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This contribution focuses on the conservation of an Egyptian wooden sculpture (Inventory Number Cat. 745) belonging to the Museo Egizio of Torino in northwest Italy. A preliminary and interdisciplinary study of constituent painting materials and their layering is here provided. It was conducted by means of a multi-technique approach starting from non-invasive multispectral analysis on the whole object, and subsequently, on selected micro-samples. In particular, visible fluorescence induced by ultraviolet radiation (UVF), infrared reflectography (IRR) and visible--induced infrared luminescence were used on the whole object. The micro-samples were analysed by means of an optical microscope with visible and UV light sources, a scanning electron microscope (SEM) with an energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDX), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometer, pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometer (Py-GC/MS) and micro-particle induced X-ray emission (PIXE). The characterization of the painting materials allowed the detection of Egyptian blue and Egyptian green, and also confirmed the pertinence of the top brown layer to the original materials, which is a key point to design a suitable surface treatment. In fact, due to the water sensitiveness of the original materials, only few options were available to perform cleaning operations on this artwork. To setup the cleaning procedure, we performed several preliminary tests on mockups using dry cleaning materials, commonly used to treat reactive surfaces, and innovative highly water retentive hydrogels, which can potentially limit the mechanical action on the original surface while proving excellent cleaning results. Overall, this study has proved fundamental to increase our knowledge on ancient Egyptian artistic techniques and contribute to hypothesize the possible provenance of the artefact. It also demonstrated that polyvinyl alcohol-based retentive gels allow for the safe and efficient cleaning of extremely water sensitive painted surfaces, as those typical of ancient Egyptian artefacts.

Multi-channel contact centers are an increasingly important component of today's business world. They serve as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries, and employ millions of operators across the globe. During their operation, they generate vast amounts of data, ranging from automatically registered logs to handwritten notes and voice recordings. Unfortunately, in most firms, data of interest is unstructured, and stored in several databases, making their exploitation very hard. This article presents a decision support system for a multi-channel, multi-service contact center for front office business process outsourcing, along with its prospective extension to a decision management system. Its core is an enterprise-wide data warehouse, based on the general concept of an event. The proposed system supports a broad new set of advanced analysis tasks, ranging from operator performance assessment to call-flow simulation and data mining, providing operational and management staff the basis for taking effective operative and strategic decisions.

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