Angelo Croatti

Smart Augmented Fields for Emergency Operations

Abstract The impressive development of wearable computing and augmented reality technologies which is occurring in recent years allows to devise ICT systems that can bring a disruptive innovation in how emergency medical operations take place. In this paper we describe first explorations in that direction, represented by a distributed collaborative system called SAFE (Smart Augmented Field for Emergency) for teams of rescuers and operators involved in a rescue mission. SAFE is based on the integration of wearable computing and augmented reality technologies with intelligent agents and multi-agent systems.

Programming Mirror Worlds: An Agent-Oriented Programming Perspective

The impressive development of technologies is reducing the gulf between the physical and the digital matter, reality and virtuality. Mirror worlds MW are agent-based systems that live on this edge. They are meant to be a conceptual blueprint for designing future smart environment systems, providing an innovative conceptual framework for investigating inter-disciplinary aspects --- from cognition to interaction, cooperation, governance --- concerning human-agent mixed-reality and augmented systems. In this paper we focus on the problem of how to concretely design and program mirror worlds, in particular adopting high-level programming abstractions that are provided by state-of-the-art agent-oriented programming models and technologies.

Multi-agent Systems Meet Aggregate Programming: Towards a Notion of Aggregate Plan

Recent works foster the idea of engineering distributed situated systems by taking an aggregate stance: design and development are better conducted by abstracting away from individuals’ details, directly programming overall system behaviour instead. Concerns like interaction protocols, self-organisation, adaptation, and large-scaleness, are automatically hidden under the hood of the platform supporting aggregate programming. This paper aims at bridging the apparently significant gap between this idea and agent autonomy, paving the way towards an aggregate computing approach for multi-agent systems. Specifically, we introduce and analyse the idea of “aggregate plan”: a collective plan to be played by a dynamic team of cooperating agents.

Towards the Web of Augmented Things

In this paper we envision and discuss the idea of the Web of Augmented Things (WoAT). The idea is about the integration of Web of Things with Augmented Worlds, i.e. distributed software systems augmenting the physical space with virtual entities and holograms in an Augmented Reality perspective, eventually coupled with smart things that are part of the same environment.

Mashing up the physical and augmented reality: The Web of Augmented Things Idea

Along with Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) are going to be an important ingredient for the design and development of future smart environments, in particular in enterprise contexts. The vision of Web of Augmented Things (WoAT) -- discussed in this paper -- aims at exploiting the Web of Things to enable the development of open interoperable pervasive hybrid systems integrating IoT and AR/MR, mashing up both physical Things and augmented, AR-based ones.

Spatial Tuples: Augmenting Physical Reality with Tuple Spaces

We introduce Spatial Tuples, an extension of the basic tuplebased model for distributed multi-agent system coordination where (i) tuples are conceptually placed in the physical world and possibly move, (ii) the behaviour of coordination primitives may depend on the spatial properties of the coordinating agents, and (iii) the tuple space can be conceived as a virtual layer augmenting physical reality. Motivated by the needs of mobile augmented-reality applications, Spatial Tuples explicitly aims at supporting space-aware and space-based coordination in agent-based pervasive computing scenarios.

A Model and Platform for Building Agent-Based Pervasive Mixed Reality Systems

In agent literature, a partially unexplored area is related to the integration of ever-wider opportunities offered by technologies such as Mixed Reality (MR) and Augmented Reality (AR). In this paper we present a framework called Augmented Worlds (AW), which provides a model and a technological support to develop a broad spectrum of agent-based AR/MR systems. Distinguishing key features of the approach include: bi-directional augmentation, support for existing cognitive agent technologies, support for developing open multi-user environments. In the paper, we describe first the conceptual model on which the framework is based, and then a concrete architecture and prototype implementation. Two case studies about real-world applications – an augmented museum and an augmented harbour – engineered with the framework are finally discussed.

Towards a Mobile Augmented Reality System for Emergency Management: The Case of SAFE

The impressive development of wearable computing and augmented/mixed reality technologies that has been occurring in recent years allows for devising ICT systems that can bring a disruptive innovation in how emergency medical operations take place. In this paper the authors describe first explorations in that direction, represented by a distributed collaborative system called SAFE Smart Augmented Field for Emergency for teams of rescuers and operators involved in a rescue mission. SAFE is based on the integration of wearable computing and augmented reality technologies with intelligent agents and multi-agent systems.

Developing Agent-Based Pervasive Mixed Reality Systems: The MiRAgE Framework

The impressive development of smart technologies is reducing the gulf between the physical and the digital matter, between what is real and what is virtual. Recent technological advances in the Mixed Reality (MR) context – both tools, such smart-glasses/visor, and software frameworks/libraries – are bringing new opportunities for research in agents and Multi-Agents Systems (MAS), in particular to explore their application in the design and development of mixed reality based smart intelligent environments that we can call augmented worlds (AWs). The goal of this demo is to present a first prototype of a framework called MiRAgE to build agent-based pervasive mixed reality software systems, incrementally showing its potentialities and proposed abstractions for the design of such class of systems.

A Personal Medical Digital Assistant Agent for Supporting Human Operators in Emergency Scenarios

In this paper we present Trauma Tracker, a project – in cooperation with the Trauma Center of a hospital in Italy – in which agent technologies are exploited to realise Personal Medical Digital Assistant Agents (PMDA) supporting a Trauma Team in trauma management operations. This project aims at exploring the fruitful integration of software personal agents with wearable/eyewear computing, based on mobile and wearable devices such as smart-glasses. The key functionality of Trauma Tracker is to keep track of relevant events occurring during the management of a trauma, for different purposes. The basic one – discussed in detail in this paper – is to have an accurate documentation of the trauma, to automate the creation (and management) of reports and to enable offline data analysis, useful for performance evaluation and to improve the work of the Trauma Team. Then, tracking is essential to conceive more involved assisting functionalities by the PMDA, from monitoring and warning generation to suggesting actions to perform—fully exploiting the hands-free interface of wearable technologies. This goes towards the idea – envisioned in the paper – of augmented physicians working in augmented hospitals, in which software personal agents are exploited along with enabling technologies from wearable and pervasive computing, augmented reality, to create novel smart environments to support individual and cooperative work of healthcare professionals.