In document image analysis the task of segmenting images of ancient printed documents in distinct elements is known to be a very complex problem. In general, these documents are of low quality and can present skew and degradations because of old printing or ink stains. To face these problems we will show and discuss the validity of the Mumford and Shah variational method, based on the ? convergence theory, along with its numerical handling.

In this paper we propose a new modeling tech- nique for vehicular traffic flow, designed for capturing at a macroscopic level some effects, due to the microscopic granularity of the flow of cars, which would be lost with a purely continuous approach. The starting point is a multiscale method for pedestrian modeling, recently introduced in [1], in which measure-theoretic tools are used to manage the microscopic and the macroscopic scales under a unique framework.

Variable annuities are investment products offered by Insurance Companies. They allow investors to place assets in mutual funds under the umbrella of a tax-deferred account. The account value of variable annuities fluctuates based on the performance of the selected mutual funds and therefore some risks are involved. Recently there has been a growing interest in using fuzzy numbers to deal with financial uncertainty.

We analyze a peer-assisted Video-on-Demand (VoD) system in which users contribute their upload bandwidth to the redistribution of a video that they are downloading or that they have cached locally. Our target is to characterize the additional bandwidth that servers must supply to immediately satisfy all requests to watch a given video. We develop an approximate fluid model to compute the required server bandwidth in the sequential delivery case, as well as in controlled nonsequential swarms.

We describe a solution for fast indexing and searching within large heterogeneous data sets whose main purpose is to support investigators that need to analyze forensic disk images originated by seizures or created from bodies of evidence. Our approach is based on a combination of techniques aimed at improving efficiency and reliability of the indexing process.We do not rely on existing frameworks like Hadoop but borrow concepts from different contexts including High Performance Computing and Database management.

Abstract. The topic of interest rate restrictions and their legal implications represents a delicate subject about which a recent inventory of EU authorities was developed. This is aimed to inspection of the so called principle of "good morals" against usury for the Member States. The most recent Italian law regulating legal rates of interest applied in loans, sets a threshold under which loan interest rates have to remain for being nonusurious, in the sense that if the loan rate lies outside the threshold, it becomes a usury rate and has to be prosecuted.

This paper investigates the problem of quantifying longevity risk in a quantile perspective. In this field, the idea of deepening the expected changes of future mortality rates over a single year is gaining. In the following the authors propose an approach which combines a stochastic model for the evolution of mortality rates and a quantile analysis of the mortality distribution in order to capture the trend component of longevity. An ex post analysis is proposed, relying on the past mortality experience of the Italian male population measured in the period of 1954-2008.