Fabrizio Antonelli

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.

City sensing: visualising mobile and social data about a city scale event

Streams of information flow through our cities thanks to: their progressive instrumentation with diverse sensors, a wide adoption of smart phones and social networks, and a growing open release of datasets. City Data Fusion project investigates techniques to visualise the pulse of our cities in real-time by fusing and making sense of all those information flows. It exploits visual data analytics, semantic technologies, and streaming databases. In this poster, we offer insights on City Sensing: an early result of City Data Fusion that allows to visually analyse city scale events such as Milano Design Week.

Energy consumption prediction using people dynamics derived from cellular network data

Energy efficiency is a key challenge for building sustainable societies. Due to growing populations, increasing incomes and the industrialization of developing countries, the world primary energy consumption is expected to increase annually by 1.6%. This scenario raises issues related to the increasing scarcity of natural resources, the accelerating pollution of the environment, and the looming threat of global climate change.In this paper we introduce a new and original approach to predict next week energy consumption based on human dynamics analysis derived out of the anonymized and aggregated telecom data, which is processed from GSM network call data records (CDRs). We introduce an original problem statement, analyze regularities of the source data, provide insight on the original feature extraction method and discuss peculiarities of the regression models applicable for this big data problem.The proposed solution could act on energy producers/distributors as an essential aid to smart meters data for making better decisions in reducing total primary energy consumption by limiting energy production when the demand is not predicted, reducing energy distribution costs by efficient buy-side planning in time and providing insights for peak load planning in geographic space.

DynamicTV: a culture-aware recommender

A geographically homogeneous group of citizens shares much common knowledge, characteristics of their culture and history. This knowledge is captured for the use in an item-based recommender system that uses textual information, by introducing bias corpora: newspaper articles that represent the shared knowledge. We present a technique for incorporating and quickly replacing bias corpora in a case study of recommendation of TV contents on our IPTV platform. With this recommender, users watched more items and expressed satisfaction with the service.

Building an Eco-System of Trusted Services via User Control and Transparency on Personal Data

The amount of personal information that is generated and collected on a daily basis is rapidly growing due to the increasing number of activities performed online and, in particular, in mobility. The availability of such a huge amount of data represents an invaluable opportunity for organizations and individuals, respectively to enable precise business intelligence and innovative services. Nevertheless, it represents the commodity of a flourishing “market of data”, mostly fostered by the biggest ICT companies, from whereof benefits users are almost excluded, significantly increasing the public concern on data privacy. In this scenario we developed a framework, based on a personal data store, enabling the development of an eco-system of trusted application, which allow users to full transparency and control on the exploitation of their data.

Exploiting the diversity, mass and speed of territorial data by TELCO Operator for better user services

The Semantic and Knowledge Innovation Lab (SKIL) is an innovation lab opened by TELECOM Italia as a result of its partnership with the European Institute of Technology (EIT). The lab is located in Trento which hosts one of the 6 Information and Communication Technologies Lab of the EIT and two reference research groups: University of Trento and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) center. The aim of the lab is to exploit the potential of big data and open data by creating a platform to share data among academia, industrial and institutional partners. It is our belief that such raw data gives a new image of the territory/community from which the data was collected and by analyzing it new trends, enriched information can be extracted. The results of the analysis can turn into revenue and profit not only for the companies but also for the communities.

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.

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.