbia. The results presented herein are based on analysis of the amplitudes of three VLF signals emitted in Italy, UK, and Germany and recorded in Serbia whose variations primarily result from changes in the electrical properties of the lower ionosphere at a distance more than 120 km from the epicentre of the EQ.

The main focus of this paper is the characterization and exploitation of the asymptotic spectrum of the saddle--point matrix sequences arising from the discretization of optimization problems constrained by elliptic partial differential equations. They uncover the existence of an hidden structure in these matrix sequences, namely, they show that these are indeed an example of Generalized Locally Toeplitz (GLT) sequences.

Systems medicine (SM) has emerged as a powerful tool for studying the human body at the systems level with the aim of improving our understanding, prevention and treatment of complex diseases. Being able to automatically extract relevant features needed for a given task from high-dimensional, heterogeneous data, deep learning (DL) holds great promise in this endeavour. This review paper addresses the main developments of DL algorithms and a set of general topics where DL is decisive, namely, within the SM landscape.