Sediment transport modelling at the catchment scale in Alpine streams

Sediment management in river networks is of crucial importance for both environmental, productive and safety reasons. For instance, lost of sediment connectivity along river networks is recognized as a major cause of habitat degradation and biodiversity loss worldwide, and erosion/deposition processes may severely contribute to flood hazards. Also, artificial reservoirs may reduce their capacity to provide water in the quantity and time needed for the productive uses they were built, like irr...

Mining common genetic Variants impacting on Allele-Specific Translation and cancer risk

The mRNA translation regulation is a critical factor in protein expression and cellular homeostasis, with deep implications for cancer biology. The work described in this thesis identifies, validates, and investigates allele-specific differences in translation efficiency mediated by tranSNPs: genetic variants that influence mRNA translation. By leveraging RNA-seq data from total and polysomal RNA, a pipeline was developed to identify tranSNPs and validate their functional consequences. Two ca...

Agent-based models of dynamical formation and emergence of memory on networks

The brain is quite possibly the most complex organ in existence, capable of, and responsible for, receiving and processing information. This ability is the essence of a wide assortment of brain functions, amongst which there is memory, or the capacity to learn from experience and retrieve stored information to affect decisions and behaviour. Hence, understanding the biological mechanisms underlying memory has been a central task in neuroscience. The very earliest theories of memory were large...

Rapid and Green Volatilomics of Roasted Hazelnuts: Comparative Multiplatform Analysis and Advanced Data Mining

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are fundamental in determining the sensory quality of food products, with their profiles influenced by various factors. Specifically, the hazelnut volatilome is shaped by the origin (botanical, geographical) of the kernels, as well as by the industrial processing steps they undergo (storage, roasting). Volatilomics, therefore, is a valuable tool for quality assessment and process monitoring. While Gas Chromatography coupled with Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) rema...

Semantic Change Detection in multitemporal Remote Sensing Images Using Deep Neural Networks

Learning without Labels - Reducing Supervision in Training, Inference, and Evaluation of Deep Neural Networks

This thesis investigates how the reliance on supervision can be reduced across the entire deep learning pipeline. In the training phase, we explore unsupervised fine-tuning, focusing on Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation scenarios in visual tasks such as Facial Expression Recognition and video-based Action Recognition, primarily leveraging self-supervision and self-training. At inference, we address the challenge of removing fixed output vocabularies from Vision Language Models by for...

Understanding Narratives through Sentiment, Emotions and Events

Automatically understanding narratives is key for AI systems processing documents from diverse domains such as healthcare, journalism or teaching. However, the narratives' heterogeneity across and within domains poses a significant challenge. To be successful, the understanding process requires robustness in several domain-specific aspects, such as the jargon, linguistic style, and background knowledge. This is particularly evident in personal narratives, i.e. recounts of emotionally charged ...

Machines Against Rage: Generating High-quality Counterspeech with Language Models

Online hate speech is typically tackled via blocking or deletion measures. However, these actions have limited effectiveness, and they often raise questions about the protection of users' freedom of speech. In this context, counterspeech has emerged as a promising alternative strategy as it fights online hate by providing positive and de-escalatory responses. The potential effectiveness of counterspeech has motivated an increasing interest in studying ways to partially automatise its product...

Role of species interactions in the ecology of Erwinia amylovora, the causal agent of apple fire blight