Pavement and alignment design of a new rural road in the province of Bologna

This thesis aims to give a general view of pavement types all over the world, by showing the different characteristics of each one and its different life steps starting from construction, passing by maintenance and arriving until recycling phase. The flexible pavement took the main part of this work because it has been used in the last part of this thesis to design a project of a rural road. This project is located in the province of Bologna-Italy (‘Comune di Argelato’, 26 km in the north of Bologna), and has 5677, 81 m of length. A pavement design was made using the program BISAR 3.0 and a fatigue life study was made, also, in order to estimate the number of loads (in terms of heavy vehicles axle) to cause road’s failure . An alignment design was made for this project and a safety study was established in order to check if the available sight distance at curves respects the safety norms or not, by comparing it to the stopping sight distance. Different technical sheets are demonstrated and several cases are discussed in order to clarify the main design principles and underline the main hazardous cases to be avoided especially at intersection. This latter, its type’s choice depends on several factors in order to make the suitable design according to the environmental data. At this part of the road, the safety is a primordial point due to the high accident rate in this zone. For this reason, different safety aspects are discussed especially at roundabouts, signalized intersections, and also some other common intersection types. The design and the safety norms are taken with reference to AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials), ACT (Transportation Association of Canada), and also according to Italian norms (Decreto Ministeriale delle Starde).

Bitext alignment: building and evaluating a bilingual corpus and translation memory of academic course descriptions

Following the internationalization of contemporary higher education, academic institutions based in non-English speaking countries are increasingly urged to produce contents in English to address international prospective students and personnel, as well as to increase their attractiveness. The demand for English translations in the institutional academic domain is consequently increasing at a rate exceeding the capacity of the translation profession. Resources for assisting non-native authors and translators in the production of appropriate texts in L2 are therefore required in order to help academic institutions and professionals streamline their translation workload. Some of these resources include: (i) parallel corpora to train machine translation systems and multilingual authoring tools; and (ii) translation memories for computer-aided tools. The purpose of this study is to create and evaluate reference resources like the ones mentioned in (i) and (ii) through the automatic sentence alignment of a large set of Italian and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) institutional academic texts given as equivalent but not necessarily parallel (i.e. translated). In this framework, a set of aligning algorithms and alignment tools is examined in order to identify the most profitable one(s) in terms of accuracy and time- and cost-effectiveness. In order to determine the text pairs to align, a sample is selected according to document length similarity (characters) and subsequently evaluated in terms of extent of noisiness/parallelism, alignment accuracy and content leverageability. The results of these analyses serve as the basis for the creation of an aligned bilingual corpus of academic course descriptions, which is eventually used to create a translation memory in TMX format.

Studying the alignment of 5-cyanobiphenyl on a polydimethylsiloxane surface through Molecular Dynamics simulations

For 40 years, at the University of Bologna, a group of researchers coordinated by professor Claudio Zannoni has been studying liquid crystals by employing computational techniques. They have developed effective models of these interesting, and still far from being completely understood, systems. They were able to reproduce with simulations important features of some liquid crystal molecules, such as transition temperature. Then they focused their attention on the interactions that these molecules have with different kinds of surface, and how these interactions affect the alignment of liquid crystals. The group studied the behaviour of liquid crystals in contact with different kinds of surfaces, from silica, either amorphous and crystalline, to organic self assembled monolayers (SAMs) and even some common polymers, such as polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) and polystyrene (PS). Anyway, a library of typical surfaces is still far from being complete, and a lot of work must be done to investigate the cases which have not been analyzed yet. A hole that must be filled is represented by polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a polymer on which the interest of industry has enormously grown up in the last years, thanks to its peculiar features, allowing it to be employed in many fields of applications. It has been observed experimentally that PDMS causes 4-cyano-4’-pentylbiphenyl (well known as 5CB), one of the most common liquid crystal molecules, to align homeotropically (i.e. perpendicular) with respect to a surface made of this polymer. Even though some hypothesis have been presented to rationalize the effect, a clear explanation of this phenomenon has not been given yet. This dissertation shows the work I did during my internship in the group of professor Zannoni. The challenge that I had to tackle was to investigate, via Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations, the reasons of 5CB homeotropic alignment on a PDMS surface, as the group had previously done for other surfaces.

DS4H Image Alignment tool, allineamento multimodale automatico: sviluppo di modulo per ottimizzazione dei dati acquisiti ed estensione ad immagini a colori

Molti degli studi oncologici partono dalla analisi di provini istologici, cioè campioni di tessuto prelevati dal paziente. Grazie a marcatori specifici, ovvero coloranti selettivi applicati alla sezione da analizzare, vengono studiate specifiche parti del campione. Spesso per raccogliere più informazioni del campione si utilizzano più marcatori. Tuttavia, questi non sempre possono essere applicati in parallelo e spesso vengono utilizzati in serie dopo un lavaggio del campione. Le immagini così ottenute devono quindi essere allineate per poter procedere con studi di colocalizzazione simulando una acquisizione in parallelo dei vari segnali. Tuttavia, non esiste una procedura standard per allineare le immagini così ottenute. L’allineamento manuale è tempo-dispendioso ed oggetto di possibili errori. Un software potrebbe rendere il tutto più rapido e affidabile. In particolare, DS4H Image Alignment è un plug-in open source implementato per ImageJ/Fiji per allineare immagini multimodali in toni di grigio. Una prima versione del software è stata utilizzata per allineare manualmente una serie di immagini, chiedendo all’utente di definire punti di riferimento comuni a tutte le immagini. In una versione successiva, è stata aggiunta la possibilità di effettuare un allineamento automatico. Tuttavia, questo non era ottimizzato e comportava una perdita di informazione nelle aree non sovrapposte all’immagine definita come riferimento. In questo lavoro, è stato sviluppato un modulo ottimizzato di registrazione automatica di immagini che non assume nessuna immagine di riferimento e preserva tutti i pixel delle immagini originali creando uno stack di dimensioni idonee a contenere il tutto. Inoltre, l’architettura dell’intero software è stata estesa per poter registrare anche immagini a colori.