Andrea Bonomi

NavEditOW: a system for navigating, editing and querying ontologies through the web

Despite the success in the application of ontologies as tools supporting semantic based approaches in various application areas, the lack of simple instruments for their visualization and editing still hinders their diffusion and wide adoption. This paper introduces NavEditOW, a system for the visualization, navigation, updating and maintenance of ontologies through the web. The paper describes the functionalities offered by the system, as well as its internal architecture. Adescription of its application to the representation and management of archaeological knowledge for the description of publications in an e-library ends the paper.

Self-organization models for adaptive environments: Envisioning and evaluation of alternative approaches

Abstract Ambient intelligence refers to environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people thanks to the integration of computer systems. A particular aim of this kind of system is to enhance the everyday experience of people moving inside the related physical environment according to the narrative description of a designer’s desiderata. In this kind of situation computer simulation represents a useful way to envision the behaviour of the responsive environments that are being designed, without actually bringing them into existence in the real world, in order to evaluate their adherence to the designer’s specification. This paper describes two different approaches, respectively based on cellular automata and autonomous agents, to the realization of a self-organization model for an adaptive illumination facility, a physical environment endowed with a set of sensors that perceive the presence of humans (or other entities such as dogs, bicycles, cars) and interact with a set of actuators (lights) that coordinate their state to adapt the ambient illumination to the presence and behaviours of its users. Computer simulation is employed to evaluate the adequacy and feasibility of the approaches in the above scenario.

Experimenting Situated Cellular Agents in Indoor Scenario: Pedestrian Dynamics during Lecture Hall Evacuation

Agent based computational approach can be fruitfully applied to study the behavior and dynamics of crowds as resulting from the interactive behavior of huge numbers of autonomous entities behaving according to an individual or shared goal. This paper focus on the presentation of a model for the simulation of relevant pedestrian dynamics in indoor scenarios with a modeling approach based on a system of situated reactive agents, i.e. Situated Cellular Agents (SCA). The latter are autonomous entities that behave according to a simple model but are able to adapt to different environmental conditions (spatial situatedness) and to share simple social and behavioral rules (obstacle avoidance, flocking). In this paper we present one of the most recent applications of SCA approach to pedestrian dynamics context. The main innovative contribution of this recent work is given by the representation of agent spatial environment as multiple graphs (i.e. multilayered spatial abstractions). This modeling solution has been studied for sake of realism in modeling scenarios where a system of visitors freely move within a highly structured environment (e.g. representing a working space building). Interesting studied behaviors in this type of scenario concern, for instance, the evacuation of a lecture hall in normal, not emergency, conditions (collaboration is assumed within the crowd in this case). The main contribution of this paper is to provide a use case of application of SCA approach that can contribute to the employment of agent-based technology within pedestrian dynamics according to an approach that takes into account the multidisciplinary requirement of this research context and relevance of compliance between modeling and computational approaches. This work is part of an ongoing research project whose goal is the development of decision support systems to design and manage public spaces and events.

Simulation supporting the design of self-organizing ambient intelligent systems

The ambient intelligence scenario depicts electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. The aim of this kind of system is not necessarily to provide some form of electronic service to its users, but also to enhance the everyday experience of people moving inside the related physical environment. For this type of application, computer simulation represents a useful way to envision the behaviour of responsive environments without actually bringing them into existence in the real world. This paper will describe the simulation of an adaptive illumination facility, a physical environment endowed with a set of sensors that perceive the presence of humans (or other entities such as dogs, bicycles, cars) and interact with a set of actuators (lights) that coordinate their state to adapt the ambient illumination to the presence and behaviours of its users.

