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This study aims to analyze the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) on heritage conservation and preservation, and to identify relevant future research trends, by applying scientometrics.

A total of 1,646 articles, published between 1985 and 2021, concerning research on the application of ML and AI in cultural heritage were collected from the Scopus database and analyzed using bibliometric methodologies.

The findings of this study have shown that although there is a very important increase in academic literature in relation to AI and ML, publications that specifically deal with these issues in relation to cultural heritage and its conservation and preservation are significantly limited.

This study enriches the academic outline by highlighting the limited literature in this context and therefore the need to advance the study of AI and ML as key elements that support heritage researchers and practitioners in conservation and preservation work.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of an end-to-end simplified and automated reconstruction pipeline for digital building assets using the design science research approach. Current methods to create digital assets by capturing the state of existing buildings can provide high accuracy but are time-consuming, expensive and difficult.

Using design science research, this research identifies the need for a crowdsourced and cloud-based approach to reconstruct digital building assets. The research then develops and tests a fully functional smartphone application prototype. The proposed end-to-end smartphone workflow begins with data capture and ends with user applications.

The resulting implementation can achieve a realistic three-dimensional (3D) model characterized by different typologies, minimal trade-off in accuracy and low processing costs. By crowdsourcing the images, the proposed approach can reduce costs for asset reconstruction by an estimated 93% compared to manual modeling and 80% compared to locally processed reconstruction algorithms.

The resulting implementation achieves “good enough” reconstruction of as-is 3D models with minimal tradeoffs in accuracy compared to automated approaches and 15× cost savings compared to a manual approach. Potential facility management use cases include the issue and information tracking, 3D mark-up and multi-model configurators.

Through user engagement, development, testing and validation, this work demonstrates the feasibility and impact of a novel crowdsourced and cloud-based approach for the reconstruction of digital building assets.

The purpose of this chapter is to reconsider the five principles of Elder et al.'s (2003) life course theory while centering disability status as an axis of inequality. We use existing research from the fields of the sociology of disability, disability studies, and aging and the life course to reflect on ways in which each life course principle can better attend to the experiences of disabled people. We start with the principle of time and place and discuss how cohort and period effects facilitate a deeper understanding of disabled people's experiences historically. Next, we analyze the principle of timing with an emphasis on cumulative dis/advantage to establish how disability status is an axis of inequality that contributes to the accumulation of social disadvantage and intersects with other axes of inequality (e.g., race, class, and gender). Then, we discuss the two principles of agency and linked lives and employ the concept of “bounded agency” to describe how ableism limits the agency of disabled people. Finally, we examine the principle of life-span development and discuss how adaptation and resilience are contextual and an ordinary part of human experiences. We conclude by offering recommendations for both life course and disability scholars to consider in hopes of broadening our theoretical and empirical knowledge about the lives of disabled people at every stage of the life course and the mechanisms by which resources are stratified by disability and age.

This chapter provides an introduction to the world of family companies and family constitutions from a legal perspective. It first studies the legal types of business organizations that family firms have chosen across time and jurisdictions. It then illustrates how early predecessors of family constitutions evolved in the late Middle Ages and what modern family constitutions look like in different countries today. Further considerations are devoted to the governance framework of family firms. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential legal effects of family constitutions under German company and contract law.

The aim of this study is to develop an in-depth case study on the implementation on Lean six sigma (LSS) in Schnell S.p.A., Italian company leader of an important multinational industrial group, highlighting the benefits that can be achieved from a careful application of this method, the main challenges and organizational learning from its implementation.

The study has been developed with a qualitative approach, creating a single in-depth case study, with the participant observation of researchers in the project which lasted 4 months. Periodic weekly meetings were done with the working group to exchange feedback on the development of the project to share opinions and data.

A project has been developed to stabilize the procurement process of a pull-type production cell, which experienced delays in supply lead times. The causes of the problems in their process of managing the supply of the production cell were found and some inefficiencies in the internal process of fulfillment of supply orders have been intercepted, the optimization of which has allowed the generation of an automatic system for sending supply orders, coming directly from the production line.

This study described the path and dynamics of the transformation process that business organizations undertake for optimizing their profitability and competitive advantage, placing emphasis on an innovative methodology for conducting business process improvement projects, which constitutes its operating philosophy on the effective and efficient use of company resources and skills, to guarantee to the company the achievement of a lasting and defensible competitive advantage over time.

Persons with intellectual disability and/or low-functioning autism spectrum didorder are with high support need (ID/ASD-HSN) are among the people who are most vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The specific vulnerability and the protective factors for persons with ID/LF-ASD attending residential and rehabilitative facilities have however received little attention. This paper aims to describe how two facilities located in the Italian COVID-19 red zone faced the risks associated with the spread of the pandemic and the results they have achieved so far.

Interventions to contrast the spread of the pandemic and preserve clients’ health conditions have been systematically monitored and recorded since the very beginning of the pandemic.

26/138 clients had to undergo clinical screening and laboratory tests for COVID-like symptomatology, but only one resulted affected by COVID-19 and survived. Considering that Lombardy had 89,595 cases and 16,262 deaths (January–May 2020), one COVID-19 case/138 clients is a good result. Temporarily limiting physical contacts with friends/family in favor of reducing the burden of risk and adopting a system of prevention/safety strategies directed for persons with ID/LF-ASD attending and their caregivers have been useful measures.

Structured or semi-structured interviews (using professional caregivers as informant) to confirm behavioral and emotional changes in the clients could not be carried out because of lack of time and resources (which were captured by the management of the pandemic) and could be the next goal for our residential facilities to implement the management of epidemic acute phases in a research-oriented view.

This study is a service evaluation report about facing COVID-19 pandemic. Only few such studies are present in medical literature about ID/ASD.