Technologies

4Ts Game was born in ITD in 2017 to indicate a board game for teacher training, which aims to develop skills in designing collaborative learning activities. The game was originally conceived as a 'tangible' game, consisting of a board and 4 decks of paper cards which contain inputs that guide the teachers/players' design process. Subsequently the game evolved and was developed in its digital version. In this version, developed in Unity and with an underlying knowledge base in Prolog, the game is able to provide feedback to teachers regarding the design/game choices made.

The proposed technology consists of a portable device for monitoring the freshness of fish, based on its smell. The device is based on a gas sensor and pattern recognition software to correlate the sensor signal to the freshness of the food. The technology is designed for its integration into domestic or industrial refrigerators.

The containers for plants and the like have different shapes, an open top to facilitate irrigation and material supply; a base that includes one or more holes to facilitate proper water drainage and to ensure ventilation for the rooting apparatus. An inconvenience of these containers is related to their placement in outdoor environments without roofs: in the presence of "unfavorable" climatic conditions, excessive exposure to rain water rather than excessive exposure to the sun, these containers expose plants to a series of problems.

CPIAbot is a conversational assistant supporting the learning of Italian L2 for migrants. It has been tested in particular in the context of CPIA - Centri Provinciali per l'Istruzione degli Adulti - MIUR.

Our innovative proposal involves an educational robotics training program, resulting from an experimental research that combines traditional educational approaches with the utilization of robotics. Specifically, the educational robot Thymio, developed by EPFL, serves as a facilitator in the learning process to enhance School Readiness.

We propose an optical technique for the fast check of the presence, on the exposed surfaces of persons and objects, of explosives and their precursors, or drugs, or in general materials which are not allowed in restricted environments: airports, courts, places of worship, etc. The technique yields bi-dimensional pictures, with exposure time of < 1 sec, reporting the target substances, and their locations and quantities. The technique already provided laboratory preliminary results, to be completed, and fully validated for sensitivity and selectivity.

The development of functional foods is often limited by industrial manufacturing processes, for example, for the production of baked foods, the use of high cooking temperatures causes denaturation of proteins, destruction of vitamins, alteration of fatty acids, etc. The protection of these components is essential in the production of gluten-free foods as they are generally poor in proteins and vitamins.

The proposed technology takes advantages of the huge potentialities of the gellan gum microgels in the preservation of cultural heritage. Microgels are polymeric gels particles with the micro and nanoscale size, whose soft nature is due to the presence of the aqueous solvent inside the particle. For their small size, they can easily diffuse in the environment and penetrate in the porous structure of paper and wood to act as cleaner agent.

Plants have a huge potential to contribute to the solution of a large number of issues facing the modern world, ranging from a poor crop yields and problems caused by global climate changing. Our team has been on the forefront of the PCR and NGS applications to plant responses to biotic and abiotic stress. As experts in genomics and plant pathology we are able to accelerate the understanding and use of plant genes and resources.

In the last years, hop culture has spread throughout Italy, and the vegetative biomass disposal, after harvesting of cones, used for beer production, became a serious problem for hop growers. Hop plant contains in all parts, cones, shoots, leaves and roots, bioactive compounds, with proven and important antiviral, antibacterial and antioxidant properties.

Our idea come from the improving of the traceability technique in agro-food fisheries industries through the application of omics technologies in microbiota studies.  These latter would be capable of exploiting the huge pool of biological molecules contained in fishery resources (e.g. nucleic acids, proteins, metabolites) and use them as a powerful tools for the identification and reconstruction of fishery history, from the sea to the table.

Detection devices for the presence of molecules of interest (analytes) enjoyed a renewed burst with the introduction of biological components (biosensors). Their high specificity is often used in various fields, from environmental monitoring and biomedicine to the protection and promotion of agri-food products. However, the high cost of production and the lack of compatibility with mass sampling (high-throughput) sometimes limit their use.

This technology concerns the development of new eco-sustainable UV physical/mineral filters with the aim of offering important innovations per the cosmetic sector. This, encouraged by European initiatives in the Green-Deal context, is constantly looking for new components with improved protection of the human health and the environment.

Mergers e Acquisitions represent important forms of business deals because of the volumes involved in the transactions and the role of the innovation activity of companies. By considering the patent activity of about one thousand companies, we develop a method to predict future acquisitions by assuming that companies deal more frequently with technologically related ones.

The procedure enables the fabrication of nanocomposite membranes filled with suitable amounts of exfoliated bidimensional crystals. These are obtained with an advanced wet-jet milling technique, which provides desired thickness and lateral size of nanofillers through the pulverization and colloidal homogenization of bulk nanomaterials. The bidimensional crystals are dispersed in fluids and suitably delivered inside polymeric matrixes exhibiting a singular morphology.