Simona Ibba

CitySense: blockchain-oriented smart cities

A smart city is a connected system in which things produce a huge quantity of data. We focused the attention on monitoring the environment quality in urban area by means of a distributed network of small mobile sensors that are devices on the Internet of Things (IoT). Sensors produce digital measurements, useful for investigating and studying the life quality in every part of the city. In our vision, environmental data must be available by everyone and shared with citizens, but it must be unmodifiable. We propose to solve the problem of the sensors data storage and management using a disruptive technology called blockchain. The blockchain responds to the demand of availability and unchangeability and, thanks to the potentiality of smart contracts, makes us able to manage sensor information and implement a control logic. In order to develop the software based on blockchain we chose to apply the SCRUM methodology because of its capabilities of being a flexible, adaptive and iterative methodology.

Digital Libraries: The Challenge of Integrating Instagram with a Taxonomy for Content Management

Interoperability and social implication are two current challenges in the digital library (DL) context. To resolve the problem of interoperability, our work aims to find a relationship between the main metadata schemas. In particular, we want to formalize knowledge through the creation of a metadata taxonomy built with the analysis and the integration of existing schemas associated with DLs. We developed a method to integrate and combine Instagram metadata and hashtags. The final result is a taxonomy, which provides innovative metadata with respect to the classification of resources, as images of Instagram and the user-generated content, that play a primary role in the context of modern DLs. The possibility of Instagram to localize the photos inserted by users allows us to interpret the most relevant and interesting informative content for a specific user type and in a specific location and to improve access, visibility and searching of library content.

Hashtag of Instagram: From Folksonomy to Complex Network

The Instagram is a social network for smartphones created in 2010 and acquired by Facebook in 2012. It currently has more than 300 million registered users and allows for the immediate upload of images (square, inspired by Polaroid), to which users can associate hashtags and comments. Moreover, connections can be created between users that share the same interests. In our work, we intend to analyze the hashtags entered by users: the use of such hashtags, as it happens in other social networks like Twitter, generates a folksonomy, that is a user-driven classification of information. We intend to map that folksonomy as a complex network to which we can associate all the typical analysis and evaluations of such a mathematical model. Our purpose is to use the resulting complex network as a marketing tool, in order to improve brand or product awareness.

ICOs Overview: Should Investors Choose an ICO Developed with the Lean Startup Methodology?

An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is an innovative way to raise funds and launch a startup. It is also an opportunity to take part in a project, or in a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). The use of ICO is a global phenomenon that involves many nations and several business categories: ICOs collected over 5.2 billion dollars only in 2017. The success of an ICO is based on the credibility and innovativeness of project proposals. This fund-raising tool contains however some critical issues, such as the use of tokens that have no intrinsic value and do not generate direct liquidity, and the role of investors in the management of the startup. We analyzed if the Lean Startup methodology is helpful to face this critical aspects and we examined some ICOs in which the proposing team states explicitly that a lean startup approach is used.

A Blockchain Approach Applied to a Teledermatology Platform in the Sardinian Region (Italy)

The use of teledermatology in primary care has been shown to be reliable, offering the possibility of improving access to dermatological care by using telecommunication technologies to connect several medical centers and enable the exchange of information about skin conditions over long distances. This paper describes the main points of a teledermatology project that we have implemented to promote and facilitate the diagnosis of skin diseases and improve the quality of care for rural and remote areas. Moreover, we present a blockchain-based approach which aims to add new functionalities to an innovative teledermatology platform which we developed and tested in the Sardinian Region (Italy). These functionalities include giving the patient complete access to his/her medical records while maintaining security. Finally, the advantages that this new decentralized system can provide for patients and specialists are presented.

