Synthema (Italy)

The subtitling demand of multimedia content has grown quickly over the last years, especially after the adoption of the new European audiovisual legislation, which forces to make multimedia content...

Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) are increasingly more reliant on information and communication technologies and affected by a society shaped by the Internet and Social Media. The richness and quantity of information available from open sources, if properly gathered and processed, can provide valuable intelligence and help drawing inference from existing closed source intelligence. This paper presents CAPER, a state-of-the-art platform for the prevention of organised crime, created in cooperation with European LEAs. CAPER supports information sharing and multi-modal analysis of open and closed information sources, mainly based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Visual Analytics (VA) technologies.

The revolution in information technology is making open sources more accessible, ubiquitous, and valuable. The international Intelligence Communities have seen open sources grow increasingly easier and cheaper to acquire in recent years. But up to 80% of electronic data is textual and most valuable information is often hidden and encoded in pages which are neither structured, nor classified. The process of accessing all these raw data, heterogeneous in terms of source and language, and transforming them into information is therefore strongly linked to automatic textual analysis and synthesis, which are greatly related to the ability to master the problems of multilinguality. This paper describes a content enabling system that provides deep semantic search and information access to large quantities of distributed multimedia data for both experts and general public. STALKER provides with a language independent search and dynamic classification features for a broad range of data collected from several sources in a number of culturally diverse languages.

Rebound insomnia is a transient intense worsening of sleep usually appearing within 3 days from the abrupt discontinuation of benzodiazepines (mainly short-acting), following long term use and abuse of these hypnotics. Zolpidem is an imidazopyridine, that binds selectively at ω1-receptor subtypes within the GABAA receptor supramolecular complex. It has a rapid onset of action and short-elimination half-life; it reduces the latency of sleep and prolongs the duration of sleep in patients with insomnia, without any major effects on sleep stages and rebound effects upon discontinuation. The present multicentre trial (three Italian centres) was aimed at assessing the symptoms/signs of rebound insomnia after discontinuation of either zolpidem or triazolam. A double-blind, randomized, parallel group trial of 20-day duration was carried out in 22 patients suffering from either transient insomnia, or short-term (situational stress) insomnia, or patients who were poor sleepers. The trial consisted of three periods: a 3-day run-in period with placebo, a 14-day active treatment period (zolpidem 10 mg od or triazolam 0.25 mg od), a 3-day withdrawal period with placebo. There were statistically significant [p = 0.0064 for Total Sleep Time (TST) and p = 0.0051 for Sleep Efficiency (SE%)] differences between triazolam- and zolpidem-treated patients during the first withdrawal night versus baseline: TST decreased to 34.5 min after triazolam but increased to 43.8 min after zolpidem, and a similar evolution was shown on SE% (a decrease of 6.3 per cent after triazolam and an increase of 9.9 per cent after zolpidem). Also the Wake-time After Sleep Onset (WASO) showed a statistically significantly (p = 0.0083) different pattern, during the first withdrawal night, remaining decreased after zolpidem (37.5 min) but suddenly increasing after triazolam (17.3 min). Also the subjective time to fall asleep changed with a statistically significant difference (p = 0.042), being increased after triazolam (8.6 min) and decreased after zolpidem (20.8 min). The results of the study demonstrate the presence of clear rebound insomnia after triazolam discontinuation, whereas such a drawback is absent with zolpidem. This allows the abrupt discontinuation of zolpidem without any need for a tapering procedure and without any risk of pharmacological dependence.