Product progression: a machine learning approach to forecasting industrial upgrading.

Economic complexity methods, and in particular relatedness measures, lack a systematic evaluation and comparison framework. We argue that out-of-sample forecast exercises should play this role, and we compare various machine learning models to set the prediction benchmark. We find that the key object to forecast is the activation of new products, and that tree-based algorithms clearly outperform both the quite strong auto-correlation benchmark and the other supervised algorithms.

The Language of Innovation.

Predicting innovation is a peculiar problem in data science. Following its definition, an innovation is always a never-seen-before event, leaving no room for traditional supervised learning approaches. Here we propose a strategy to address the problem in the context of innovative patents, by defining innovations as never-seen-before associations of technologies and exploiting self-supervised learning techniques.

Considering patient clinical history impacts performance of machine learning models in predicting course of multiple sclerosis.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) progresses at an unpredictable rate, but predictions on the disease course in each patient would be extremely useful to tailor therapy to the individual needs. We explore different machine learning (ML) approaches to predict whether a patient will shift from the initial Relapsing-Remitting (RR) to the Secondary Progressive (SP) form of the disease, using only "real world" data available in clinical routine. The clinical records of 1624 outpatients (207 in the SP phase) attending the MS service of Sant'Andrea hospital, Rome, Italy, were used.

Improving Reliability of Myocontrol Using Formal Verification.

In the context of assistive robotics, myocontrol is one of the so-far unsolved problems of upper-limb prosthetics. It consists of swiftly, naturally, and reliably converting biosignals, non-invasively gathered from an upper-limb disabled subject, into control commands for an appropriate self-powered prosthetic device. Despite decades of research, traditional surface electromyography cannot yet detect the subject's intent to an acceptable degree of reliability, that is, enforce an action exactly when the subject wants it to be enforced.

A Context Similarity-Based Analysis of Countries' Technological Performance.

This work contributes to the literature in the field of innovation by proposing a quantitative approach for the prediction of the timing and location of patenting activity. In a recent work, it was shown that focusing on couples of technological codes allows for the formation of testable predictions of innovation events, defined as the first time two codes appear together in a patent. In particular, the construction of the vector space of codes and the introduction of the metric allows for a quantitative analysis of technological progress.

A New and Stable Estimation Method of Country Economic Fitness and Product Complexity.

We present a new metric estimating fitness of countries and complexity of products by exploiting a non-linear non-homogeneous map applied to the publicly available information on the goods exported by a country. The non homogeneous terms guarantee both convergence and stability. After a suitable rescaling of the relevant quantities, the non homogeneous terms are eventually set to zero so that this new metric is parameter free.

The Virtuous Interplay of Infrastructure Development and the Complexity of Nations.

Does the infrastructure stock catalyze the development of new capabilities and ultimately of new products or vice-versa? Here we want to quantify the interplay between these two dimensions from a temporal dynamics perspective and, namely, to address whether the interaction occurs predominantly in a specific direction. We therefore need to measure the complexity of an economy (i.e.

Collaboration between a human group and artificial intelligence can improve prediction of multiple sclerosis course: a proof-of-principle study.

Multiple sclerosis has an extremely variable natural course. In most patients, disease starts with a relapsing-remitting (RR) phase, which proceeds to a secondary progressive (SP) form. The duration of the RR phase is hard to predict, and to date predictions on the rate of disease progression remain suboptimal.

The heterogeneous dynamics of economic complexity.

What will be the growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or the competitiveness of China, United States, and Vietnam in the next 3, 5 or 10 years? Despite this kind of questions has a large societal impact and an extreme value for economic policy making, providing a scientific basis for economic predictability is still a very challenging problem. Recent results of a new branch--Economic Complexity--have set the basis for a framework to approach such a challenge and to provide new perspectives to cast economic prediction into the conceptual scheme of forecasting the evolution of a dynamical system as in the case of weather dynamics. We argue that a recently introduced non-monetary metrics for country competitiveness (fitness) allows for quantifying the hidden growth potential of countries by the means of the comparison of this measure for intangible assets with monetary figures, such as GDP per capita.

How the taxonomy of products drives the economic development of countries.

We introduce an algorithm able to reconstruct the relevant network structure on which the time evolution of country-product bipartite networks takes place. The significant links are obtained by selecting the largest values of the projected matrix. We first perform a number of tests of this filtering procedure on synthetic cases and a toy model.

Diversification versus specialization in complex ecosystems.

By analyzing the distribution of revenues across the production sectors of quoted firms we suggest a novel dimension that drives the firms diversification process at country level. Data show a non trivial macro regional clustering of the diversification process, which underlines the relevance of geopolitical environments in determining the microscopic dynamics of economic entities. These findings demonstrate the possibility of singling out in complex ecosystems those micro-features that emerge at macro-levels, which could be of particular relevance for decision-makers in selecting the appropriate parameters to be acted upon in order to achieve desirable results.

