Antonio Cisternino

Collaborative workforce, business process crowdsourcing as an alternative of BPO

Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing activities to networked people. This paper presents Business Process Crowdsourcing, an alternative to Business Process Outsourcing where crowd activities are coordinated, work force contributions not wasted and final result guaranteed. The positioning paper shows how to transform canonical business processes in crowdsourced business processes where Web 2.0, social networks, and business process management are combined to deploy business critical process to the Internet, getting the same level of quality and control of traditional outsourcing approaches with conventional workforce.

The FACE of autism

People with autism are known to possess deficits in processing emotional states, both their own and of others. A humanoid robot, FACE (Facial Automation for Conveying Emotions), capable of expressing and conveying emotions and empathy has been constructed to enable autistic children and adults to better deal with emotional and expressive information. We describe the development of an adaptive therapeutic platform which integrates information deriving from wearable sensors carried by a patient or subject as well as sensors placed in the therapeutic ambient. Through custom developed control and data processing algorithms the expressions and movements of FACE are then tuned and modulated to harmonize with the feelings of the subject postulated by their physiological and behavioral correlates. Preliminary results demonstrating the potential of adaptive therapy are presented.

A High-Throughput Bioreactor System for Simulating Physiological Environments

The optimization of in vitro cell culture for tissue engineering, pharmacological, or metabolic studies requires a large number of experiments to be performed under varying conditions. In this paper, we describe a high-throughput bioreactor system that allows the conduction of parallel experiments in a simulated in vivo-like environment. Our bioreactors consist of tissue-, organ-, or system-specific culture chambers and a mixing device controlled by an embedded system that regulates the insertion of gas in the culture medium in order to control pH and pressure. Each culture chamber and mixing device possesses an autonomous control system that is able to ensure an optimal environment for cells. A computer communicates with the embedded system to acquire data and set up experimental variables. With this apparatus, we can perform a high-throughput experiment controlling several bioreactors working in parallel. In this paper, we discuss the architecture and design of the system, and the results of some experiments which simulate physiological and pathological conditions are presented.

GestIT: a declarative and compositional framework for multiplatform gesture definition

Gestural interfaces allow complex manipulative interactions that are hardly manageable using traditional event handlers. Indeed, such kind of interaction has longer duration in time than that carried out in form-based user interfaces, and often it is important to provide users with intermediate feedback during the gesture performance. Therefore, the gesture specification code is a mixture of the recognition logic and the feedback definition. This makes it difficult 1) to write maintainable code and 2) reuse the gesture definition in different applications. To overcome these kinds of limitations, the research community has considered declarative approaches for the specification of gesture temporal evolution. In this paper, we discuss the creation of gestural interfaces using GestIT, a framework that allows declarative and compositional definition of gestures for different recognition platforms (e.g. multitouch and full-body), through a set of examples and the comparison with existing approaches.

A compositional model for gesture definition

The description of a gesture requires temporal analysis of values generated by input sensors and does not fit well the observer pattern traditionally used by frameworks to handle user input. The current solution is to embed particular gesture-based interactions, such as pinch-to-zoom, into frameworks by notifying when a whole gesture is detected. This approach suffers from a lack of flexibility unless the programmer performs explicit temporal analysis of raw sensors data. This paper proposes a compositional, declarative meta-model for gestures definition based on Petri Nets. Basic traits are used as building blocks for defining gestures; each one notifies the change of a feature value. A complex gesture is defined by the composition of other sub-gestures using a set of operators. The user interface behaviour can be associated to the recognition of the whole gesture or to any other sub-component, addressing the problem of granularity for the notification events. The meta-model can be instantiated for different gesture recognition supports and its definition has been validated through a proof of concept library. Sample applications have been developed for supporting multitouch gestures on iOS and full body gestures with Microsoft Kinect.

CodeBricks: code fragments as building blocks

We present a framework for code generation that allows programs to manipulate and generate code at the source level while the joining and splicing of executable code is carried out automatically at the intermediate code/VM level. The framework introduces a data type Code to represent code fragments: methods/operators from this class are used to reify a method from a class, producing its representation as an object of type Code. Code objects can be combined by partial application to other Code objects. Code combinators, corresponding to higher-order methods, allow splicing the code of a functional actual parameter into the resulting Code object. CodeBricks is a library implementing the framework for the .NET Common Language Runtime. The framework can be exploited by language designers to implement metaprogramming, multistage programming and other language features. We illustrate the use of the technique in the implementation of a fully featured regular expression compiler that generates code emulating a finite state automaton. We present benchmarks comparing the performance of the RE matcher built with CodeBricks with the hand written one present in .NET.

Web-based configuration assistants

Configuration assistants are tools for guiding the final user in simple configuration tasks, such as product assembling and customization or study plans generation. For their wide availability, web-based configuration assistants are valuable in fields such as electronic commerce and information services. We describe a general approach for building web-based configuration assistants: from a high-level description of the configuration constraints and of the basic items, given in a declarative language, the hypertext files for user guidance and the Java code for constraint checking are generated. We claim that the general approach of process-oriented configuration, where the user is guided through the configuration process by an explanatory hypertext, as opposed to product-oriented configuration, where one starts from a high-level description of the product of the configuration, is better suited for many application domains.

Ambient Abstract State Machines with applications

We define a flexible abstract ambient concept which turned out to support current programming practice, in fact can be instantiated to apparently any environment paradigm in use in frameworks for distributed computing with heterogeneous components. For the sake of generality and to also support rigorous high-level system design practice we give the definition in terms of Abstract State Machines. We show the definition to uniformly capture the common static and dynamic disciplines for isolating states or concurrent behavior (e.g. handling of multiple threads for Java) as well as for sharing memory, patterns of object-oriented programming (e.g. for delegation, incremental refinement, encapsulation, views) and agent mobility.

Trends in Robotic Software Frameworks

In the software community, a framework indicates an integrated set of domainspecific software components [CS95] which can be reused to create applications. A framework is more than a library of software components: It defines the common architecture underlying the particular applications built on the framework. Frameworks are a powerful development approach as they consist of both reusable code (the component library) and reusable design (the architecture).

Freely Annotating C

Reflective programming is becoming popular due to the increasing set of dynamic services provided by execution environments like JVM and CLR. With custom attributes Microsoft introduced an extensible model of reflection for CLR: they can be used as additional decorations on element declarations. The same notion has been introduced in Java 1.5. The annotation model, both in Java and in C#, limits annotations to classes and class members. In this paper we describe [a]C# a , an extension of the C# programming language, that allows programmers to annotate statements and code blocks and retrieve these annotations at run-time. We show how this extension can be reduced to the existing model. A set of operations on annotated code blocks to retrieve annotations and manipulate bytecode is introduced. We also discuss how to use [a]C# to annotate programs giving hints on how to parallelize a sequential method and how it can be implemented by means of the abstractions provided by the run-time of the language. Finally, we show how our model for custom attributes has been realized.