Michela Paolucci

Mobile Medicine: semantic computing management for health care applications on desktop and mobile devices

In many health care situations, powerful mobile tools may help to make decisions and provide support for continuous education and training. They can be useful in emergency conditions and for the supervised application of protocols and procedures. To this end, content models and formats with semantic and intelligence have more flexibility to provide medical personnel (both in off-line and on-line conditions) with more powerful tools than those currently on the market. In this paper, we are presenting Mobile Medicine solution, which exploits a collection of semantic computing technologies together with intelligent content model and tools to provide innovative services for medical personnel. Most of the activities of semantic computing are performed on the back office on a cloud computing architecture for: clustering, recommendations, intelligent content production and adaptation. The mobile devices have been endowed with a content organizer to collect local data, provide local suggestions, while supporting taxonomical searches and local queries on PDA and iPhone. The proposed solution is under usage at the main hospital in Florence. The smart content has been produced by medical personnel, with the adoption of the new ADF-Design authoring tool, which produces content in MPEG-21 format. The mobile content distribution service is integrated with a collaborative networking portal, for discussion on procedures and content, thus suggestions are provided on both PC and Mobiles (PDA and iPhone).

Analysis and assessment of a knowledge based smart city architecture providing service APIs

Abstract The main technical issues regarding smart city solutions are related to data gathering, aggregation, reasoning, data analytics, access, and service delivering via Smart City APIs (Application Program Interfaces). Different kinds of Smart City APIs enable smart city services and applications, while their effectiveness depends on the architectural solutions to pass from data to services for city users and operators, exploiting data analytics, and presenting services via APIs. Therefore, there is a strong activity on defining smart city architectures to cope with this complexity, putting in place a significant range of different kinds of services and processes. In this paper, the work performed in the context of Sii-Mobility smart city project on defining a smart city architecture addressing a wide range of processes and data is presented. To this end, comparisons of the state of the art solutions of smart city architectures for data aggregation and for Smart City API are presented by putting in evidence the usage semantic ontologies and knowledge base in the data aggregation in the production of smart services. The solution proposed aggregate and re-conciliate data (open and private, static and real time) by using reasoning/smart algorithms for enabling sophisticated service delivering via Smart City API. The work presented has been developed in the context of the Sii-Mobility national smart city project on mobility and transport integrated with smart city services with the aim of reaching a more sustainable mobility and transport systems. Sii-Mobility is grounded on Km4City ontology and tools for smart city data aggregation, analytics support and service production exploiting smart city API. To this end, Sii-Mobility/Km4City APIs have been compared to the state of the art solutions. Moreover, the proposed architecture has been assessed in terms of performance, computational and network costs in terms of measures that can be easily performed on private cloud on premise. The computational costs and workloads of the data ingestion and data analytics processes have been assessed to identify suitable measures to estimate needed resources. Finally, the API consumption related data in the recent period are presented.

Collaborative Solution for Music Education

In the area of technology enhanced music training, cooperative work is becoming an increasingly demanding concept. It can be used to exploit new modalities of training and to reduce the set up time necessary for the organization of groups and class rooms - integrating distributed systems for audio-visual processing and general control (e.g., synchronous playback, recording, monitoring progresses). To this end, a flexible model to cope with groups, roles, external tools, and large sets of features is required. This paper presents a flexible cooperative environment to facilitate the creation of a variety of cooperative applications and in particular to the implementation of cooperative music lessons. The solution has been used for the implementation of cooperative music lessons allowing the control and supervising. The work has been developed for the I-MAESTRO STREP FP6 project of the European commission for developing cooperative educational multimodal tools in the Max/MSP. The work has been based on MPEG-SMR as standard Symbolic Music Representation format for music notation coding.

Models and Tools for Aggregating and Annotating Content on ECLAP

In the area of cultural heritage there is a strong push on aggregating content metadata from institutions (such as museums, university, archives, library, foundations, etc.) to make them widely accessible. This action is going to reduce fragmentation, allows aggregation and integrates valuable collections in a unique place. For example, European a (the so called European digital library) collects only metadata, while content files are referred via some URL. These URLs refer to the original content owner and/or to the Content Aggregator, facilitating the collection. That model leaves space to the Content Aggregator to provide additional services on their enriched models. The proposed Content Aggregation model attempts to satisfy specific requirements with a semantic model and tools providing support for executable aggregations such as: play lists, collections, e-learning courses, and media annotations/synchronizations. The produced aggregations may also be provided by mapping semantic concepts to European a. The paper also performs an analysis of semantics models mentioned and of their difficulties including some comments about the adoption of linked open data and media model. The results have been produced in the project ECLAP ICT PSP founded by the European Commission, http://www.eclap.eu.

