Research Units

Research Units are created within and across the two main Research Areas that drive the research activity within IMT:

• Research area in Computer Science and Applications
• Research area in Economics and Institutional Change

to meet the evolution of frontiers of scientific research, combining scientific rigor and relevance in research activities in high relevance for applications and policy.

The School's thematic Research Units have been designed in a way that they can develop with continually evolving frontier of cutting-edge research and related new opportunities without neglecting the sustainability and advantages of their intended trajectory and specific characteristics of complementarity.

Research Units can host one or more research projects. Each member of IMT'S Faculty is affiliated to one of the above mentioned Research Areas, and participates in at least one Research Unit.

SYSMA - SYStem Modelling and Analysis

(Director, Rocco De Nicola)
The aim of this research unit is to support the development of high-quality, correct-by-construction software and systems. Distinctive features of high-quality software and systems are predictability, efficiency, usability, re-usability, maintainability and modularity. To this purpose, we plan to provide languages, models, methodologies and tools which are deeply founded on discrete mathematics, algebra, logics and probability, to mention a few. Our tools will be usable even by software programmers and system designers who may have little or no knowledge of the above-mentioned underlying theories and formal methods.

DYSCO - DYnamical Systems, Control, and Optimization

(Director, Alberto Bemporad)
The main mission of the research unit DYSCO is to develop novel engineering methodologies, based on dynamical models and numerical optimization, for the design of control and decision strategies that make systems react autonomously and optimally to changes in the environment they are operating in. The approach of DYSCO to reach such a mission is based on understanding theoretical aspects, on developing numerical algorithms and software tools, and on applying the new concepts to real-life problems of industrial, economic, and societal interest. DYSCO's mission is also to train researchers to be able to transfer the scientific know-how developed within the research unit outside academia.

PRIAn - Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis

(Director, Angelo Bifone)
By improving analysis and interpretation of medical and biological images, we will bring novel imaging methods to fruition for the benefit of the biomedical research community and, ultimately, of the patient. Our ambition is to provide a new conceptual framework to unravel multiparametric information generated by advanced imaging methods, and to define more objective and quantitative criteria for their interpretation. To do so, we will bring together experience and approaches from diverse areas of research that share the common problem of representation and analysis of complex data-sets. We believe that concepts and algorithms developed in different contexts, which are not conventionally associated with biomedical imaging, may provide a novel and powerful means to analyze and interpret diagnostic images.

AXES - Laboratory for the Analysis of compleX Economic Systems

(Director, Fabio Pammolli)
Interdisciplinary science at the interface between physics, applied mathematics, ICT, economics, sociology, and management is moving ahead the research frontier. These interacting systems can now be analysed through the collection, integration and analysis of huge large-scale data bases accessible in electronic form, while a new set of techniques must be developed to explore and capture the nature of interdependencies between processes, structures, and agents. To date, this mathematical approach to empirical social sciences has not been fully developed and applied. AXES seeks to put together different scientific disciplines in a research enterprise, which aims at spotting the issues of systemic weaknesses and fragilities in socioeconomic systems.

LIME - Laboratory of Innovation Management and Economics

(Director, Massimo Riccaboni)
The core research areas of the LIME are reflected in the name of the laboratory. LIME is focused on innovation and entrepreneurship, informed by organizational economics, and predominantly based on a unique collection of empirical datasets analyzed with the use of state-of-the-art methods including microeconometrics, content analysis, and the analysis of networks and complex systems.
It is the ambition of the LIME to sustain and develop its international reputation for excellent research in the economics of science and innovation.

ICES - Institutional Change, Economics, Society

(Director, Davide Ticchi)
ICES aims at improving our understanding of the dynamic interactions, in a long term perspective, between economic variables, political institutions, politics and culture, to provide answers to a wide variety of issues. For example, ICES research agenda includes the analysis of how political institutions affect economic outcomes (such as fiscal policy, taxation, social security system), and the channels through which economic fundamentals and policies affect the choice and quality of political institutions. Different dimensions of culture (political, economic, legal, etc.) are likely to shape these relationships and will be an important part of the research agenda. ICES favors and promotes an interdisciplinary approach to research analysis and graduate teaching, from the use of analytical and empirical tools to the historical and descriptive accounts.

LYNX - Center for the interdisciplinary Analysis of Images.
Objects, Spaces, Images: individual Experience and social Behaviors

(Director, Maria Luisa Catoni)
LYNX fosters and carries out case study-based research projects concerning the mechanisms of both the production of images and their contextual reception and use. LYNX does not pose any limitation in terms of the cultural area, the chronological period and the medium the research projects proposed deal with; it privileges, though, projects that adopt multidisciplinary strategies of analysis, paying special attention, in particular, to the economic, sociological, architectural, urban-studies related, historical, art historical, philosophical, neuro-perceptive, behavioral, and media-studies related approaches. LYNX aims at hosting in the very same context and at the very same time both research projects dealing with contemporary phenomena and research projects dealing with phenomena and contexts of the past. LYNX is interested both in the domain of research and in the industries and institutions that give a prominent role to the production, manipulation and reception of images (whether museum displays, urban spaces, single visual objects expressed in whatever medium, books, etc.). LYNX's goal is to make itself and the city of Lucca the reference place for a high level, transversal reflection and competence on the large theme of "Objects, Spaces, Images: individual Experience and social Behaviors".