University of Bergamo

Micro-Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) process textures have garnered significant interest due to their unique characteristics and potential applications in various fields. This research aims to define the base for investigating the crucial aspect of evaluating the antibacterial properties and/or biocompatibility of surfaces textured by the typical crater-like features generated through micro-EDM. The focus of this study is the development of a numerical simulation framework based on scanned surfaces to comprehensively assess if the traditional crater texture is sufficient to attribute these characteristics to the surfaces. The importance of this research lies in addressing the growing demand for advanced surface engineering techniques that not only improve functionality but also ensure safety in medical, industrial, and consumer applications. Using numerical simulations, this study aims to provide insights into the interaction between surface topography and antibacterial properties, providing a convenient and efficient tool for evaluating surface characteristics. The findings of this study are anticipated to contribute significantly to the advancement of surface engineering technologies, offering novel solutions for combating bacterial colonization and improving biocompatibility. Furthermore, the development of a numerical simulation framework holds promise for accelerating the design and evaluation of textured surfaces, thereby streamlining the innovation process in various industries.

Informal food markets, particularly those managed by (elderly) women in post-communist Eastern Europe, represent a biocultural phenomenon of profound significance since globalisation and increasingly strict legal frameworks often threaten these reservoirs of biocultural food heritage. In the fall of 2022 and 2023, a preliminary field study was conducted by visiting the informal markets of six Moldovan centres: Chișinău, Orhei, Bălți, Călărași, Comrat, and Taraclia, and conversing with approximately 40 mid-aged and elderly sellers. We argue that these markets are crucial in sustaining small-scale farming, preserving biodiversity, and maintaining a connection between urban communities and rural communities and, ultimately, between these rural citizens and their nature, keeping small-scale family farming and domestic traditional gastronomic activities alive. By trading fresh, homegrown, and homemade food and goods (including handicrafts), these mid-aged and elderly vendors support local economies, promote environmental sustainability, and safeguard traditional ecological knowledge and cultural heritage. This paper explores how grannies’ markets contribute to biocultural diversity and sustainable food practices, especially amid the country’s recent turbulent political, socioeconomic, and demographic challenges. The analysis advocates for the survival rights of these ecological, economic, and cultural (2-x-eco-cultural) refugia and invites ethnobiologists, food studies and cultural heritage scholars, rural sociologists, and agricultural economists to defend the biocultural diversity of informal food markets, moving them from an “out of necessity” status to a solid pillar of a possible future, new, family farming and small-scale ecological and gastronomic (conscientious) tourism. Policymakers should protect and enhance these informal spaces, especially the socioecological farming systems behind them, as essential socioeconomic and environmental assets. They should emphasise their importance as hubs for biological diversity, cultural preservation, community cohesion, and ecological sustainability.

Boards of Directors is one of the most recurring topics in corporate governance literature. In the family firm realm, Boards of Directors have distinctive features compared to non‐family firms; their functions and activities can differ significantly. Indeed, the degree of family involvement in the board and heterogeneity in directors' characteristics produce different effects on behaviors, decision‐making processes, and performance. Applying diverse approaches, the continuous increase of research produces many results, making it hard to reflect on the development of this research area. We conduct an integrative literature review to renovate the knowledge infrastructure, starting from the outcomes of an exploratory bibliometric overview of 130 representative articles between 1988 and 2023 published in top‐tier as well as specialistic academic journals. After describing the evolution of the research and identifying seminal publications as well as the most productive and cited authors and journals, using the co‐citation tool, we unveil the main theoretical pillars and their interconnections, building a map of theoretical groundings and providing an understanding of the field's knowledge base. Revealing the conceptual linkages between the seminal works, we highlight how theories have evolved in Family Firms' Board of Directors' research. A reflexive knowledge work focused on the role of scholars in shaping research on family firms' boards of directors allows us to provide reflections based on theoretical groundings, rather than capturing them descriptively, and to identify future research directions.

