Search results for " ANN"

ALTERNATIVE MODELS FOR BUILDING ENERGY PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

2020

The research activity carried out during the three years of the PhD course attended, at the Engineering Department of the University of Palermo, was aimed at the identification of an alternative predictive model able to solve the traditional building thermal balance in a simple but reliable way, speeding up any first phase of energy planning. Nowadays, worldwide directives aimed at reducing energy consumptions and environmental impacts have focused the attention of the scientific community on improving energy efficiency in the building sector. The reduction of energy consumption and CO2 emissions for heating and cooling needs of buildings is an important challenge for the European Union, be…

A survey on energy performance of the non-residential public building stock in Southern Italy; toward a decision support tool for refurbishment actio…

2016

The public buildings sector represents one of the most intensive items of EU energy consumption; the application of retrofit solutions in existing buildings is a crucial way to reduce its impact. To facilitate the knowledge of the energy performance of the existing non-residential buildings and the choice of the more adequate actions, Public Administrations (PA) should have the availability of proper tools. Within the Italian project “POI 2007-13”, a database and a decision support tool, for easy use, even to a non-technical user, have been developed. A large set of data, obtained from the energy audits of 151 existing public buildings located in four regions of South of Italy have been ana…

Mechanism of formation of char coating in LDPE/organoclay nanocomposites

2009

Characterization of annealed LDPE/clay nanocomposites

2009

Multiscale Approach in Studying the Influence of Annealing Conditions on Conductivity of TiO2 Nanotubes

2015

Titanium oxide nanotubes (NTs) have attracted much attention during last decade due to their special characteristics such as one-dimensional highly ordered geometry with large surface area and good chemical and optical stability.

Automatic image representation and clustering on mobile devices.

2010

In this paper a novel approach for the automatic representation of pictures on mobile devices is proposed. With the wide diffusion of mobile digital image acquisition devices, the need of managing a large number of digital images is quickly increasing. In fact the storage capacity of such devices allow users to store hundreds or even thousands, of pictures that, without a proper organization, become useless. Users may be interested in using (i.e., browsing, saving, printing and so on) a subset of stored data according to some particular picture properties. A content-based description of each picture is needed to perform on-board image indexing. In our work the images are analyzed and descri…

Simulated Annealing Technique for Fast Learning of SOM Networks

2011

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a popular unsupervised neural network able to provide effective clustering and data visualization for multidimensional input datasets. In this paper, we present an application of the simulated annealing procedure to the SOM learning algorithm with the aim to obtain a fast learning and better performances in terms of quantization error. The proposed learning algorithm is called Fast Learning Self-Organized Map, and it does not affect the easiness of the basic learning algorithm of the standard SOM. The proposed learning algorithm also improves the quality of resulting maps by providing better clustering quality and topology preservation of input multi-dimensi…

Composition of SIFT features for robust image representation

2010

In this paper we propose a novel feature based on SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) algorithm1 for the robust representation of local visual contents. SIFT features have raised much interest for their power of description of visual content characterizing punctual information against variation of luminance and change of viewpoint and they are very useful to capture local information. For a single image hundreds of keypoints are found and they are particularly suitable for tasks dealing with image registration or image matching. In this work we stretched the spatial coverage of descriptors creating a novel feature as composition of keypoints present in an image region while maintaining…

A Conceptual Probabilistic Model for the Induction of Image Semantics

2010

In this paper we propose a model based on a conceptual space automatically induced from data. The model is inspired to a well-founded robotics cognitive architecture which is organized in three computational areas: sub-conceptual, linguistic and conceptual. Images are objects in the sub-conceptual area, that become "knoxels" into the conceptual area. The application of the framework grants the automatic emerging of image semantics into the linguistic area. The core of the model is a conceptual space induced automatically from a set of annotated images that exploits and mixes different information concerning the set of images. Multiple low level features are extracted to represent images and…

Collective Reasoning over Shared Concepts for the Linguistic Atlas of Sicily

2013

In this chapter, collective intelligence principles are applied in the context of the Linguistic Atlas of Sicily (ALS - Atlante Linguistico Siciliano), an interdisciplinary research focusing on the study of the Italian language as it is spoken in Sicily, and its correlation with the Sicilian dialect and other regional varieties spoken in Sicily. The project has been developed over the past two decades and includes a complex information system supporting linguistic research; recently it has grown to allow research scientists to cooperate in an integrated environment to produce significant scientific advances in the field of ethnologic and sociolinguistic research. An interoperable infrastruc…