Gabriele Montelisciani

Internet of Things for designing smart objects

Internet has formerly been used to link ideas, then people and now it is starting to connect things together. IoT constitutes a good paradigm to enable people to design and modify things, and then sharing their designs and modifications. Through the internet, things are nowadays able to exchange raw data and information thus enabling the development of a new class of interconnected smart objects. In this paper a web platform for the design, co-design and sharing of smart objects is presented. The platform represents a design environment where physical shapes, sensing and actuation features, as well as functioning logics are integrated in a user friendly framework. A platform test has been performed in the context of the Maker Faire Rome 2013 demonstrating how the developed infrastructure acts as design enabler for both makers and mainstream users.

Skills and wills: the keys to identify the right team in collaborative innovation platforms

The access to external expertise and collaboration initiatives became an undeniable strategy for highly innovative sectors. Innovation intermediaries have gained a prominent role in this scenario, and crowdsourcing platforms reached notable results. However, identifying right competencies with demanded innovation is a critical issue. Research is needed in the domain of matchmaking mechanisms for identifying the necessary skills to fulfil different kinds of problems in order to build effective collaborative teams. This paper investigates different approaches adopted in crowdsourcing and main characteristics of teams operating in these contexts. Thus, a set of critical issues is highlighted and a structured team-building methodology for finding suitable solvers in crowdsourcing challenges is presented. Such method is grounded on natural language processing (NLP) and semantic ontologies fulfilling some of the identified criticalities. The description is supported by a case study conducted within a self-developed crowdsourcing platform.

Changing the programming paradigm for the embedded in the IoT domain

The enormous growth of the IoT with the simultaneous explosion of the interest on prototyping boards pushed the research to rethink also the way to making the embedded world easy accessible to several targets: designers, artists, but also engineer without a strong background in low level programming. In this paper the technical specifications of a comprehensive design suite for IoT prototyping are described and a possible implementation of a software suite for the design of smart objects is presented. The suite represents a design environment where different software tools are integrated in an integrated and user friendly framework.

Developing integrated sustainable product-process-service systems at the early product design stages

The paper describes a systematic approach that aims to foster the development of sustainable integrated systems of products and services since the very early phases of conceptual design. The procedure helps the designer in redesigning a product (as well as the related processes and services) to reduce its overall impacts. The method takes into account environmental, social and economic aspects concerning a wide range of stakeholders. The proposed approach adopts the functional analysis methodology, which is used to: 1) characterise the product (either an artefact or a service) as an integrated product-process-service system; 2) identify the design analogies with existing products in order to identify the similarities in terms of sustainability impacts. The improved design concept, along with the related environmental, economic and societal characteristics, is used as a starting point for the successive detailed design. A case study illustrates the method and proposes a redesign of the product-process-service for carrying babies.

A full stack for quick prototyping of IoT solutions

The paper presents a novel approach to the prototyping of interconnected products belonging to the Internet of Things field. The chosen solution tries to merge the benefits of monolithic vertical approaches (where everything is chosen from the board to the cloud) with those of horizontal solutions (where every time all the elements can be chosen and the code for integrating them written). The proposed solution allows to speed up the prototyping process and to let the developers focus on coding the product behaviours instead of solving customization issues. The advantages of the proposed solution goes beyond the prototyping, as the prototyped solution can be easily converted in an industrial grade one. The paper ends with a real case application that shows how an IoT industrial refrigerator smar-tification unit has been developed thanks to the horizontal stack here proposed.

A structured team building method for collaborative crowdsourcing

The traditional crowdsourcing approach consists in open calls that give the access to a worldwide crowd potentially able to solve particular problems or perform small tasks. However, over the years crowdsourcing platforms have started to select narrower groups of skilled solvers basing on their expertise, in order to ensure quality and effectiveness of the final result. As a consequence, the selection and allocation of the most appropriate team for the resolution of different types of problems have become a critical process. The present research aims to highlight the main variables to assess solvers capabilities and provides a skills-based methodology for advanced team building in collaborative crowdsourcing contexts. The method focuses on selecting the most suitable team to face a determined problem as well as on tracking the evolution of individuals skills over the performed challenges. A case study conducted within a self-developed platform is proposed to support the description.