3D Si radiation sensors came along with extreme radiation hard properties, primarily owing to the geometrical advantages over planar sensors where electrodes are formed penetrating through the active substrate volume. Among them: reduction of the inter-electrode distance, lower depletion voltage requirement, inter-columnar high electric field distribution, lower trapping probability, faster charge collection capability, lower power dissipation, and lower inter-pitch charge sharing. Since several years, FBK has developed 3D sensors with a double-sided technology, that have also been installed in the ATLAS Insertable B-Layer at LHC. However, the future High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrades, aimed to be operational by 2024, impose a complete swap of current 3D detectors with more radiation hard sensor design, able to withstand very large particle fluences up to 2×1016 cm-2 1-MeV equivalent neutrons. The extreme luminosity conditions and related issues in occupancy and radiation hardness lead to very dense pixel granularity (50×50 or 25×100 μm2), thinner active region (~100 μm), narrower columnar electrodes (~5μm diameter) with reduced inter-electrode spacing (~30 μm), and very slim edges (~100 μm) into the 3D pixel sensor design. This thesis includes the development of this new generation of small-pitch and thin 3D radiation sensors aimed at the foreseen Inner Tracker (ITk) upgrades at HL-LHC.

Il NM è una disturbo del movimento spontaneo caratterizzato da un sottoutilizzo dell’arto controlesionale in assenza di un deficit primario che migliora con il comando verbale. Per la sue caratteristiche è difficile da evocare in ambito clini-co e il suo riconoscimento si basa sull'osservazione dei sintomi. Le lesioni associate al NM sono diverse e i suoi mecca-nismi sono sconosciuti. La compromissione selettiva del movimento spontaneo suggerisce un coinvolgimento del si-stema motorio mediale. La ricerca ha lo scopo di studiare il NM con un nuovo metodo quantitativo, basato su actigra-fia, e di esplorare le basi neuroanatomiche. Due accelerometri erano posti su entrambi i polsi per 24 ore. 31 soggetti sani e 38 cerebrolesi, 6 con MN sono stati reclutati. In due casi abbiamo esplorato le lesioni. E’stato validato il nuovo indice di asimmetria AR24h. I MN mostravano un comportamento asimmetrico, simile agli emiplegici e diverso dai sani e dai pazienti non emiplegici. I pazienti mostravano una lesione del cingolo e putamen, parti del sistema motorio mediale, importante per le azioni volontarie. I risultati che l’actigrafia differenziale nel quantifica il movimento spontaneo e valuta il NM. Putamen e il cingolo causano una disfunzione del sistema motorio mediale e induce NM. / The MN is a movement disorder characterized by spontaneous underutilized contralesional limb in the absence of a primary deficit that improves with the verbal command. For its characteristics it is difficult to evoke in the clinical set-ting and its recognition is based on observation of symptoms. The lesions associated with NM are different and its mechanisms are unknown. The selective impairment of spontaneous movement suggests the involvement of the medi-al motor system. Research has the aim of studying the MN with a new quantitative method, based on the actigraphy, and to explore the neuroanatomical bases. Two accelerometers were placed on both wrists for 24 hours. Sog-31 jets and 38 brain-healthy, with 6 MN were recruited. In two cases we analysis lesions. It has been validated new asymmetry index AR24h. The MN showed an asymmetric behavior, similar to and different from the healthy and hemiplegic pa-tients not hemiplegic. Patients showed a lesion of the cingulate and putamen, parts of the medial motor system im-portant for voluntary actions. The differential actigraphy quantifies the spontaneous movement and evaluates the NM. Putamen and the track cause dysfunction of the motor system and causes medial NM.

