Landscapes before the Landscape in Ancient Etruscan Art

This thesis approaches the broad field of landscape study from a specialized standpoint, namely by investigating the different ways in which landscape is represented in Etruscan art. In particular, this analysis aims to identify the significance of what we might nowadays refer to as “landscape elements” in the production-fruition systems of Etruscan visual culture. The iconographic analysis presented here shows that landscape features are working material which, employed in relation to other ...

Legislative and Policy Responses to the Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property in the European Union An historical inquiry into the legal means and methods employed by the EU and its northern Member states to protect cultural property from illicit trafficking

This doctoral dissertation is an historical analysis of the legislative and policy responses to the phenomenon that is illicit trafficking and the illegal movement of cultural property to, from and within the European continent in the 20th and 21st centuries. Its intent is to illustrate the evolution of the historic means used the restrain the illicit trafficking of culture property, ascertain if they work(ed), and understand the extent to which they influence the current EU legal order. Usin...

Essays on Public Good Game Experiments

An Entirely Different Paradigm: Rethinking Pictorial Photography through Sentimento between National and International Exhibitions in Italy (1898–1911)

This thesis examines the changing status and institutional positioning of photography in Italy between 1898 and 1911, a period marked by its systematic inclusion in major exhibitions and by intense critical debate. Through four case studies—the photographic sections of the Italian General Exhibition (1898, Turin), the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts (1902, Turin), the International Exhibition of Artistic Photography in Rome (1911), and the International Exhibition of Indust...

Crusader Heritage in Syria: Legacy, Ideology, and Management in Tartus under the French Mandate

This dissertation examines the mechanisms through which changes in the understanding and interpretation of the past translate into the built environment. Focusing on the crusader heritage in the Syrian coast, it shows how heritage sites influence the development of an ideology and the construction of regional identities, and how these ideologies and narratives can in turn reshape the same heritage sites and their perception. Additionally, it explores the ways in which these sites become arena...

Optimized Monitoring and Detection of Internet of Things resources-constraints Cyber Attacks

This research takes place in the context of the optimized monitoring and detec- tion of Internet of Things (IoT) resource-constraints attacks. Meanwhile, the In- ternet of Everything (IoE) concept is presented as a wider extension of IoT. How- ever, the IoE realization meets critical challenges, including the limited network coverage and the limited resources of existing network technologies and smart devices. The IoT represents a network of embedded devices that are uniquely identifiable an...

Neural signatures of auditory statistics: a window into auditory computations and their interactions with other modalities

The auditory system processes information at high temporal resolutions, extracting fine-grained details from complex sounds. However, this ability comes at a cost as the acoustic information often exceeds memory storage capacity. To keep track of sound changes occurring over several seconds, the auditory system abstracts local features into compact representations (summary statistics). This thesis addresses three questions: (i) whether it is possible to distinguish from neural activity the pr...

Automatic and Accurate Performance Prediction in Distributed Systems

System performance is getting attention by industry as it af- fects user experience, and much research focused on perfor- mance evaluation approaches. Profiling is the most straight- forward approach to performance evaluation of software sys- tems, despite being limited to shallow analyses. Conversely, software performance models excel in representing complex interactions between components. Still, practitioners do not integrate performance models in the software development cycle, as the le...

Advances in macroeconometrics: (interpretable) machine learning and high-frequency data for forecasting and structural analysis

Forecasting and modelling techniques for structural analy- sis have changed through the years to cope with the com- plexity of macroeconomic systems. Recent results show evi- dence that non-parametric models such as machine learning are helping with the prediction of macroeconomic variables. On the other side, high-frequency information is widely used to provide a new source of information for structural analy- sis. This thesis contributes to all these aspects by proposing innovative appro...