This paper is devoted to the formulation of a model for the optimal asset-liability man- agement for insurance companies. We focus on a typical guaranteed investment con- tract, by which the holder has the right to receive after T years a return that cannot be lower than a minimum predened rate rg. We take account of the rules that usually are imposed to insurance companies in the management of this funds as reserves and solvency margin. We formulate the problem as a stochastic optimization problem in a discrete time setting comparing this approach with the so-called hedging approach. The utility function to maximize depends on various parameters including specific goals of the company management. Some preliminary numerical results are reported to ease the comparison between the two approaches.

L’articolo mette in evidenza come lo sviluppo culturale e civile di un paese sia strettamente collegato con il progresso della sua struttura socioeconomica e, contemporaneamente, con il livello generale di produzione e diffusione delle conoscenze scientifiche nei diversi strati sociali, dando risalto al ruolo che il bibliotecario degli istituti di ricerca, in qualità di operatore attivo nella produzione scientifica ed esperto dei sistemi informativi, può giocare. Nell'articolo inoltre si individua il contributo strategico del bibliotecario finalizzato alla divulgazione delle conoscenze e alla costruzione di un “senso comune” della scienza, rendendo più fluida la circolazione delle informazioni e accessibile a tutti il patrimonio bibliografico raccolto e conservato nelle biblioteche presso cui opera.

Elementary interpolation was used in nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE) to study higher integrability via Riesz transforms. The analysis was conducted in Dirichlet space of locally integrable functions in RN. The uniqueness statement for solutions of the nonlinear PDE was also proved.

A computational approach has been developed to assess the power of paramagnetism-based backbone constraints with respect to the determination of the tertiary structure, once the secondary structure elements are known. This is part of the general assessment of paramagnetism-based constraints which are known to be relevant when used in conjunction with all classical constraints. The paramagnetism-based constraints here investigated are the pseudo-contact shifts, the residual dipolar couplings due to self-orientation of the metalloprotein in high magnetic fields, and the cross correlation between dipolar relaxation and Curie relaxation. The relative constraints are generated by back-calculation from a known structure. The elements of secondary structure are supposed to be obtained from chemical shift index. The problem of the reciprocal orientation of the helices is addressed. It is shown that the correct fold can be obtained depending on the length of the α-helical stretches with respect to the length of the non helical segments connecting the α-helices. For example, the correct fold is straightforwardly obtained for the four-helix bundle protein cytochrome b562, while the double EF-hand motif of calbindin D9k is hardly obtained without ambiguity. In cases like calbindin D9k, the availability of datasets from different metal ions is helpful, whereas less important is the location of the metal ion with respect to the secondary structure elements.

Some known models in phase separation theory (Hele-Shaw, nonlocal mean curvature motion) and their approximations by means of Cahn-Hilliard and nonlocal Allen-Cahn equations are proposed as a tool to generate planar curve-shortening flows without shrinking. This procedure can be seen as a level set approach to area-preserving geometric flows in the spirit of Sapiro and Tannenbaum [38], with application to shape recovery. We discuss the theoretical validation of this method and its implementation to problems of shape recovery in Computer Vision. The results of some numerical experiments on image processing are presented.

We present a numerical study of anisotropic statistical fluctuations in homogeneous turbulent flows. We give an argument to predict the dimensional scaling exponents, (p+j)/3, for the projections of p-th order structure function in the j-th sector of the rotational group. We show that measured exponents are anomalous, showing a clear deviation from the dimensional prediction. Dimensional scaling is subleading and it is recovered only after a random reshuffling of all velocity phases, in the stationary ensemble. This supports the idea that anomalous scaling is the result of a genuine inertial evolution, independent of large-scale behavior.

We study the on-line version of the well known problem of scheduling a set of $n$ independent multiprocessor tasks with prespecified processor allocations on a set of identical processors in order to minimize the makespan. Recently, it has been proven that even in the off-line case with unit processing time tasks no polynomial time approximation algorithm can be found with approximation factor $m^{{1}/{2}-\eps}$ for any $\eps >0$, unless \NP=\ZPP. We first study simple approximation and on-line algorithms based on the classical first-fit technique. Then, by using a split-round technique, we give a $3 \sqrt{m}$-approximation algorithm for the off-line version of the problem. Finally, we adapt this algorithm to the on-line case, in the paradigm of tasks arriving over time, and show that its competitive ratio is bounded by $(6\sqrt{m}+1)$. Due to the conducted experimental results, which also analyzed here, we conclude that our algorithms can also perform well in practice.

PELCR is an environment for lambda-terms reduction on parallel/distributed computing systems. The computation performed in this environment is a distributed graph rewriting and a major optimization to achieve efficient execution consists of a message aggregation technique exhibiting the potential for strong reduction of the communication overhead. In this paper we discuss the interaction between the effectiveness of aggregation and the schedule sequence of rewriting operations. Then we present a Priority Based (BP) scheduling algorithm well suited for the speci c aggregation technique. Results on a classical benchmark lambda-term demonstrate that PB allows PELCR to achieve up to 88% of the ideal speedup while executing on a shared memory parallel architecture.