Optical Characterization of Natural and Anthropogenic Aerosols Using ChAMBRe Experiments & Field Campaigns

This thesis investigates the optical and physicochemical properties of natural and anthropogenic aerosols through laboratory experiments and field campaigns. Controlled chamber studies were performed in the ChAMBRe facility to evaluate the effects of dilution, particle size distribution, and aging processes on aerosol optical properties using instruments including SMPS, OPS, AE33, MWAA, BLAnCA, and PAX. In addition, field measurements conducted in Multedo (Italy) and Lahore (Pakistan) were us...

Rappresentare l’Equatoria Esplorazioni nilotiche, avventura, espansionismo egiziano nella stampa geografica italiana di fine Ottocento (1870-1900)

Il presente lavoro analizza la percezione e la rappresentazione della provincia d'Equatoria — estrema propaggine meridionale del Sudan turco-egiziano, fondata nel 1871 e dissoltasi nel 1889 — nel panorama culturale ed editoriale italiano della seconda metà dell'Ottocento. Attraverso un corpus eterogeneo di fonti — riviste geografiche specializzate, periodici illustrati di divulgazione e letteratura di viaggio — lo studio ricostruisce le dinamiche con cui l'Italia post-unitaria elaborò e trasf...

Tailoring Fe/Ni-based skutterudites for thermoelectric applications: from the synthesis and optimization of bulk materials to the fabrication of thin films

Beyond Accuracy: Designing Artificial Intelligence Systems for Trustworthy Deployment in Regulated Domains

Artificial intelligence systems deployed in regulated domains must satisfy requirements that extend well beyond predictive accuracy. Legal accountability, transparency obligations and human oversight mandates — formalised in the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act — demand architectures capable of demonstrating not only what they decide but why. This thesis investigates how AI systems can be designed to meet such requirements, through two complementary empirical studies addressing ca...

Bound by the past: Serial dependence in multisensory perception across domains and modalities

Serial dependence refers to the tendency of perceptual judgments to be systematically biased toward or away from recently encountered stimuli. This mechanism is believed to promote perceptual stability in a dynamic and often noisy environment. Over the past decade, serial dependence has become a central topic in perceptual neuroscience, with extensive evidence demonstrating its influence on a wide range of visual features, from low-level attributes such as orientation and position to higher-l...

New Synthetic Routes with Low Environmental Impact towards Mild Surfactants Starting from Renewable Starting Materials

Amino acid-based surfactants are mild surfactants that are mainly used as additives in personal care products such as shampoos, shower gels, hand soaps, etc. Due to their excellent cleaning properties, their demand has increased significantly over the past twenty years. An example of such surfactants are N-acyl amino acids, the molecular structure of which consists of an acyl group of fatty acids and an amino acid part. Schotten-Baumann acylation of amino acids is an industrial method of th...

CFD-Informed Methods for Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics of Turbomachinery

Tactile motion perception across sensory contexts: from multisensory integration to visual deprivation.

Multisensory integration allows the brain to combine information from different sensory modalities to form a coherent and reliable representation of the environment. Among these interactions, vision and touch play a fundamental role in motion perception, sharing common computational principles and neural mechanisms for encoding orientation and direction. This thesis investigates visuo-tactile integration in motion perception and examines how motion-related information is processed when visual...

Deciphering octopus arm and sucker control mechanisms for novel soft robotic applications

Soft robotics has gained substantial popularity over the last ten years. As the name implies, these robots are mainly composed of soft materials. However, their biggest strength is also their biggest challenge: without rigid structures, movements can be performed with substantially more degrees of freedom than in regular robots. This large motion repertoire makes it hard to develop systems that can reliably predict and control movements. In nature, one model facing similar challenges is the o...