Natural (cotton) and synthetic (polyester) fabrics functionalized with the SilverSil xerogel powder dispersed in water-repellent. ecofriendly commercial textile finishings acquire substantial antibacterial activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Here demonstrated against Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli bacteria, said activity is due to the Ag nanoparticles sol-gel entrapped within the organically modified silica matrix. Ease of deposition using a printing method, low application rate, and enhanced physical and chemical stability of the ORMOSIL-entrapped Ag nanoparticles are promising towards the production of the first durable antimicrobial fabrics and garments, minimizing antimicrobial resistance.

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic led many individuals to experience moral transgressions, exacerbating feelings of guilt and remorse. This study explored the role of the self-forgiveness of such transgressions in explaining their associations with psychological well-being and family conflict. We hypothesized that (a) higher levels of self-forgiveness would be associated with greater psychological well-being and reduced family conflict, (b) the perceived relevance of moral transgressions would be positively associated with self-forgiveness and indirectly associated with psychological well-being and family conflict through the mediation of self-forgiveness, and (c) the relationships between the variables of interest could vary across age. Method Adults (N = 277; M age = 30.04) completed anonymous online questionnaires assessing the relevance of transgressions committed, forgiveness and unforgiveness of self, psychological well-being, and family conflict during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. Results Structural equation modeling revealed that transgression relevance was positively associated with both forgiveness and unforgiveness of self, and indirectly related to psychological well-being and family conflict via self-forgiveness. Greater forgiveness of self was related to greater eudaimonic well-being, whereas greater unforgiveness of self was linked to increased family conflict and reduced eudaimonic well-being. The findings also indicated that age moderated the relationship between forgiveness of self and hedonic well-being, with the association weakening as age increased. Conclusions The results highlight the importance of promoting self-forgiveness to enhance psychological resilience and familial stability, particularly during challenging times.

Employees’ entrepreneurial orientation represents a powerful bottom–up force for building organizations that are more resilient to exogenous crises. However, limited empirical knowledge exists regarding how exogenous crises may affect employees’ entrepreneurial orientation in the first place. To address this gap, we draw on threat-rigidity theory and exploit the COVID-19 pandemic as a valuable test bed. Using a survey administered to employees of a system integrator firm pre- and post-COVID-19, we find that the crisis negatively impacted employees’ entrepreneurial orientation. However, entrepreneurial exposure mitigates this effect, ultimately enhancing employees’ entrepreneurial orientation in response to exogenous crises. Our findings deepen the understanding of employees’ entrepreneurial orientation dynamics and the role of entrepreneurial exposure in established firms.

The field of uncertainty quantification and mitigation in software-intensive and self-adaptive systems is garnering increased interest, especially with the rise of statistical inference methodologies like Bayesian reasoning. These methods typically address uncertain quality attributes embedded within system models by adjusting model parameters. However, the uncertainty related to selecting a specific system model over plausible alternatives has received limited attention. Our work focuses on self-adaptation, exploring methods to tackle uncertainty in model selection. This includes scenarios where one model is chosen over competing alternatives to encapsulate the system’s understanding and anticipate future observations. Our proposed solution augments the conventional feedback loop of self-adaptive systems by combining Bayesian model averaging to mitigate uncertainty and many-objective optimization to take into account multiple, possibly many, dependability requirements at the same time. We carry out an empirical evaluation to study the effectiveness, cost, and scalability of the proposed approach using two case studies with increasing structural complexity and number of dependability requirements. Results show that our approach based on model averaging is significantly better than model selection in terms of satisfied requirements after adaptation (adaptation success frequency). We also show that our approach can deal with large model spaces ( $\sim\!10^{19}$ ) using efficient sampling methods rather than exhaustive model space exploration.

