Publications

This Open Access textbook provides students and researchers in the life sciences with essential practical information on how to quantitatively analyze data images. It refrains from focusing on theory, and instead uses practical examples and step-by step protocols to familiarize readers with the most commonly used image processing and analysis platforms such as ImageJ, MatLab and Python. Besides gaining knowhow on algorithm usage, readers will learn how to create an analysis pipeline by scripting language; these skills are important in order to document reproducible image analysis workflows.

The textbook is chiefly intended for advanced undergraduates in the life sciences and biomedicine without a theoretical background in data analysis, as well as for postdocs, staff scientists and faculty members who need to perform regular quantitative analyses of microscopy images.

This open access book, published in the Soft and Biological Matter series, presents an introduction to selected research topics in the broad field of flowing matter, including the dynamics of fluids with a complex internal structure -from nematic fluids to soft glasses- as well as active matter and turbulent phenomena.

Flowing matter is a subject at the crossroads between physics, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, biology and earth sciences, and relies on a multidisciplinary approach to describe the emergence of the macroscopic behaviours in a system from the coordinated dynamics of its microscopic constituents.

Depending on the microscopic interactions, an assembly of molecules or of mesoscopic particles can flow like a simple Newtonian fluid, deform elastically like a solid or behave in a complex manner. When the internal constituents are active, as for biological entities, one generally observes complex large-scale collective motions. Phenomenology is further complicated by the invariable tendency of fluids to display chaos at the large scales or when stirred strongly enough. This volume presents several research topics that address these phenomena encompassing the traditional micro-, meso-, and macro-scales descriptions, and contributes to our understanding of the fundamentals of flowing matter.

This book is the legacy of the COST Action MP1305 “Flowing Matter”.

This open access book addresses the various disciplinary aspects of nature-based solutions in flood risk management on private land. In recent decades, water management has been moving towards nature-based solutions. These are assumed to be much more multi-purpose than traditional “grey infrastructures” and seem to be regarded as a panacea for many environmental issues. At the same time, such measures require more – and mostly privately owned – land and more diverse stakeholder involvement than traditional (grey) engineering approaches. They also present challenges related to different disciplines. Nature-based solutions for flood risk management not only require technical expertise, but also call for interdisciplinary insights from land-use planning, economics, property rights, sociology, landscape planning, ecology, hydrology, agriculture and other disciplines to address the challenges of implementing them. Ultimately, nature-based flood risk management is a multi-disciplinary endeavor. Featuring numerous case studies of nature-based flood risk management accompanied by commentaries, this book presents brief academic reflections from two different disciplinary perspectives that critically highlight which specific aspects are of significance, and as such, underscore the multi-disciplinary nature of the challenges faced.

This document reports the State of the Art of science and practice on three topics
related to smart and healthy ageing at home: furniture and habitats, Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT), and healthcare. The reports were prepared by
the working groups of COST Action CA16226, Sheld-on. Sheld-on is a network of
researchers, user representatives, industry members, and other stakeholders. The three
domains covered in this report were the areas of interest for three working groups from
the COST Action. The aim of each working group was to assess the State of the Art for
disciplinary understanding, identification of advances in smart furniture and habitat,
products, industries and success stories. The findings on these topics of all working
groups are compiled here. Due to the different backgrounds of the members of each
of the working groups, the document is divided in three separate parts that can be
considered as separate State of the Art reports. The goal of this document is to be used
as input in the fourth working group of Sheld-on COST Action: Solutions for Ageing
Well at Home, in the Community, and at Work, where experts from the three different
domains converge to a single working group in order to achieve the action objectives.