Sulla base della teoria delle Comunità di Pratica e dell'Azione Situata, la ricerca si propone come scopo generale lo studio delle dinamiche interattive, relazionali e comunicative legate all’introduzione di una Cartella clinica medico-infermieristica informatizzata da parte di Comunità di Pratica professionali, composte da medici ed infermieri. Il primo obiettivo è quello di studiare in un’ottica psicosociale la creazione (primo studio) e il funzionamento (secondo studio) di Comunità di Pratica professionali nate intorno alle Nuove Tecnologie, tenendo conto anche se e in quale misura una comunità che segue un nuovo paradigma di interazione sociale possa essere considerata una vera e propria Comunità di Pratica. Il secondo obiettivo è quello di affinare una metodologia di indagine psicosociale in riferimento alle dinamiche che si concretizzano all’interno delle Comunità di Pratica, senza dimenticare la dimensione dell’Identità/Soggettività. I risultati, in un'ottica esplicativa di comprensione delle dinamiche sottostanti all’essere parte di una Comunità di Pratica o all’iniziare a farne parte, hanno restituito interessanti risvolti dal punto di vista interpersonale e organizzativo, con particolare riferimento alla costituzione e allo sviluppo delle due Comunità di Pratica e agli aspetti comunicativi e identitari della relazione medico-infermiere. Il terzo e ultimo obiettivo è provare a rispondere al quesito: per le Comunità di Pratica è possibile parlare di ‘Soggettività di pratica’? Per fare questo, una riflessione teorica conclusiva si propone di collegare il costrutto di Comunità di Pratica ai recenti sviluppi teorici sulla Soggettività. / According to the Community of Practice and the Situated Action Theories, the general aim of the research is the evaluation of the interactive, relational and communicative dimensions of the introduction and use of an interactive clinical-nursing record by medical professionals (doctors and nurses) Communities of Practice. In particular, the two studies investigate, from a psychosocial perspective, the emergence (first study) and the process (second study) of Communities related to the New Technologies, estimating if this kind of communities can be properly considered as Communities of Practice, referring also to the Identity/Subjectivity dimension. The results offers interesting practical implications -from the interpersonal and organizational point of view- on communication and identity aspects of the relationship among colleagues and between doctors and nurses. The last objective is then to try to answer to the question if it’s possible to assume a “subjectivity of practice”: a conclusive theoretical proposal aims to rely the Community of practice theory to the recent progress in Subjectivity concept.

The upgrades of High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will call for new radiation hard technologies to be applied in the next generations of tracking devices that will be required to withstand extremely high radiation doses. In this sense, one of the most promising approaches to silicon detectors, is the so called 3D technology. This technology realizes columnar electrodes penetrating vertically into the silicon bulk thus decoupling the active volume from the inter-electrode distance. 3D detectors were first proposed by S. Parker and collaborators in the mid ’90s as a new sensor geometry intended to mitigate the effects of radiation damage in silicon. 3D sensors are currently attracting growing interest in the field of High Energy Physics, despite their more complex and expensive fabrication, because of the much lower operating voltages and enhanced radiation hardness. 3D technology was also investigated in other laboratories, with the intent of reducing the fabrication complexity and aiming at medium volume sensor production in view of the first upgrades of the LHC experiments. This work will describe all the efforts in design, fabrication and characterization of 3D detectors produced at FBK for the ATLAS Insertable B-Layer, in the framework of the ATLAS 3D sensor collaboration. In addition, the design and preliminary characterization of a new batch of 3D sensor will also be described together with new applications of 3D technology.

