Dario Mana

Interacting with social networks of intelligent things and people in the world of gastronomy

This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.

Crowd Steering in Public Spaces: Approaches and Strategies

Smart phones and environmental sensors make it possible to dynamically monitor the positions and patterns of movements of people in urban areas and public spaces, identify or predict possible dangerous situations (e.g., overcrowded areas) or simply recognize the profitability of a different patterns of distribution and collective movements. In this article, we focus on the problem of using such technologies also to steer the movement of people in public and urban spaces, i.e., suggesting people where to move to eventually reach some desirable global configuration in terms of crowd distribution. In particular, we overview and motivate the general problem of crowd steering, identify the technologies that can be put into play, and the possible strategies to direct people movements. Following, we present the results of a set of simulations that we have performed to assess the effectiveness of two exemplary crowd steering strategies.

Urban Crowd Steering: An Overview

Smart phones and environmental sensors make it possible to dynamically monitor the positions and patterns of movements of people in urban areas and public spaces, identify or predict possible dangerous situations e.g., overcrowded areas or simply recognize the profitability of a different patterns of distribution and collective movements. In this overview paper, we focus on the problem of using such technologies also to steer the movement of people. In particular, this paper has the goal of motivating the general problem of crowd steering, identifying the technologies that can be put to play to enforce crowd steering strategies, and presenting the possible strategies that can be adopted to steer people movements, other than the key research challenges.

Interacting with a Social Web of Smart Objects for Enhancing Tourist Experiences

In this paper we introduce the idea of interaction with networks of socially intelligent objects as a way of supporting tourists and introducing them to the culture of a territory and as a way of maintaing the cultural heritage of a territory alive. We illustrate this idea with an application we designed in the field of gastronomy. Socially intelligent objects are able to maintain and aggregate knowledge about themselves and their world and are able to establish social relations with other objects and people. In this way they become hubs which allow tourists to get in touch with the world of the objects which is made of a territory, its culture and traditions, people and other objects. We support natural forms of interaction without requiring any electronic infrastructring of the objects. In particular, we designed an interaction paradigm supporting a playful enhancing experience when interacting with objects. We also support a continuum of experience in the real and virtual world.

Transparent Bandwidth Aggregation for Residential Access Networks

We propose, implement, and evaluate a bandwidth aggregation service for residential users that allows to improve the upload throughput of the asymmetric digital subscriber line connection by leveraging the unused bandwidth of neighboring users. The residential access gateway adopts the 802.11 radio interface to simultaneously serve the local home users and to share the broadband connectivity with neighboring access gateways. Differently from previous works, our aggregation scheme is transparent both for local users, who are not required to modify their applications or device drivers, and for neighboring users, who do not experience any meaningful performance degradation. To evaluate the achievable performance and tune the parameters driving the traffic balancing, we developed a fluid model that was shown experimentally to be very accurate. Our proposed scheme is amenable to efficient implementation on Linux networking stack. Indeed, we implemented it and tested in some realistic scenarios, showing an efficient exploitation of the whole available bandwidth, also for legacy cloud storage applications.

WantEat: interacting with social networks of smart objects for sharing cultural heritage and supporting sustainability

WantEat is about interacting with everyday objects that become intelligent hubs for accessing and sharing the cultural heritage of a territory. Objects are smart in the sense that they share knowledge with users, interact with them in a personalized way and maintain social relationships with users and other objects. When interacting with an object, a user is also introduced to the social network of its friends; the user can explore this network to discover new interesting information, services, objects, people. The objects we consider belong to the realm of gastronomy, including food items, shops, restaurants, cooks, recipes, etc. On the one hand, this allows people to get deeply in touch with the culture of a territory, making people aware of its traditions and supporting a sustainable gastronomy; on the other hand, the approach supports networking and the promotion of local quality productions and economy.