This work aims to show how to manage heterogeneous information and data coming from real datasets that collect physical, biological, and sensory values. As productive companies—public or private, large or small—need increasing profitability with costs reduction, discovering appropriate ways to exploit data that are continuously recorded and made available can be the right choice to achieve these goals. The agricultural field is only apparently refractory to the digital technology and the “smart farm” model is increasingly widespread by exploiting the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm applied to environmental and historical information through time-series. The focus of this study is the design and deployment of practical tasks, ranging from crop harvest forecasting to missing or wrong sensors data reconstruction, exploiting and comparing various machine learning techniques to suggest toward which direction to employ efforts and investments. The results show how there are ample margins for innovation while supporting requests and needs coming from companies that wish to employ a sustainable and optimized agriculture industrial business, investing not only in technology, but also in the knowledge and in skilled workforce required to take the best out of it.

Neurodegenerative diseases, as for instance Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Parkinson's Disease (PD), affect the peripheral nervous system, where nerve cells send the messages that control muscles in order to allow movements. Sick neurons cannot control muscles properly. Handwriting involves cognitive planning, coordination and execution abilities. Significant changes in the handwriting performance are a prominent feature of AD and PD. This work addresses the most relevant results obtained in the field of on-line (dynamic) analysis of handwritten trials by AD and PD patients. The survey is made from a pattern recognition point of view, so that different phases are described. Data acquisition deal not only with the device, but also with the handwriting task. Feature extraction can deal with function and parameter features. The classification problem is also discussed along with results already obtained. The paper also highlights the most profitable research direction.

Handwritten signatures are biometric traits at the center of debate in the scientific community. Over the last 40 years, the interest in signature studies has grown steadily, having as its main reference the application of automatic signature verification, as previously published reviews in 1989, 2000, and 2008 bear witness. Ever since, and over the last 10 years, the application of handwritten signature technology has strongly evolved and much research has focused on the possibility of applying systems based on handwritten signature analysis and processing to a multitude of new fields. After several years of haphazard growth of this research area, it is time to assess its current developments for their applicability in order to draw a structured way forward. This perspective reports a systematic review of the last 10 years of the literature on handwritten signatures with respect to the new scenario, focusing on the most promising domains of research and trying to elicit possible future research directions in this subject. CCS Concepts: • General and reference → Surveys and overviews; • Security and privacy → Biometrics; Access control; • Theory of computation → Pattern matching; • Applied computing → Document analysis; System forensics;

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