This thesis aims at evaluating, in two separate studies, strategies for physiological noise and head motion correction in resting state brain FC-fMRI. In particular, as a general marker of noise correction performance we use the test-retest reproducibility of the DMN. The guiding hypothesis is that methods that improve reproducibility should reflect more efficient corrections and thus be preferable in longitudinal studies. The physiological denoising study evaluated longitudinal changes in a 3T harmonized multisite fMRI study of healthy elderly participants from the PharmaCog Consortium (Jovicich et al., 2016). Retrospective physiological noise correction (rPNC) methods were here implemented to investigate their influence on several DMN reliability measures within and between 13 MRI sites. Each site involved five different healthy elderly participants who were scanned twice at least a week apart (5 participants per site). fMRI data analysis was performed once without rPNC and then with WM/CSF regression, with physiological estimation by temporal ICA (PESTICA) (Beall & Lowe, 2007) and FMRIB's ICA-based Xnoiseifier (FSL-FIX) (Griffanti et al., 2014; Salimi-Khorshidi et al., 2014). These methods differ for their data-based computational approach to identify physiological noise fluctuations and need to be applied at different stages of data preprocessing. As a working hypothesis, physiological denoising was in general expected to improve DMN reliability. The head motion study evaluated longitudinal changes in the DMN connectivity from a 4T single-site study of 24 healthy young volunteers who were scanned twice within a week. Within each scanning session, RS-fMRI scans were acquired once using interleaved and then sequential slice-order acquisition methods. Furthermore, brain volumes were corrected for motion using once rigid-body volumetric and then slice-wise methods. The effects of these choices were then evaluated computing multiple DMN reliability measures and investigating single regions within the DMN to assess the existence of inter-regional effects associated with head-motion. In this case, we expected to find slice-order acquisition effects in reliability estimates under standard volumetric motion correction and no slice-order acquisition effect under 2D slice-based motion correction. Both studies used ICA to characterize the DMN using group-ICA and dual regression procedures (Beckmann et al., 2009). This methodology proved successful at defining consistent DMN connectivity metrics in longitudinal and clinical RS-fMRI studies (Zuo & Xing, 2014). Automatic DMN selection procedures and other quality assurance analyses were made to supervise ICA performance. Both studies considered several test-retest (TRT) reliability estimates (Vilagut, 2014) for some DMN connectivity measurements: absolute percent error between the sessions, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) between sessions and multiple sites, the Jaccard index to evaluate the degree of voxel-wise spatial pattern actiavtion overlap between sessions.

Modern communication and space systems such as satellite communication devices, radars, SAR and radio astronomy interferometers are realized with large antenna arrays since this kind of radiating systems are able to generate radiation patterns with high directivity and resolution. In such a framework conventional arrays with uniform inter-element spacing could be not satisfactory in terms of costs and dimensions. An interesting alternative is to reduce the array elements obtaining the so called "thinned arrays". Large isophoric thinned arrays have been exploited because of their advantages in terms of weight, consumption, hardware complexity, and costs over their filled counterparts. Unfortunately, thinning large arrays reduces the control of the peak sidelobe level (PSL) and does not give automatically optimal spatial frequency coverage for correlators. First of all the state of the art methodologies used to overcome such limitations, e.g., random and algorithmic approaches, dynamic programming and stochastic optimization algorithms such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing or particle swarm optimizers, are analyzed and described in the introduction. Successively, innovative guidelines for the synthesis of large radiating systems are proposed, and discussed in order to point out advantages and limitations. In particular, the following specific issues are addressed in this work: 1. A new class of analytical rectangular thinned arrays with low peak sidelobe level (PSL). The proposed synthesis technique exploits binary sequences derived from McFarland difference sets to design thinned layouts on a lattice of P(P+2) positions for any prime P. The pattern features of the arising massively-thinned arrangements characterized by only P(P+1) active elements are discussed and the results of an extensive numerical analysis are presented to assess advantages and limitations of the McFarland-based arrays. 2. A set of techniques is presented that is based on the exploitation of low correlation Almost Difference Sets (ADSs) sequences to design correlator arrays for radioastronomy applications. In particular three approaches are discussed with different objectives and performances. ADS-based analytical designs, GA-optimized arrangements, and PSO optimized arrays are presented and applied to the synthesis of open-ended "Y" and "Cross" array configurations to maximize the coverage u-v or to minimize the peak sidelobe level (PSL). Representative numerical results are illustrated to point out the features and performances of the proposed approaches, and to assess their effectiveness in comparison with state-of-the-art design methodologies, as well. The presented analysis indicates that the proposed approaches overcome existing PSO-based correlator arrays in terms of PSL control (e.g., >1.0dB reduction) and tracking u-v coverage (e.g., up to 2\% enhancement), also improving the speed of convergence of the synthesis process. 3. A genetic algorithm (GA)-enhanced almost difference set (ADS)-based methodology to design thinned planar arrays with low-peak sidelobe levels (PSLs). The method allows to overcome the limitations of the standard ADS approach in terms of flexibility and performance. The numerical validation, carried out in the far-field and for narrow-band signals, points out that with affordable computational efforts it is possible to design planar array arrangements that outperform standard ADS-based designs as well as standard GA design approaches.