Semi-structured data extraction and modelling: the WIA Project

Over the last decades, the amount of data of all kinds available electronically has increased dramatically. Data are accessible through a range of interfaces including Web browsers, database query languages, application-specific interfaces, built on top of a number of different data exchange formats. All these data span from un-structured to highly structured data. Very often, some of them have structure even if the structure is implicit, and not as rigid or regular as that found in standard database systems. Spreadsheet documents are prototypical in this respect. Spreadsheets are the lightweight technology able to supply companies with easy to build business management and business intelligence applications, and business people largely adopt spreadsheets as smart vehicles for data files generation and sharing. Actually, the more spreadsheets grow in complexity (e.g., their use in product development plans and quoting), the more their arrangement, maintenance, and analysis appear as a knowledge-driven activity. The algorithmic approach to the problem of automatic data structure extraction from spreadsheet documents (i.e., grid-structured and free topological-related data) emerges from the WIA project: Worksheets Intelligent Analyser. The WIA-algorithm shows how to provide a description of spreadsheet contents in terms of higher level of abstractions or conceptualisations. In particular, the WIA-algorithm target is about the extraction of i) the calculus work-flow implemented in the spreadsheets formulas and ii) the logical role played by the data which take part into the calculus. The aim of the resulting conceptualisations is to provide spreadsheets with abstract representations useful for further model refinements and optimizations through evolutionary algorithms computations.

Enabling Creativity through Innovation Challenges: The Case of Interactive Lightning

This paper discusses a case in which an idea and a creative design for a reactive environment characterized by an adaptive lightning expressed by an artist was transformed into a prototype supporting the customization of the lightning effect. A specific configuration interface was realized to support the user in expressing and envisioning his creativity: by altering some specific parameters of the model implemented in the system, he/she can effectively change the behaviour of the adaptive lightning and immediately visualize the implications of his choice on parameters’ values. This experience has been further developed towards the realization of a product based on the same model and approach: a configurable modular adaptive lightning system. The paper presents the starting scenario and its main characteristics, then the model supporting adaptive lightning is introduced. The model configuration and envisioning interface is described and the recent developments towards a product based on the model and configuration system conclude the paper.

Combining Interface Agents and Situated Agents for Deploying Adaptive Web Applications

A web site presents a graph---like spatial structure composed of pages connected by hyperlinks. This structure may represent an environment in which situated agents associated to visitors of the web site (user agents) are positioned and moved in order to monitor their navigation. This paper presents a heterogeneous multi-agent system supporting the collection of information related to users behaviour in a web site by specific situated reactive user agents. The acquired information is then exploited by interface agents supporting advanced adaptive functionalities based on the history of users movement in the web site environment. Interface agents also interact with user agents to acquire information on other visitors of the web site and to support a context aware form of interaction among web site visitors.

