Marco Alfano

User Requirements and Resource Control for Cooperative Multimedia Applications

The spread of distributed multimedia applications is setting forth a new set of challenges in the management of host and network resources for guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS). When the multimedia applications compete for resources as in the case of a cooperative multimedia environment, the management task becomes even more difficult. In this work, we first discuss QoS for multimedia applications. We then present the architectural and implementation details of a Cooperative Multimedia Environment (CME) made up of Cooperative Multimedia Applications (COMMA), one for each user. A COMMA presents a user with a single interface that allows him to invite other users to a cooperative session, select the media services to be used in the session, and specify his Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for the media services throughout the session.

Searching the internet for learning materials through didactic indicators

Internet offers a huge amount of didactic materials that can be used in creating new online courses. However, those materials need a deep analysis to understand their context and contents before their potential use. As a consequence, the search of didactic material in internet is often quite tedious and time consuming so the searcher usually limits his/her analysis to the first found web pages. To help users in finding efficiently and timely the most appropriate online materials, we have developed a system, called SAXEF (System for Automatic eXtraction of lEearning object Features), that is capable to automatically extract the didactic indicators (a sort of DNA) of any web page (or group of pages) found on internet. Moreover, we have developed an e-learning search engine, SaxSearch, around SAXEF. It allows the user to make requests in terms of didactic indicators and automatically browses the internet to find the web pages that best match the user requirements.

An Automatic System for Helping Health Consumers to Understand Medical Texts

Medical texts (reports, articles, etc.) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, these texts are often read by health consumers (as in the case of medical reports) who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and can have difficulties in text comprehension. To help a health consumer in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an automatic system that, given a text written with medical (technical) terms, translates them in simple or plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. We have designed such a system. It processes online medical documents and provides health consumers with the needed information for their understanding. To this end, we use a medical vocabulary for finding the technical terms in the medical texts, a consumer health vocabulary (CHV) for translating the technical terms into their consumer equivalents and a health-consumer dictionary for finding supplementary information on the terms. We have built a prototype that processes Italian medical reports and uses infobuttons next to the technical terms for allowing easy retrieval of the desired information.