Measuring the intangibles: a metrics for the economic complexity of countries and products.

We investigate a recent methodology we have proposed to extract valuable information on the competitiveness of countries and complexity of products from trade data. Standard economic theories predict a high level of specialization of countries in specific industrial sectors. However, a direct analysis of the official databases of exported products by all countries shows that the actual situation is very different.

A network analysis of countries' export flows: firm grounds for the building blocks of the economy.

In this paper we analyze the bipartite network of countries and products from UN data on country production. We define the country-country and product-product projected networks and introduce a novel method of filtering information based on elements' similarity. As a result we find that country clustering reveals unexpected socio-geographic links among the most competing countries.

A new metrics for countries' fitness and products' complexity.

Classical economic theories prescribe specialization of countries industrial production. Inspection of the country databases of exported products shows that this is not the case: successful countries are extremely diversified, in analogy with biosystems evolving in a competitive dynamical environment. The challenge is assessing quantitatively the non-monetary competitive advantage of diversification which represents the hidden potential for development and growth.

Immunomodulatory therapy in recurrent acute necrotizing encephalopathy ANE1: is it useful?

Acute Necrotizing Encephalopathy (ANE) is a rare disorder characterized by fever, seizures and rapid progression to coma after the onset of a viral infection. Most cases are sporadic, however the observation of multiple cases in the same family with recurrent episodes of ANE led to the identification of a genetic form of the disorder, called ANE1, and to the discover of the causative mutation in RANBP2 gene. We report the first Italian child with ANE1 carrying the common c.

Epidemiology of febrile neutropenia in children with central nervous system tumor: results from a single center prospective study.

Data regarding the epidemiology febrile neutropenia during chemotherapy for pediatric central nervous system neoplasia are scarce. Data retrieved from a prospective study performed from January 2002 to December 2004 at G.Gaslini Children Hospital, Genoa, Italy, where analyzed to evaluate proportions, rate for 1000 neutropenic days and etiology of fever in neutropenic children receiving gentle, standard, or peripheral blood stem cell transplant (PBSCT) therapy for central nervous system tumor.

Burden of rotavirus infections in Liguria, Northern Italy: hospitalisations and potential savings by vaccination.

We evaluated the rates of gastroenteritis admissions to the emergency department and of rotavirus-related hospitalisations in children ≤5 years of age in 2006 at an Italian paediatric hospital. We calculated the number of rotavirus cases avoidable through the universal vaccination of children. Epidemiological data were extracted from the Data Elaboration Centre.

Catheter-related bacteremia caused by methicillin-resistant coagulase negative staphylococci with elevated minimal inhibitory concentration for vancomycin.

Treatment of bacteremia caused by methicillin-resistant coagulase-negative staphylococci with vancomycin minimum inhibitory concentration ≥2 mg/L frequently requires central venous catheter removal in children with cancer. There are few data supporting efficacy and safety of antibiotic catheter lock or use of daptomycin or linezolid for this indication in children.

Burden of rotavirus disease and cost-effectiveness of universal vaccination in the Province of Genoa (Northern Italy).

Rotavirus is acknowledged to be a major cause of acute gastroenteritis in infants and young children. As gastroenteritis due to rotavirus is a public health problem and two new vaccines are currently available, we investigated the rotavirus burden and developed a cost-effectiveness analysis, using data collected in the Province of Genoa (Italy), to evaluate the benefits of new borns vaccination. The cost-effectiveness of a rotavirus vaccination programme in the Province of Genoa was performed, in comparison with no vaccination, for both the regional healthcare system (RHS) and society (S).

Epidemiology and clinical features of Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection in children.

Mycoplasma pneumoniae (MP) is, considered to affect rarely children less than 5 yrs of age. This study was performed to describe the epidemiology and the clinical features of MP lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) in children, presenting to a tertiary children hospital. Eleven month-longitudinal study of LRTI due to MP, diagnosed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) on throat swab specimen, was performed.

Unusual manifestations of infections due to Mycoplasma pneumoniae in children.

Mycoplasma pneumoniae (Mp) is an important cause of pneumonia in paediatric age, but also other organs or systems can be affected even without pulmonary involvement. The purpose of this study is to stress the unusual clinical features of Mp infection in children. A review of children affected with Mp infection with peculiar pulmonary and/or extra-pulmonary forms is reported.

The effect of fresh human serum on ofloxacin bactericidal activity.

We have studied the possibility of an increase in ofloxacin bactericidal activity when it is combined with fresh human serum. The tested strains were 10 clinical isolates of Klebsiella pneumoniae. From among our strains 5 were susceptible to serum bactericidal activity and 5 were found to be resistant.