This literature review aims to highlight the themes and the developments of public sector accounting (PSA) research over the last five decades (1970–2019), analyzing 2187 papers though a combination of bibliometric (co‐word) analysis and qualitative insights into the selected papers. The review shows that PSA scholarship has grown in significance over the last few decades giving rise to a vibrant and variegated scientific community, flourishing at the intersection among but also increasingly spanning across, different disciplines. Moreover, it reveals that traditional themes such as budgeting, performance measurement, and accountability remained at the core of the literature across most of the decades, attracting attention from multiple communities and journals. Other themes, such as accruals accounting, accounting standards, reporting, and auditing experienced varied interest over the decades and reflected the interests of more specialized, or “niche” communities of scholarship. By looking at the trends of PSA over time, the paper shows how accounting systems and calculative practices have come to reflect and affect the multiple values and the need for quantifying techniques of an ever‐evolving public sector. A call for more attention toward accounting for multiple and plural values is advanced, with suggestions for future research avenues.

Our experience seems to be populated by mind-independent objects. These very same objects are also experienced as offering the possibility of motor interactability. Thus, one may be tempted, prima facie, to consider these two experiences as always related. In this paper, I propose that this idea is not tenable, by invoking evidence from vision science and ophthalmology about a special case of blindness, stereoblindness. Stereoblind subjects cannot rely on stereopsis. Stereopsis is the visual mechanisms responsible for the experience of motor interactability with objects. Nonetheless, as I argue, stereoblind subjects can experience objects as mind-independent (notwithstanding the diminished quality of the experience of their spatial features for action). This claim is crucial for the literature. First, it explicitly suggests that the visual experience of motor interactability and the experience of mind-independence do not always correlate, and can be disjointed, though they may be usually considered two simultaneous aspects of our experience of objects. Second, it offers a novel philosophical discussion, showing the significance, for the first time, of this visual impairment, i.e., stereoblindness, for the literature on philosophy of perception.

The development of AI tools, such as large language models and speech emotion and facial expression recognition systems, has raised new ethical concerns about AI’s impact on human relationships. While much of the debate has focused on human-AI relationships, less attention has been devoted to another class of ethical issues, which arise when AI mediates human-to-human relationships. This paper opens the debate on these issues by analyzing the case of romantic relationships, particularly those in which one partner uses AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to resolve a conflict and apologize. After reviewing some possible, non-exhaustive, explanations for the moral wrongness of using AI tools in such cases, I introduce the notion of second-person authenticity: a form of authenticity that is assessed by the other person in the relationship (e.g., a partner). I then argue that at least some actions within romantic relationships should respect a standard of authentic conduct since the value of such actions depends on who actually performs them and not only on the quality of the outcome produced. Therefore, using AI tools in such circumstances may prevent agents from meeting this standard. I conclude by suggesting that the proposed theoretical framework could also apply to other human-to-human relationships, such as the doctor-patient relationship, when these are mediated by AI; I offer some preliminary reflections on such applications.

Maintenance engineering has taken up more and more a strategic function in recent decades due to technological advancements and its role in asset productivity. Over time, a plethora of methods have been proposed, shifting from reactive approaches to complex, data-driven strategies focused on failure prediction (e.g. through Machine learning) and knowledge management (e.g. based on ontologies and large language models). The advancements achieved by maintenance have also beneficially impacted production quality, sustainability, and safety. This work presents the results of a systematic literature review of papers published on the topic of maintenance in the past 30 years. In particular, natural language processing has been used to analyze abstract, extract topics and, through further analysis delineate past, current, and future trends in the field of maintenance engineering in manufacturing. This work contributes to define a vision on how maintenance in manufacturing will evolve in the next future.