Initial Coin Offerings and Agile Practices

An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is an innovative way to fund projects based on blockchain. The funding is based on the selling of tokens by means of decentralized applications called smart contracts written in Solidity, a programming language specific for Ethereum blockchain. The ICOs work in a volatile context and it is crucial that the team is capable of handling constant changes. The Agile methods, proven practices enabling to develop software in presence of changing requirements, could be a means for managing uncertainty. The main goals of this work are to understand software engineering activities related to ICOs, recognize the ICOs developed using Agile methods, and make a comparison between ICOs and Agile ICOs. In addition, we perform a deeper analysis of Agile ICOs concerning project planning, software development, and code features. Our work shows that the roles of the people involved in an ICO can be compared to the typical roles of the SCRUM methodology. The majority of Agile ICOs use tool of testing before storing smart contract on blockchain. Finally, the application of volumetric and complexity software metrics shows that the files of Agile ICOs is on average shorter and less complex than in other smart contracts.

Towards a smart region: The case study of a teledermatology platform in sardinian region (Italy)

Teledermatology offers the possibility of improving access to dermatologic care by using telecommunication technologies for connecting several medical centers and enabling to exchange information about skin conditions over a distance. This paper describes the main points of the implementation of a teledermatology project following the so-called smart region paradigm. A case study is presented to describe how the implementation of a virtual organization model using teledermatology is able to promote and facilitate the diagnosis on skin diseases and improve the quality of care for rural and remote areas. Initial results and assessment by general practitioners and dermatologists show that the proposed software platform can be used as a decision support system for dermatological patients.

Aposentu: A Social Semantic Platform for Hotels.

Tourism business has become competitive and dynamic and it is essential to adapt both customers’ satisfaction and to market’s changing needs. A hotel owner faces three big challenges: he must look to attract new guests to its location, manage his hotel in the best performant way and has to adapt their online marketing strategy using several tools such as online travel agencies (OTA) or meta-search engines website or other players from the sharing economy. All these channels can complicate the hotelier’s life, making the tourism market and by removing in some areas the prices according to the seasons and the availability. In addition, consumer generated content (CGCs) influence the market and the revenue management making the web reputation even more important. This paper presents Aposentu, an innovative tool which integrates all the required components in order to successfully manage the hotel. The platform will be cloud computing technology based and it will show a proper dashboard with a lot of innovative functionalities. By using semantic tools, sentiment analysis, complex network metrics, the platform will allow the hoteliers to become more competitive in the tourism industry. Moreover, administrative complexity will be reduced and that will facilitate the management of

Incidence of predatory journals in computer science literature

Purpose One of the main tasks of a researcher is to properly communicate the results he obtained. The choice of the journal in which to publish the work is therefore very important. However, not all journals have suitable characteristics for a correct dissemination of scientific knowledge. Some publishers turn out to be unreliable and, against a payment, they publish whatever researchers propose. The authors call “predatory journals” these untrustworthy journals. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the incidence of predatory journals in computer science literature and present a tool that was developed for this purpose. Design/methodology/approach The authors focused their attention on editors, universities and publishers that are involved in this kind of publishing process. The starting point of their research is the list of scholarly open-access publishers and open-access stand-alone journals created by Jeffrey Beall. Specifically, they analysed the presence of predatory journals in the search results obtained from Google Scholar in the engineering and computer science fields. They also studied the change over time of such incidence in the articles published between 2011 and 2015. Findings The analysis shows that the phenomenon of predatory journals somehow decreased in 2015, probably due to a greater awareness of the risks related to the reputation of the authors. Originality/value We focused on computer science field, using a specific sample of queries. We developed a software to automatically make queries to the search engine, and to detect predatory journals, using Beall’s list.

Categorization and Matching for Drone-based Services

The exchange of supply and demand in drone-based services would benefit from the shared use of an online platform. Such a platform would need to offer two important opportunities. One is to share the service with other users, and the other is to receive offers from all providers interacting on the platform, who optimize their investments by sharing their own resources and technologies. The purpose of this position paper is to propose a categorization and matching algorithm on which to base this platform. The platform will aim to facilitate the sharing of services provided through the use of drones. The algorithm will match demand and offer, and will evolve through the use and the application of all participants (operators, users, lenders of shared resources). The platform, currently in development, could be the first web-based system in Europe to offer this model.