User Engagement Engine for Smart City Strategies

The new challenges in the smart city context are mainly related to the stimulation of the city users towards taking more sustainable behaviors, in mobility and energy. The state of the art in this case is mainly focused on classical smart city solution for informing the city users and or for engaging them with specific wired rules toward virtuous models. And not using flexible languages and predictive models, pushing them towards a larger range of virtuous habits. On this regards, the main problems are the computation of user behavior via data analytic (semantic computing, machine learning), as well as the formalization of strategies via simple and well formalized language for producing engagements to the city users, which can be understood by city operators. In this paper, a solution for city users engagement is studied and implemented for Sii-Mobility Smart city national project in Italy has been presented. The solution has been implemented thanks to the exploitation of Km4City model and semantic computing. The paper also presents the validation of results about the effective usage of the solution by providing some statistical evidence about the efficient assessment of user behavior and of engagement rules acceptance rate.

IPR Centered Institutional Service and Tools for Content and Metadata Management

Multimedia services of cultural institutions need to be supported by content, metadata and workflow management systems to efficiently manage huge amount of content items and metadata production. Online digital libraries and cultural heritage institutions, as well as portals of publishers need an integrated multimedia back office in order to aggregate content collection and provide them to national and international aggregators, with respect to Intellectual Property Rights, IPR. The aim of this paper is to formalize and discuss requirements, modeling, design and validation of an institutional aggregator for metadata and content, coping with IPR Models for conditional access and providing content towards Europeana, the European international aggregator. This paper presents the identification of the Content Aggregator requirements for content management and IPR, and thus the definition and realization of a corresponding distributed architecture and workflow solution satisfying them. The main contributions of this paper consist of the formalization of IPR Model that enable the shortening of the activities for the IPR resolution, and avoid the assignment of conflicting rights/permissions during IPR model formalization, and thus of licensing. The proposed solution, models and tools have been validated in the case of the ECLAP service and results are reported in the paper. ECLAP Content Aggregator has been established by the European Commission to serve Europeana for the thematic area of Performing Arts institutions.

A New Generation Digital Content Service for Cultural Heritage Institutions

The evolution of semantic technology and related impact on internet services and solutions, such as social media, mobile technologies, etc., have determined a strong evolution in digital content services. Traditional content based online services are leaving the space to a new generation of solutions. In this paper, the experience of one of those new generation digital content service is presented, namely ECLAP (European Collected Library of Artistic Performance, http://www.eclap.eu). It has been partially founded by the European Commission and includes/aggregates more than 35 international institutions. ECLAP provides services and tools for content management and user networking. They are based on a set of newly researched technologies and features in the area of semantic computing technologies capable of mining and establishing relationships among content elements, concepts and users. On this regard, ECLAP is a place in which these new solutions are made available for interested institutions.

Smart City Governance Strategies to Better Move Towards a Smart Urbanism

This paper intends to summarize the principal reached objectives of an ongoing project on smart cities governance called GHOST financed by MIUR (Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research), in order to provide an overview on how the smart governance analysis applied to smart urbanism has evolved in two particular case studies in Italy (Cagliari and Florence). Firstly, authors analyze the concept of ‘Smart City Governance’ (SCG), it is associated with a set of commonly accepted terminologies and not yet standardized even if nowadays academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly. Secondly, this paper analyses the major aspects of smart city governance applied to case studies from: (i) the governance data acquisition approach with particular reference to tourism sector, and (ii) the adaptations of urban strategies (in general) and of these data acquisition in Florence and in Cagliari (in particular), due to the Km4city city dashboard, created and developed by the DISIT lab. The paper concludes by evaluating the emerged results of the case studies analysis, in order to find the necessary balance for urban synergies, and, consequently, to better move towards a smart urbanism.

A static and dynamic recommendations system for best practice networks

Semantics computing technologies may be used to provide recommendations and stimulate user engagement in many kinds of services, such as social media, match making, best practice networks, technology transfer, etc. The recommendation metrics used take into account both static information and dynamical behaviors of users on a Social Network Platform. The recommendations provided include those realized taking into account also strategic and random users. The set of recommendations have been assessed with respect to the users acceptance, which allowed to validate the solution and to tune the parameters. The experience performed in creating and validating recommendation systems adopted for ECLAP and APREToscana best practice networks is described and results obtained are reported. The identified model has significantly increased the acceptance rate for the recommendation on ECLAP.

InterDataNet: Interoperability Framework to Support Collaborative Creation and Management of Official Documents in e-Government Processes

At present e-Government procedures for creation and management of official documents pose specific problems with collaborative information authoring, data distribution and storage, use of a unique name for resource addressing, attribution of the entity responsible for the documents. Many benefits can be obtained through the informatization of the procedures. To this end we propose InterDataNet (IDN) as a distributed framework that can solve many of the issues present in e-Government contexts through collaborative information management, data distribution and storage, workflow processes. To evaluate the IDN approach validity, in this paper we describe the hypothetical scenario related to the management of Italian administrative acts.