Patrizia Agati

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Bologna

For several decades, the standard method of measuring personality has been through self-report questionnaires. In this work, we apply a model based on the analysis of the words used by people. Using Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, we created a classifier that categorizes people into their Myers-Briggs Type In...

Today, teaching and learning paths increasingly intersect with technologies powered by emerging artificial intelligence (AI).This work analyses public opinions and sentiments about AI applications that affect e-learning, such as ChatGPT, virtual and augmented reality, microlearning, mobile learning, adaptive learning, and gamification. The way peop...

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed society and people’s lives. The vaccination campaign started December 27th 2020 in Italy, together with most countries in the European Union. Social media platforms can offer relevant information about how citizens have experienced and perceived the availability of vaccines and the start of the vaccination campaign...

The outbreak of COVID-19 forced a dramatic shift in education, from in-person learning to an increased use of distance learning over the past 2 years. Opinions and sentiments regarding this switch from traditional to remote classes can be tracked in real time in microblog messages promptly shared by Twitter users, who constitute a large and ever-in...

Social network analysis allows to map and measure relationships and flows (links) between people, groups, computers, URLs, or other connected knowledge entities (nodes). In this context, a relevant issue is the treatment of constrained scale-free networks such as the network of student transfers between degree courses offered by an University, that...

Previous researchers have found that traditional determinants explain only a limited part of the variation in perinatal and infant mortality at the family level. In the study reported in this paper, we explored the factors that make the perinatal/neonatal death risk more heterogeneous across families. We estimated logistic regressions with cluster...

Background: Early-interim fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-PET scan after two ABVD (doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine) chemotherapy courses (PET-2) represents the most effective predictor of treatment outcome in classical Hodgkin's lymphoma. We aimed to assess the predictive value of PET-2 combined with tissue biomarkers in neoplastic a...

Different arterial wall properties can significantly increase the risk of blood turbulent fluxes leading to complications such as atherosclerosis. Since the mechanical properties of arterial vessels are influenced by age, we investigated, in a retrospective study, the effects on renal artery stenosis of an age difference >15 years between donor and...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, an evident reduction of the infant mortality rate occurred in Italy. In previous studies, less attention has been devoted to the effects of individual bio-demographic and socioeconomic components on infant mortality. We use micro data from births, deaths and marriages civil registers of Granarolo, an I...

In every real-world domain where reasoning under uncertainty is required, combining information from different sources (‘experts’) can be really a powerful tool to enhance accuracy and precision of the ‘final’ estimate of the unknown quantity. Bayesian paradigm offers a coherent perspective which can be used to address the problem, but an issue str...

Purpose The aim of the study was to investigate the collagen fibre ultrastructural arrangement and collagen fibril diameters in the superficial medial collateral ligament (sMCL) in the human knee. Considering sMCL’s distinctive functions at different angles of knee flexion, it was hypothesized a significant difference between the collagen fibril d...

In clinical research an early and prompt detection of the risk class of a new patient may really play a crucial role in determining the effectiveness of the treatment and, consequently, achieving a satisfying prognosis of the patient's chances. There exists a number of popular rule-based algorithms for classification, whose performances are very at...

Narcolepsy with cataplexy (NC) is associated with loss of hypocretin neurons in the lateral hypothalamus involved in the circadian timing of sleep and wakefulness, and many biologic functions including autonomic control. The authors investigated whether chronic lack of hypocretin signaling alters cardiovascular control during sleep in humans. Compa...

Narcolepsy with cataplexy (NC) is a sleep disorder caused by the loss of the hypothalamic neurons producing hypocretin. The clinical hallmarks of the disease are excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, other rapid eye movement (REM) sleep phenomena, and a fragmented wake-sleep cycle. Experimental data suggest that the hypocretin system is involved...

The purpose of the present study was to make a histological analysis of the remodelling process of hamstring tendon graft used as Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). The hamstring graft of eight patients was biopsied at different follow-up times from 1 to 10 years. The specimens were analysed with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) at ultrastruct...

This work analyzes the effects of storage by fresh-freezing at -80 degrees C on the histological, structural and biomechanical properties of the human posterior tibial tendon (PTT), used for ACL reconstruction. Twenty-two PTTs were harvested from eleven donors. For each donor one tendon was frozen at -80 degrees C and thawed in physiological soluti...

Ensemble Prediction Systems play today a fundamental role in weather forecasting. They can represent and measure uncertainty, thereby allowing distributional forecasting as well as deterministic-style forecasts. In this context, we show how the Joint Calibration Model (Agati et al., 2007) – based on a modelization of the Probability Integral Transf...

Following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction with the middle third part patellar tendon, the graft undergoes histological rearrangement due to biomechanical action, which transforms it into a structure similar to the normal ACL. The purpose of our study was to make a qualitative and quantitative histological evaluation, by transmission...

In many research fields, as for example in probabilistic weather forecasting, valuable predictive information about a future random phenomenon may come from several, possibly heterogeneous, sources. Forecast combining methods have been developed over the years in order to deal with ensemble of sources. The aim is to combine several predictions in s...

In condition of uncertainty regarding a random phenomenon, particularly in decision making and risk analysis, valuable information may be provided by “experts” in terms of subjective probability distributions for a random variable. In this paper, some ideas about this topic are discussed.

In many research fields, where valuable information about a random phenomenon may come from different, possibly heterogeneous sources of knowledge ("experts"), the combining of the available information is a powerful uncertainty- reducing process. As efficiency reasons often suggest to perform a sequential proce- dure, in this paper some informativ...

When an investigator performs a sequential consulting of ‘experts’ to reduce his/her own uncertainty about an unknown quantity, efficiency reasons suggest he/she should use some criteria for selecting the ‘best’ expert to be consulted at each stage and for deciding at which stage the information acquiring can be stopped. In this paper some selectin...

L'algoritmo implementato è quello bayesiano di P.A. Morris (1997), che suggerisce di aggregare leinfromazioni, codificate in tremini di distribuzioni di probabilità su 0, in un a densità-sintesi individuata come densiutà a posteriori. Tale impostazione è caratterizzata da una "funzione di calibrazione" che può essere modellizata adoperando l'argome...

In the expert use problem, hierarchical models provide an ideal perspective for classifying understanding and generalising the aggregative algoithms suitable to compose experts' opinions in a single synthesis distribution. After suggesting to look at Peter A. Morris' (1971, 1974, 1977) Bayesian model in such a light, this paper addresses the proble...