Courses

Art objects, objects of use (cultural, exchange, prestige). The circulation of ideas, believes and technologies through the circulation of objects. Tools for the contextual analysis of art-objects.

International Law, EU Law, and Domestic Law on Cultural Heritage. Basic elements of comparative law. Definition of Cultural Heritage. The institution of protection of cultural heritage in Italy. Fundamental principles and main public interests: protection, circulation, access. Problems and cases (Case law). - European Landscape Convention and Domestic Law on Landscape. Basic elements of comparative law. Principles and main issues: definition of landscape; levels of governance; public law instruments.Problems and cases (Case law).

The goal of the seminars is to introduce some of the most recent techniques for the management of complex data that can be applied to GLAMs (i.e.. Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) related data. Attendees will get aware of the most advanced techniques for data management that can be used to boost the impact of GLAMs activities on various stakeholders, e.g., tourists, scholars, etc. Benefits deriving from these seminars are mainly three: awareness about the main technologies to organize and manage GLAMs' data and objects efficiently, practical examples of how to turn these data and objects into knowledge to be successively exploited, learn how to exploit people and visitors to improve the quality of GLAMs' offered services. The seminars are organized into three modules surveying different approaches and techniques for the storing, annotation, and retrieval of Cultural Heritage data. It firstly introduces the students to the issue of data management, in particular oriented towards texts. The second module illustrates some techniques for digital image understanding and users profiling, also discussing a number of data mining tools for the analysis of multimedia data. Finally, the third module is related to the novel, but already important, topic of crowdsourcing as a way to involve people in the management cycle of GLAMs data.

The goal of the proposed PhD course is to introduce the new methodologies for the construction of high-quality digital 3D models of real artifatcts/scenes and the potential utilizations of those models to support study, monitoring of conservation condition, restoration, education/learning and finally dissemination of our Cultural Heritage.

The long seminar aims at providing an overview on the management of intellectual property rights (copyright transfer agreements, open access, patents, etc.). Funding opportunities for PhD students, post-docs, and researchers are also presented (scholarships by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; initiatives by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst; scholarships offered by the Royal Society in UK; bilateral Italy-France exchange programmes; Fulbright scholarships; Marie Curie actions; grants for researchers provided by the European Research Council). For each funding scheme, specific hints on how to write a proposal are given.

TBD

The course will provide an introduction to the mathematical basis of Complex Networks and to their use to describe, analyze and model a variety of physical and economic situations.

LIST OF LECTURES

Lecture 1 Graph Theory Introduction:
Basic Definitions, Statistical Distributions, Universality, Fractals, Self-Organised Criticality

Lecture 2 Properties of Complex Networks:
Scale-Invariance of Degree Distribution, Small-World Effect, Clustering

Lecture 3 Applications:
Internet, WWW, Socio-technological systems, Economics, Biology

Lecture 4 Communities:
Community Detections, Algorithms to explore Graphs

Lecture 5 Different kind of graphs:
Vertices differences, Layered Vertices, Trees and Taxonomies

Lecture 6 Ranking:
Hierarchies, Spanning Trees,HITS, PageRank,

Lecture 7 Static Models of Graphs:
Erdos-Renyi, Small World

Lecture 8 Dynamical Models of Graphs:
Barabasi-Albert, Configuration models

Lecture 9 Fitness models:
Fitness model and Self-Organised Fitness Model

Lecture 10 Basic Ingredients of Models:
Growth Preferential Attachments, Log Normal Distribution, Multiplicative Noise

Thi course has been cancelled.

History of collecting; management forms of early collections. Theoretical reflections on the phenomenon of collecting. Emerging themes in early collections: private and public goods, ownership of the collection/fruition of the collection. Organizational structure of museums in Italy, France, UK and USA. Elements of museology. The communication strategies of museums in Italy, Europe, USA. The specificity of Italian cultural heritage and its museological management.

This course will provide an introduction to general themes in Affective and Social Neurosciences, particularly focusing on the neural correlates of emotion and behavior.

We know a lot of things ? or, at least, we think we do. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that
studies knowledge: its main features, the dynamics of its growth, as well as its claims for truth, validity, and progress. In this course ? which is designed as a series of seminars held by the students, preceded by a few introductory lectures ? we will consider some of the key contributions to the philosophical debate about the growth of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century, from Logical Positivism to Karl Popper, from Thomas Kuhn to Paul Feyerabend. We shall read some of their (as well as others?) works, and critically consider the content and limits of the different methodologies they advanced. Finally, we will reflect on the extent to which such debates affected the methodology of the social sciences, and consider in what ways hard and social sciences differ: as to their inner nature, the context in which they operate, the data they employ and rely upon, and the prescriptive methodology they more or less explicitly adopt.

In order to ensure their widest possible dissemination, research results need to be presented in academic publications and in talks. The first goal of this course is to introduce students to basic principles of academic writing and on basic techniques to plan and deliver good academic talks. In addition, the course discusses the key principles of peer review, which is what makes science reliable knowledge. In particular, the course focuses on how to write a professional referee report.

TBD