Nello Scarabottolo

Informatics education in italian high schools

This paper presents the main results of an extensive monitoring exercise aimed at assessing the role of informatics education in Italian high schools. The investigation focused on the teaching and certification activities performed by the schools as well as on the role and use of information technologies for teaching and communications with the students and their families. The study has shown a very positive attitude of the schools towards informatics education: many offer specific courses to their students and promote the use of the technologies for teaching a large variety of disciplines. The certification process of ICT skills is also popular. Despite all these positive aspects, the investigation has shown that informatics education is often limited to the use of computers and seldom addresses the foundations of the discipline.

The ECDL programme in Italian Universities

The European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) programme aims at testing practical skills and competences in using ICT tools. This paper presents the results of a monitoring exercise aimed at analyzing the impact of the ECDL programme in the Italian Universities. The ECDL programme, adopted in most Italian Universities since the year 2000, has involved several tens of thousands of students. Our investigation focused on the experiences of the Universities in the year 2003 and, in particular, on the organizational and teaching issues addressed for the implementation of the programme. The analysis has shown that the implementation relied on a large variety of choices about what concerns the teaching organization, the credits awarded to the students and the type of ECDL certification required. These choices varied as a function of the size of the Universities, whereas their geographical location did not seem to have any influence.

Toward Model-Based Big Data-as-a-Service: The TOREADOR Approach

The full potential of Big Data Analytics (BDA) can be unleashed only by overcoming hurdles like the high architectural complexity and lack of transparency of Big Data toolkits, as well as the high cost and lack of legal clearance of data collection, access and processing procedures. We first discuss the notion of Big Data Analytics-as-a-Service (BDAaaS) to help potential users of BDA in overcoming such hurdles. We then present TOREADOR, a first approach to BDAaaS.

On the predictive power of university curricula

In this study we analyzed the curricula of 65 university students to investigate the impact of activities progression on student performances. Clustering curricula based on activity order and type we discovered a significant incidence on performance, validating the predictive power of curricula. Nevertheless, we discovered that the characterization of clusters is mainly due to non mandatory activities, selected by a student to personalize his curriculum, while activity order is very less relevant. This observation rejects the idea that activities progression has impact on performance, resulting rather as a consequence of student choices.

Parametric estimation of sample entropy for physical activity recognition.

Insufficient amount of physical activity, and hence storage of calories may lead depression, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes. The amount of consumed calorie depends on the type of activity. The recognition of physical activity is very important to estimate the amount of calories spent by a subject every day. There are some research works already published in the literature for activity recognition through accelerometers (body worn sensors). The accuracy of any recognition system depends on the robustness of selected features and classifiers. The typical features reported for most physical activities recognitions are autoregressive coefficients (ARcoeffs), signal magnitude area (SMA), tilt angle (TA), and standard deviation (STD). In this study, we have studied the feasibility of using single value of sample entropy estimated parametrically (SETH) of an AR model instead of ARcoeffs. After feasibility study, we also compared the recognition accuracies between two popular classifiers ı.e. artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM). The recognition accuracies using linear structure (where all types of activities are classified using a single classifier) and hierarchical structure (where activities are first divided into static and dynamic events, and then activities of each event are classified in the second stage). The study showed that the use of SETH provides similar recognition accuracy (69.82%) as provided by ARcoeffs (67.67%) using ANN. The linear structure of SVM performs better (average accuracy of SVM: 98.22%) than linear ANN (average accuracy with ANN: 94.78%). The use of hierarchical structure of ANN increases the average recognition accuracy of static activities to about 100%. However, no significant changes are observed using hierarchical SVM than the linear one.

Heterogeneous Business Process Management: A Metamodel-Based Approach

Dynamically adapting business process to changing needs, and promptly reacting to events are today key factors to maintain competitiveness in the market. Business Process Management (BPM) is focusing today more and more on a BPM in the large approach to process changes that embrace all of the specific techniques and mechanisms needed to design, enact, execute and monitor processes and process-aware information systems. A novel and promising feature of BPM in the large is the ability to store, aggregate and combine this huge and very diverse amount of data that can enable new ways of analysing current operations and can deliver new business insights. The KITE.IT Project [2] is aimed at facing such challenges in the context of the Italian aerospace industry, using and integrating Open Source tools exclusively. The project has recently deployed its initial open framework offering a robust data integration system in an open and scalable architecture. In such a context a metamodel approach was considered the very first base to design a system apt at integrating data originated from heterogeneous sources. The clear advantage that can be reached is the improvement of the speed and the effectiveness of business operations. The clear advantage, which can be reached, is the improvement of the effectiveness of business operations. This paper, in particular, presents the design process that was implemented in defining the KITE.IT Metrics Metamodel (KMM). A final evaluation of the framework, as it was initially deployed, is also reported.

EUCIP in Italian Universities

EUCIP (EUropean Certification of Informatics Professionals) is a pan-European qualification scheme for people entering the IT profession and for IT professionals wishing to assess their professional development. This paper presents the experiences of the Italian Universities in the framework of the EUCIP programme. We illustrate both the institutional perspective of the Universities and the personal perspective of a set of students who received the EUCIP Core level certification during their University studies. The results of our investigations have shown a good interest of the Universities towards the EUCIP programme. Students in general recognize the importance of this certification for their future professional career and show a good interest in improving their certified knowledge and competences.