In recent years, the need to enable location- and map-aware services in GPS-deprived environments has become increasingly important, especially after natural disasters events. At the same time, the possibility to form swarms of mini-robots is a very attractive solution for users’ mobiles positioning and for mapping of position-related physical quantities, not only for outdoor but also for indoor scenarios, e.g., assessing the status of buildings immediately after an earthquake. In this context, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a good choice thanks to their flexibility, reconfigurability and advantageous line-of-sight propagation conditions. Despite UAVs’ potentials for indoor positioning, scholars and professionals have mostly considered and used them only for enabling outdoor applications. In this perspective, AirSens aims at analyzing the potentialities of swarms of UAVs for high-accuracy tracking and sensing in indoor contexts, by addressing three novel objectives: (1) the assessment of the swarms’ localization performance, even in infrastructure-less scenarios, by deriving the fundamental limits and considering energy-efficient solutions; (2) the investigation of swarms’ mapping capabilities, enhanced by crowd-sensing mechanisms; (3) the design of an information-seeking control for navigation (i.e., where the swarm should navigate to provide reliable position estimates) and formation (i.e., which specific swarm geometry can maximize the positioning performance). These objectives will be pursued through an innovative combination of theoretical and experimental analyses, possible thanks to the synergy between the researcher and her supervisors, experts in the fields of advanced signal processing (USA) and radio-localization (Italy), which perfectly matches the project vision. AirSens will also enhance the researcher technical and managerial skills thanks to multidisciplinary and ad-hoc training activities.

Personalised medicine (PM) is a novel approach to medical care that customises each treatment not just to the disease but also to the patient. While the advantages of this framework are widely recognised and its development is acknowledged as a fundamental societal challenge by the H2020 program, clinical applications are still limited, due to the increased complexity and costs, with respect to the current standard of care. ITHACA aims at developing an innovative PM toolkit that, relying on an advanced computational simulator, innovative in-vitro techniques and standard clinical data could provide an efficient and ethical framework for the screening of different ovarian cancer therapies and the identification of the most effective for each subject. This project builds on my experience with computational modelling and multidisciplinary research environments, to develop a programmable in-silico simulator capable of reproducing the patient-specific response to standard and novel ovarian cancer treatments. This tool will be extensively validated with both standard and primary cell lines and will then be used to determine patient-specific therapy outcome (RECIST 1.1 criteria) in women affected by ovarian cancer. Additionally it will be integrated in a novel bioreactor system for the in-vitro study of metastasization in HGSC. This compound device will allow for automatic treatment optimisation within an accurate and unique experimental model for this disease, and will thus provide an effective platform for personalised treatments development. Funding of this action will be a fundamental opportunity of career development, that will support my training in a highly innovative, interdisciplinary field while fostering the achievement of professional independence. Additionally the results of ITHACA will lead to high profile, impactful publications and provide the scientific community with enabling tools for the extensive application of PM in the clinic.

By investigating the development of services provided by women to cater the emotional and sexual needs of women in contemporary Japan, this project addresses the relationship and the tension between the possibility for self-expression, the role of intimacy, and its intersection with the neoliberal market from a feminist perspective. This project stands at the nexus between Japanese Studies and Gender Studies and it investigates to what extent the market for female/female commodified intimacy provides women with the chance to explore alternative ways to perform femininity outside a heteronormative frame. My contention is that occupations where female-born individuals provide emotional and/or sexual satisfaction to other women allow space for expressions of intimacy and gender performativity outside the binary male/female division for both clients and providers. When dating, meeting, or loving another woman within the frame of paid intimacy, both subjects escape the pressure generated by heteronormativity. Commodified forms of intimacy, I argue, allow women to challenge societal expectations about femininity, to obtain increased emotional satisfaction and freedom. By tackling these dimensions, I discuss the dissatisfaction of Japanese women with the dominant relational models (e.g. marriage) and provide a new understanding of the development of alternative relational models to the detriment of the traditional heteronormative family, framing these choices as a form of long-term resistance. The project fills a gap as the investigation of contexts where women are, at the same time, both clients and providers of commodified intimacy is still largely unexplored. In addition, instead of essentializing this phenomenon as a feature of Japan, this project – situated at the juncture of postindustrial consumerism and globalizing neoliberal reformation – and its findings can be applied to contemporary societies witnessing the ramifications of love on-demand.

An investigation of Sino-Iranian connections from the third to tenth centuries, with a particular focus on political, religious and material exchanges between China and Sassanian Iran. The aim will be to build a bridge between modern Sinology and Iranology and to further build our understanding of the history of Sino-Iranian relations in close coordination with Iranologists in Italy and Europe. The project will aim to highlight Sino-Iranian relations as having been significantly more important than is normally recognized, and to provide new knowledge that will be useful to both Sinology and Iranology. This two-year project will excavate primary and archaeological sources in Chinese while documenting modern scholarship on Sino-Iranian relations, especially in Modern Chinese and Japanese. The project will make great use of the digitized and searchable corpus of classical Chinese, and reevaluate the roles of Iranian religions in medieval China. The findings and data from this study will be digested and presented as a single monograph. The proposed project will be actively interdisciplinary. It will involve the research, a Canadian Sinologist trained in Japan and the Netherlands, being hosted by Iranologists in Italy. Such an arrangement will allow for gainful two-way exchanges of knowledge and skills.