Francesco Piccialli

The Talking Museum Project

Abstract In this paper, we present an ongoing project, named Talking Museum and developed within DATABENC - a high technology district for Cultural Heritage management. The project exploits the Internet of Things technologies in order to make objects of a museum exhibition able to “talk” during users’ visit and capable of automatically telling their story using multimedia facilities. In particular, we have deployed in the museum a particular Wireless Sensor Network that, using Bluetooth technology, is able to sense the surrounding area for detecting user devices’ presence. Once a device has been detected, the related MAC address is retrieved and a multimedia story of the closest museum objects is delivered to the related user. Eventually, proper multimedia recommendation techniques drive users towards other objects of possible interest to facilitate and make more stimulating the visit. As case of study, we show an example of Talking museum as a smart guide of sculptures’ art exhibition within the Maschio Angioino castle, in Naples (Italy).

Smart environments and Cultural Heritage: a novel approach to create intelligent cultural spaces

The relationship between cultural heritage domain and new technologies has always been complex, dialectical and often inspired by the human desire to induce these spaces not created for that purpose, to pursue technological trends, eventually offering to the end-users devices and innovative technologies that could become a ‘dead weight’ during their cultural experiences. However, by means of innovative technological applications and location-based services it is possible to shorten the distance between cultural spaces and their visitors, nowadays determined by the purely aesthetic and essentially passive fruition of cultural objects. This paper presents the design and implementation of a novel multipurpose system for creating single smart spaces (), a new concept of intelligent environment, that relies on innovative sensors board named smart crickets and an ad hoc proximity strategy; by following the Internet of Things paradigm the proposed system is able to transform a cultural space in a smart cultural environment to enhance the enjoyment and satisfaction of the involved people. To assess the effectiveness of our solution, we have experienced two real case studies, the first one situated within an art exhibition (indoor), and the second one concerning an historical building (outdoor). In this way, technology can become a mediator between visitors and fruition, an instrument of connection between people, objects and spaces to create new social, economic and cultural opportunities.

Designing a Smart Museum: When Cultural Heritage Joins IoT

The adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm constitutes the basic building block to progress towards unified ICT platforms for a variety of applications within the large framework of the smart cities. Unfortunately, designing a general architecture for IoT is still a very complex challenge, since in such system may be involved several devices, link layer technologies and services. Cultural Heritage represents a worldwide resource of inestimable value and it gains more and more importance when embedded into the digital ecosystem of a smart city. In this paper we focus specifically to design a IoT architecture that is able to support the designing of a smart museum, a static cultural space that becomes intelligent thanks to the definition of an innovative model of sensors and services. Furthermore, the paper will present and discuss a real case of study, placed in a temporary art exhibition of sculptures in the Maschio Angioino Castle, located in Naples, Italy.

IoT-based collaborative reputation system for associating visitors and artworks in a cultural scenario

We design a CRS to establish the people reputation within Cultural spaces.The system is able to classify visitor behaviours.Our approach is suitable for both nonprofit and business oriented organizations. In this paper, starting from a comprehensive mathematical model of a Collaborative Reputation Systems (CRSes), we present a research study within the Cultural Heritage domain. The main goal of this study has been the evaluation and classification of the visitors behaviour during a cultural event. By means of mobile technological instruments, opportunely deployed within the environment, it is possible to collect data representing the knowledge to be inferred and give a reliable rate for both visitors and exposed artworks. Discussed results, confirm the reliability and the usefulness of CRSes for deeply understand dynamics related to people visiting styles.

3D data denoising via Nonlocal Means filter by using parallel GPU strategies.

Nonlocal Means (NLM) algorithm is widely considered as a state-of-the-art denoising filter in many research fields. Its high computational complexity leads researchers to the development of parallel programming approaches and the use of massively parallel architectures such as the GPUs. In the recent years, the GPU devices had led to achieving reasonable running times by filtering, slice-by-slice, and 3D datasets with a 2D NLM algorithm. In our approach we design and implement a fully 3D NonLocal Means parallel approach, adopting different algorithm mapping strategies on GPU architecture and multi-GPU framework, in order to demonstrate its high applicability and scalability. The experimental results we obtained encourage the usability of our approach in a large spectrum of applicative scenarios such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or video sequence denoising.

