Quantifying and Modeling risks and dynamics of information disorders in digital ecosystems

Social media platforms, as primary sources of information, have profoundly transformed public communication, reshaping how information is created, disseminated and consumed. While enabling unprecedented connectivity, they also amplify the risks associated with information disorders, ranging from the spread of misleading content to harmful online behaviors. The thesis examines the problem of information disorders by investigating four aspects: the characterization of online conversation during...

MATHEMATICAL MODELLING FOR REAL-TIME AND PROSPECTIVE ASSESSMENT OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES

Unraveling rugae in compressed fiber-reinforced bilayers - New scaling laws for wrinkling, symmetry breaking, and beyond

Wrinkling is a bifurcation phenomenon frequently observed in natural and engineered systems, where mismatches in physical properties of the components produce wavy patterns on the system's surface. This often occurs in bilayers, where a thin film adheres to a compliant substrate. Although wrinkling in isotropic bilayers is captured by established scaling laws at high substrate-to-film elastic mismatches, comparable formulations for anisotropic bilayers remain undeveloped. The thesis addresses...

Unraveling cellular complexity: novel computational frameworks to improve the interpretability of single-cell and spatial omics data in health and disease

Over the past decade, advances in single-cell and spatial transcriptomics have transformed our understanding of cellular heterogeneity and tissue organization, providing unprecedented insights into cell processes in health and disease. However, these technologies have introduced a new set of analytical challenges, with the reliable identification and annotation of cell types and states being a major bottleneck. An effective way to achieve accurate cell type identification is by employing mar...

Gaussian Stochastic Processes on Metric Graphs

Linear networks have been recently generalised by metric graphs: these are flexible graph topologies where each edge is in bijection with a segment of the real line, allowing points on edges to have a geometric meaning. Anderes et al. (2020) extended the classical notion of effective resistance distance to these new topologies and provided an ingenious method to define valid isotropic covariance functions (therefore, stochastic processes) on them. In this thesis, we collect some recent develo...

Enhancement of cold tolerance and growth of tomato plants using endophytic bacteria isolated from cold-adapted plants

Cold stress is a key abiotic factor that adversely impacts crop production. Climate change is responsible for warm winter periods that allow crop production under partial protection, such as commercial greenhouses and tunnels used for tomato production in Sicily. However, temperature conditions are not constant under commercial greenhouse conditions, and cold stress damage can occur. Microbial communities associated with plants in cold environments can enhance plant growth at low temperatures...

The Q-closeness technique: an application to isoperimetric inequalities in 2-d lattices and to the Faber-Krahn inequality

Variational problems and their quantitative stability in the continuous setting are a classical topic in mathematical analysis and calculus of variations. In recent years, however, increasing attention has been devoted to the challenges arising when extending these problems to discrete settings, motivated by material science and crystallisation theory. In the thesis, we establish maximal fluctuation estimates for minimizers of two variational problems on periodic lattices, by exploiting the Q...

Listening and speaking strategies in face-to-face interactions

What’s in a cognitive map? Action representations in the hippocampal-entorhinal system

Spatially selective cell types in the mammalian entorhinal cortex are often taken as building blocks of a ‘cognitive map’, a mental representation of relational information. Nonetheless, relating these representations to behaviour, especially in non-spatial domains, has proven difficult. In this thesis, it will be argued that entorhinal representations of task structure integrate action information in support of flexible behaviour. Moreover, these representations appear connected to gaze beha...