Movement smoothness is a critical metric for evaluating motor control and sensorimotor impairments, with increasing relevance in neurorehabilitation and everyday functional assessments. This study investigates the correlation between two smoothness metrics (Log Dimensionless Jerk): LDLJV, derived from body center of mass (BCoM) trajectories using a gold-standard stereophotogrammetric system, and LDLJA, calculated from acceleration data recorded via an inertial measurement unit (IMU) placed at the L1–L2 level. Ten healthy adults (six men and four women; height: 1.71 ± 0.08 m; body mass: 68.2 ± 10.2 kg; age: 34.5 ± 8.5 years) walked on a treadmill at seven different speeds, with stride-specific data analyzed to compute smoothness indices for three anatomical components (antero-posterior, medio-lateral, cranio-caudal). Concordance between the metrics was evaluated using Bland–Altman analysis, Spearman’s correlation, and the mean absolute percentage error. The results revealed weak correlations and substantial biases across all components and speeds, reflecting inherent differences between IMU- and BCoM-derived data. Correcting biases improved alignment but did not eliminate discrepancies. The findings highlight that LDLJA captures only localized trunk accelerations, whereas BCoM-derived LDLJV approximates whole-body dynamics, making direct substitution infeasible. This study emphasizes the need for careful interpretation of IMU-based metrics and contributes to refining their application in real-world gait analyses.

We study a two‐period industry where firms are run by agents privately informed about their (persistent) costs, and principals can only use spot contracts. We characterize novel semi‐separating equilibria where principals randomize in one or both periods. These equilibria have the following implications for industry dynamics and firms' performance. First, despite some principals learning their agents' type early on, aggregate output need not increase over time: the inefficiencies generated by the adverse selection problem can be persistent over time in competitive environments. Second, a more severe adverse selection problem may result in higher market prices, thereby increasing principals' profits.

A variety of autonomous exploration tasks have been successfully performed in several types of environments using different types of robotic platforms. The robotic task, the operational environment, and the robot embodiment represent the dimensions of the “problem space” in robot exploration. At the same time, a lot of exploration strategies are documented in the literature that provide partial solutions to the exploration problem. They define the “solution space” in robot exploration. To our knowledge, no previous work has provided a methodical overview of robot exploration strategies from the point of view of both the problem and solution spaces. In this systematic mapping study, we build a taxonomy of autonomous robot exploration strategies and application requirements and classify existing approaches according to it. The goal is to analyze research trends over time, and identify possible research gaps, open challenges, and promising future directions in order to support researchers and practitioners in generalizing, communicating, and applying the findings of the robot exploration knowledge field.

A large proportion of greenhouse gas emissions come from heating and hot water supply and developed district heating systems will play an important role in meeting climate targets. The research presents a methodology for the study of the influence of combined factors on future thermal energy demand. System dynamics modeling has been applied to residential buildings in terms of renovation, new building construction, subsidy fund and assessment of reducing future thermal energy and greenhouse gas emissions. Changes in the consumption of thermal energy of district and decentralized thermal supply, under the influence of energy efficiency and financial factors were studied. Renovation of old buildings has a great impact on achieving the goals set on the way to climate neutrality by reducing heat energy consumption. As shown by the simulations carried out with the existing funding and legislation, by 2050 the expected reduction for users of district heat supply in Riga is 3 % and for users of alternative heating 2 %, from the existing 2023 consumption.

Goal 13 of the UNO Agenda 2030 highlights the urgent threat of climate change and its far-reaching consequences for both nature and society. To encourage action on climate change, the UNO Agenda 2030 redirects to the ACT NOW campaign site and the Climate Change website. Drawing on corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and specifically the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), the aim of this chapter is to analyse if, and how, crises deriving from climate change are discursively communicated in official 2023 UNO documents. In order to do so, I concentrate on the linguistic analysis of three key terms (crisis and crises, challenge(s), and burden(s)): by taking into consideration aspects of nomination and predication, I will see if, in official UN documents, awareness of the various climate change crises is raised, and which discursive strategies are employed when discussed. Results seem to indicate that responsibility for the processes indicated in UNO documents is never specified. Instances of personification, passivization, and nominalization contribute to making the texts vaguer in terms of social actors’ responsibility, thus hiding agency and systematically relegating responsibility for actions to the background.