Ever since the earthquake of April 6, 2009 hit the city of L’Aquila, Italy, the city has been facing major challenges in terms of social, physical, and economic reconstruction. The system of public urban mobility, the bus network, is no exception with its old bus fleet, non-user-friendly information, and poor scheduling. This paper argues that the public transportation system of L’Aquila could be improved towards smart mobility models without large infrastructure investment by leveraging the “infostructure” approach, digital technologies, open data, and open source software. This work presents the digitization and geo-referencing procedure, software architecture, and the web and mobile apps that have been developed to improve the information flow available to citizens and to increase the user-friendliness of the transportation system. Future research will seek to make use of the data and develop applications to perform a public transport accessibility analysis of major points of interest throughout the city

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is an aggressive epithelial tumor which shows very poor prognosis and high rate of recurrence, representing an urgent problem for public healthcare. MicroRNAs (miRNAs/miRs) are a class of small, non-coding RNAs that attract great attention because of their role in regulation of processes such as cellular growth, proliferation, apoptosis. Because of the thousands of potential interactions between a single miR and target mRNAs, bioinformatics prediction tools are very useful to facilitate the task for individuating and selecting putative target genes. In this study, we present a chemically-induced HCC mouse model to identify differential expression of miRNAs during the progression of the hepatic injury up to HCC onset. In addition, we describe an established bioinformatics approach to highlight putative target genes and protein interaction networks where they are involved. We describe four miRs (miR-125a-5p, miR-27a, miR-182, miR-193b) which showed to be differentially expressed in the chemically-induced HCC mouse model. The miRs were subjected to four of the most used predictions tools and 15 predicted target genes were identified. The expression of one (ANK3) among the 15 predicted targets was further validated by immunoblotting. Then, enrichment annotation analysis was performed revealing significant clusters, including some playing a role in ion transporter activity, regulation of receptor protein serine/threonine kinase signaling pathway, protein import into nucleus, regulation of intracellular protein transport, regulation of cell adhesion, growth factor binding, and regulation of TGF-beta/SMAD signaling pathway. A network construction was created and links between the selected miRs, the predicted targets as well as the possible interactions among them and other proteins were built up. In this study, we combined miRNA expression analysis, obtained by an in vivo HCC mouse model, with a bioinformatics-based workflow. New genes, pathways and protein interactions, putatively involved in HCC initiation and progression, were identified and explored.

Next Generation Internet (NGI) is the European initiative launched to identify the future internet technologies, designed to serve the needs of the digitalized society while ensuring privacy, trust, decentralization, openness, inclusion, and business cooperation. NGI provides efficient support to promote diversity, decentralization and the growth of disruptive innovation envisioned by smart cities. After the earthquake of 6 April 2009, the city of L’Aquila is facing a massive and innovative reconstruction process. As a consequence, nowadays, the L’Aquila city can be considered as a living laboratory model for applications within the context of smart cities. This paper describes and evaluates the realization of a Collaborative Road Mobility System (CRMS) for L’Aquila city by using our CHOReVOLUTION approach for the automated choreography production. The CRMS allows vehicles and transport infrastructure to interconnect, share information and use it to coordinate their actions.