A smart system to manage the context evolution in the Cultural Heritage domain

Model the context evolution by means of a graph approach.Design a Context Evolution System (CES) to manage the context evolution and the consequently tailoring of data and services.Improve user experience by means of this kind of system.Our apporach is suitable within the Cultural Heritage domain. Nowadays intelligent and pervasive environments are characterized by a great number of devices and sensors that develop continuously and capture enormous amounts of data. Designing a context-aware system able to provide the most tailored services to users according to their behaviors, preferences and needs is still a research challenge. In such environments, although the context is very complex, dynamic and full of data captured and produced, users aspire to automatically receive contextualized services. The Cultural Heritage domain represents a domain where exchanged and produced data can be opportunely exploited by a set of applications and services in order to transform a static space into a smart environment. In this perspective, this paper presents a context-aware system named Context Evolution System (CES) able to represent and manage the evolution of the context through its instances; such an evolution is driven by occurring events and opportunely modeled by a graph structure. To assess the proposed solution, a Cultural Heritage case study of a real temporary art exhibition named the Beauty or the Truth and located in Naples (Italy) is presented and discussed.

Social recommendation service for cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is a domain in which new technologies and services have a special impact on people approach to its spaces. Technologies are changing the role of such spaces, allowing a more in-depth knowledge diffusion and social interactions. Static places become dynamic cultural environments in which people can discover and share new knowledge. Nowadays, cultural heritage is approaching to a new digital era in which people become active elements, as recipients of the actions ensuring the sustainability of such heritage, both moneywise but also simply as the perceived quality of life. In this perspective, this paper presents a novel recommender system to individual and people group in order to create a social recommendation service for cultural ICT applications. As key aspect of the presented work, we introduce a method for discovering and exploiting social affinity between users based on artwork features and user experience. In addition, we propose an architecture of the recommender system related with the affinity and discuss the architecture in terms of sparsity, group recommendation, and sustainability.

A Regularized MRI Image Reconstruction based on Hessian Penalty Term on CPU/GPU Systems

In this paper we investigate an inverse reconstruction problem of Magnetic Resonance Imaging with few acquired body scanner samples. The missing information in the Fourier domain causes image artefacts, therefore iterative computationally expensive recovery techniques are needed. We propose a regularization approach based on second order derivative of both simulated and real images with highly undersampled data, obtaining a good reconstruction accuracy. Moreover, an accelerated regularization algorithm, by using a projection technique combined with an implementation on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computing environment, is presented. The numerical experiments give clinically-feasible reconstruction runtimes with an increase in speed and accuracy of the MRI dataset reconstructions.

Designing a Smart Multisensor Framework Based on Beaglebone Black Board

This paper presents an intelligent multisensor framework based on the BeableBone Black platform, a complete open hardware and software embedded computer; the challenge is to create a multi-purpose hierarchical network composed by smart nodes able to gain and manage heterogeneous data and spaces according to the Internet of Things paradigm. Thanks to several expansion modules, the designed nodes can become an instrument for monitoring, preservation and protection of several environments. As a proof of the proposed framework we conducted a first prototypal experimentation within the Cultural Heritage domain; in detail we deployed the system in an art exhibition within the Maschio Angioino Castle, Naples, Italy.

Improving User Experience of Cultural Environment Through IoT: The Beauty or the Truth Case Study

Internet of Things (IoT) computing applied to the Cultural Heritage domain is an emerging discipline which consists of the application of intelligent sensors and technologies within cultural sites; it is strongly related to the development of systems able to be pervasive and ubiquitous with the definitive goal of rethinking such spaces. IoT paradigm can constitute a powerful tool to enhance people fruition and enjoyment of such spaces; thanks to ICT technologies, a cultural object can be effectively “dressed” of its context and juxtaposed into it. In this paper, an intelligent IoT system, designed with the aim of improving user experience and knowledge diffusion within a cultural space, is presented. The paper describes the hardware/software system components, and presents a case study of a sculptures exhibition named the Beauty or the Truth (http://www.ilbellooilvero.it) in Naples where the system was deployed. Furthermore, the paper provides the results of an users behaviour analysis which revealed up a significant increase in user satisfaction and cultural knowledge diffusion.