At the end of a rush lasting over half a century, in which CMOS technology has been experiencing a constant and breathtaking increase of device speed and density, Moore’s law is approaching the insurmountable barrier given by the ultimate atomic nature of matter. A major challenge for 21st century scientists is finding novel strategies, concepts and materials for replacing silicon-based CMOS semiconductor technologies and guaranteeing a continued and steady technological progress in next decades. Among the materials classes candidate to contribute to this momentous challenge, oxide films and heterostructures are a particularly appealing hunting ground. The vastity, intended in pure chemical terms, of this class of compounds, the complexity of their correlated behaviour, and the wealth of functional properties they display, has already made these systems the subject of choice, worldwide, of a strongly networked, dynamic and interdisciplinary research community. Oxide science and technology has been the target of a wide four-year project, named Towards Oxide-Based Electronics (TO-BE), that has been recently running in Europe and has involved as participants several hundred scientists from 29 EU countries. In this review and perspective paper, published as a final deliverable of the TO-BE Action, the opportunities of oxides as future electronic materials for Information and Communication Technologies ICT and Energy are discussed. The paper is organized as a set of contributions, all selected and ordered as individual building blocks of a wider general scheme. After a brief preface by the editors and an introductory contribution, two sections follow. The first is mainly devoted to providing a perspective on the latest theoretical and experimental methods that are employed to investigate oxides and to produce oxide-based films, heterostructures and devices. In the second, all contributions are dedicated to different specific fields of applications of oxide thin films and heterostructures, in sectors as data storage and computing, optics and plasmonics, magnonics, energy conversion and harvesting, and power electronics.

Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across Europe like never before. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the ‘respublica litteraria’, a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs, formative of many modern values and institutions, and a potential cornerstone of a transnational level of European identity. Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since. To reassemble that scattered material and chart the history of that imagined community, we need a revolution in digital communications. Between 2014 and 2018, an EU networking grant assembled an interdisciplinary community of over 200 experts from 33 different countries and many different fields for four years of structured discussion. The aim was to envisage transnational digital infrastructure for facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly work and public dissemination. The framework emerging from those discussions – potentially applicable also to other forms of intellectual, cultural and economic exchange in other periods and regions – is documented in this book.

The needs of future digital data and computer systems are expected to be two to three orders of magnitude larger than for today’s systems, to take account of unprecedented amounts of heterogeneous hardware, lines of source code, numbers of users, and volumes of data. Ultrascale computing systems (UCS) are a solution. Envisioned as large-scale complex systems joining parallel and distributed computing systems, which can be located at multiple sites and cooperate to provide the required resources and performance to the users, these technologies will extend individual systems to provide the resources that are very much needed.

Based on the research work in the COST Action IC 1305 Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS) this book presents important results and methods towards achieving sustainable UCS. The authors present a wide range of emerging programming models that facilitate the task of scaling and extracting performance on continuously evolving platforms, while providing resilience and fault-tolerant mechanisms to tackle the increasing probability of failures throughout the entire software stack. These methods are needed to achieve scale handling, better programmability and adaptation to rapidly changing underlying computing architecture, data centric programming models, resilience, and energy-efficiency.

This book presents different challenges related to public open spaces and people, the relationships between them and possible roles of digital technology in this relationship. It is a book about a phenomenon that is increasingly being in the centre of sciences and strategies – the penetration of digital technologies in the urban space and related different approaches, methods, empirical studies, open questions and concerns. It brings together research work results, ideas, discussions and experiences of different participants of the Project CyberParks, fostering knowledge about the relationship between information and communication technologies and public spaces supported by strategies to improve their use and attractiveness (www.cyberparks-project.eu), that was founded by the H2020 European Programme Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) in the period of April 2014 to April 2018 (www.cost.eu/actions/ TU1306).

In response to climate change and limited fossil fuels, renewable energy is being heavily promoted throughout Europe. Despite general support for green energy, perceived landscape change and loss of landscape quality have featured heavily in opposition campaigns.

The COST Action “Renewable Energy and Landscape Quality” (RELY) systematically investigated the nexus between renewable energy production and landscape quality. Its aim was to analyze how landscape protection and renewable energy deployment can be reconciled to contribute to the sustainable transformation of energy systems.

This book compiles guidelines for assessing landscape suitability for, and vulnerability to, renewable energy projects together with a toolbox for landscape-aware public participation in planning. It furthermore elaborates a multilingual glossary of terms related to landscape and energy.