Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) is one of the key indicators of land degradation. SOC positively affects soil functions with regard to habitats, biological diversity and soil fertility; therefore, a reduction in the SOC stock of soil results in degradation, and it may also have potential negative effects on soil-derived ecosystem services.

We consider a variational model for two interacting species (or phases), subject to cross and self attractive forces. We show existence and several qualitative properties of minimizers. Depending on the strengths of the forces, different behaviors are possible: phase mixing or phase separation with nested or disjoint phases. In the case of Coulomb interaction forces, we characterize the ground state configurations.

In this paper, we use the Z-control approach to get further insight on the role of awareness in the management of epidemics that, just like Covid-19, display a high rate of overexposure because of the large number of asymptomatic people. We focus on a SEIR model including a overexposure mechanism and consider awareness as a time-dependent variable whose dynamics is not assigned a priori.

We consider a simple discrete model for screw dislocations in crystals. Using a variational discrete scheme we study the motion of a configuration of dislocations toward low energy configurations. We deduce an effective fully overdamped dynamics that follows the maximal dissipation criterion introduced in Cermelli and Gurtin (1999) and predicts motion along the glide directions of the crystal. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We consider a simple discrete model for screw dislocations in crystals. Using a variational discrete scheme we study the motion of a configuration of dislocations toward low energy configurations. We deduce an effective fully overdamped dynamics that follows the maximal dissipation criterion introduced in Cermelli and Gurtin (1999) and predicts motion along the glide directions of the crystal. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We apply the Z-control approach to a SEIR model including a overexposure mechanism and consider awareness as a time-dependent variable whose dynamics is not assigned a priori. Exploiting the potential of awareness to produce social distancing and self-isolation among susceptibles, we use it as an indirect control on the class of infective individuals and apply the Z-control approach to detect what trend awareness must display over time in order to eradicate the disease.

The Internet evolution is one of the greatest innovations of the twentieth century and has changed lives of individuals and business organizations. On the other hand, potential attacks on the information systems and eventual crash may cause heavy losses on data, services and business operation. Executives and security professionals are accepting that it is not a matter of if but a matter of when their organization will be hit by a cyber-attack. As a consequence, cyber risk is a fast-growing area of concern.

The visual quality evaluation is one of the fundamental challenging problems in image processing. It plays a central role in the shaping, implementation, optimization, and testing of many methods. The existing image quality assessment methods centered mainly on images altered by common distortions while paying little attention to the distortion introduced by color quantization.

Identifying relevant genomic features that can act as prognostic markers for building predictive survival models is one of the central themes in medical research, affecting the future of personalized medicine and omics technologies. However, the high dimension of genome-wide omic data, the strong correlation among the features, and the low sample size significantly increase the complexity of cancer survival analysis, demanding the development of specific statistical methods and software.

Skin lesion segmentation is one of the crucial steps for an efficient non-invasive computer-aided early diagnosis of melanoma. This paper investigates how to use colour information, besides saliency, for determining the pigmented lesion region automatically.