A System Supporting Users of Cultural Resource Management Semantic Portals

Invited Talks.- Learning to Select Team Strategies in Finite-Timed Zero-Sum Games.- Expressive Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Games and New Media.- Artificial Ontologies and Real Thoughts: Populating the Semantic Web?.- Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.- Model-Based Diagnosability Analysis for Web Services.- Finite Model Reasoning on UML Class Diagrams Via Constraint Programming.- Model Checking and Preprocessing.- Some Issues About Cognitive Modelling and Functionalism.- Understanding the Environment Through Wireless Sensor Networks.- An Implementation of a Free-Variable Tableaux for KLM Preferential Logic P of Nonmonotonic Reasoning: The Theorem Prover FreeP 1.0.- Ranking and Reputation Systems in the QBF Competition.- A Top Down Interpreter for LPAD and CP-Logic.- Multiagent Systems, Distributed AI.- A Multi-layered General Agent Model.- Goal Generation with Ordered Beliefs.- Verifying Agent Conformance with Protocols Specified in a Temporal Action Logic.- Knowledge Engineering, Ontologies and the Semantic Web.- Harvesting Relational and Structured Knowledge for Ontology Building in the WPro Architecture.- English Querying over Ontologies: E-QuOnto.- Use of Ontologies in Practical NL Query Interpretation.- Machine Learning.- Evolving Complex Neural Networks.- Discovering Relational Emerging Patterns.- Advanced Tree-Based Kernels for Protein Classification.- A Genetic Approach to the Automatic Generation of Fuzzy Control Systems from Numerical Controllers.- Trip Around the HMPerceptron Algorithm: Empirical Findings and Theoretical Tenets.- Instance-Based Query Answering with Semantic Knowledge Bases.- A Hierarchical Clustering Procedure for Semantically Annotated Resources.- Similarity-Guided Clause Generalization.- Structured Hidden Markov Model: A General Framework for Modeling Complex Sequences.- Nearest Local Hyperplane Rules for Pattern Classification.- Natural Language Processing.- The JIGSAW Algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation and Semantic Indexing of Documents.- Data-Driven Dialogue for Interactive Question Answering.- GlossExtractor: A Web Application to Automatically Create a Domain Glossary.- A Tree Kernel-Based Shallow Semantic Parser for Thematic Role Extraction.- Inferring Coreferences Among Person Names in a Large Corpus of News Collections.- Dependency Tree Semantics: Branching Quantification in Underspecification.- Information Retrieval and Extraction.- User Modelling for Personalized Question Answering.- A Comparison of Genetic Algorithms for Optimizing Linguistically Informed IR in Question Answering.- A Variant of N-Gram Based Language Classification.- Planning and Scheduling.- SAT-Based Planning with Minimal-#actions Plans and soft Goals.- Plan Diagnosis and Agent Diagnosis in Multi-agent Systems.- Boosting the Performance of Iterative Flattening Search.- Real-Time Trajectory Generation for Mobile Robots.- AI and Applications.- Curricula Modeling and Checking.- Case-Based Support to Small-Medium Enterprises: The Symphony Project.- Synthesizing Proactive Assistance with Heterogeneous Agents.- Robust Color-Based Skin Detection for an Interactive Robot.- Building Quality-Based Views of the Web.- Special Track: AI and Robotics.- Reinforcement Learning in Complex Environments Through Multiple Adaptive Partitions.- Uses of Contextual Knowledge in Mobile Robots.- Natural Landmark Detection for Visually-Guided Robot Navigation.- Real-Time Visual Grasp Synthesis Using Genetic Algorithms and Neural Networks.- Attention-Based Environment Perception in Autonomous Robotics.- A 3D Virtual Model of the Knee Driven by EMG Signals.- Special Track: AI and Expressive Media.- O Francesca, ma che sei grulla? Emotions and Irony in Persuasion Dialogues.- Music Expression Understanding Based on a Joint Semantic Space.- Towards Automated Game Design.- Tonal Harmony Analysis: A Supervised Sequential Learning Approach.- Words Not Cast in Stone.- Special Track: Intelligent Access to Multimedia Information.- Annotations as a Tool for Disclosing Hidden Relationships Between Illuminated Manuscripts.- Mining Web Data for Image Semantic Annotation.- Content Aware Image Enhancement.- Semantic Annotation of Complex Human Scenes for Multimedia Surveillance.- Synthesis of Hypermedia Using OWL and Jess.- NaviTexte, a Text Navigation Tool.- TV Genre Classification Using Multimodal Information and Multilayer Perceptrons.- Posters.- Hierarchical Text Categorization Through a Vertical Composition of Classifiers.- Text Categorization in Non-linear Semantic Space.- A System Supporting Users of Cultural Resource Management Semantic Portals.- Interactive Analysis of Time in Film Stories.- Towards MKDA: A Knowledge Discovery Assistant for Researches in Medicine.- Mobile Robots and Intelligent Environments.- Multi-robot Interacting Through Wireless Sensor Networks.- Design of a Multiagent Solution for Demand-Responsive Transportation.- Planning the Behaviour of a Social Robot Acting as a Majordomo in Public Environments.- Enhancing Comprehension of Ontologies and Conceptual Models Through Abstractions.- Recognizing Chinese Proper Nouns with Transformation-Based Learning and Ontology.- Toward Image-Based Localization for AIBO Using Wavelet Transform.- Crosslingual Retrieval in an eLearning Environment.- Constraint-Based School Timetabling Using Hybrid Genetic Algorithms.