Stefano Modafferi

Real-Time Crisis Mapping of Natural Disasters Using Social Media

The proposed social media crisis mapping platform for natural disasters uses locations from gazetteer, street map, and volunteered geographic information (VGI) sources for areas at risk of disaster and matches them to geoparsed real-time tweet data streams. The authors use statistical analysis to generate real-time crisis maps. Geoparsing results are benchmarked against existing published work and evaluated across multilingual datasets. Two case studies compare five-day tweet crisis maps to official post-event impact assessment from the US National Geospatial Agency (NGA), compiled from verified satellite and aerial imagery sources.

The Future Internet Enablement of the Environment Information Space

This paper motivates the enablement of the Future Internet to become a highly functional service platform supporting the design and the operation of software applications in the Environmental Information Space. It reports on the experience made by the European research project ENVIROFI as one of the usage area projects within the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership programme. It describes the software components (environmental and specific enablers) which are required to connect with the domain-independent capabilities (generic enablers) of the Future Internet core platform for geospatially and environmentally-driven applications.

GRAVITATE: geometric and semantic matching for cultural heritage artefacts

The GRAVITATE project is developing techniques that bring together geometric and semantic data analysis to provide a new and more effective method of re-associating, reassembling or reunifying cultural objects that have been broken or dispersed over time. The project is driven by the needs of archaeological institutes, and the techniques are exemplified by their application to a collection of several hundred 3D-scanned fragments of large-scale terracotta statues from Salamis, Cyprus. The integration of geometrical feature extraction and matching with semantic annotation and matching into a single decision support platform will lead to more accurate reconstructions of artefacts and greater insights into history. In this paper we describe the project and its objectives, then we describe the progress made to date towards achieving those objectives: describing the datasets, requirements and analysing the state of the art. We follow this with an overview of the architecture of the integrated decision support platform and the first realisation of the user dashboard. The paper concludes with a description of the continuing work being undertaken to deliver a workable system to cultural heritage curators and researchers.

Experiences monitoring and managing QoS using SDN on testbeds supporting different innovation stages

In recent years there has been a big increase in the number of network-related experiments using software defined networking (SDN) technology. We report on our practical experience over 2 years running network experiments on three classes of testbed facility, each supporting researchers working at a different innovation stage. We run experiments using the commercial Amazon EC2 cloud facility, pre-commercial federated testbed of FIWARE Lab instances and the OFELIA experimental facility. We run an idealized common network experiment on each testbed, reducing its scope where needed to match testbed capabilities, and report details of the practical experience gained using a set of qualitative metrics for direct comparison across classes of testbed. We conclude with a concrete recommendation for pre-commercial testbed facilities to allow better support for network experiments in the future.

EXPERIMEDIA – a multi-venue experimentation service supporting technology innovation through new forms of social interaction and user experience

Editors: Martin Serrano, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland Nikolaos Isaris, European Commission, Belgium Hans Schaffers, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands John Domingue, Open University, United Kingdom Michael Boniface, IT Innovation, United Kingdom Thanasis Korakis, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, USA ISBN: 9788793519121 e-ISBN: 9788793519114 Available From: June 2017 Price: € 90.00The demand for ways to explore and understand how applications and services behave in a shared software defined infrastructures is increasing. Completely new applications are emerging, alongside “Big Data” and the convergence of services with mobile networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) all exploiting Cloud scalability and flexibility along with integration with software defined networks. These innovative technologies are creating opportunities for industry that requires a new collaborative approach to product and services that combines, commercial and funded research, early-stage and close-to-market applications, but always at the cutting edge of ideas.New media applications and services are revolutionising social interaction and user experience in both society and in wide ranging industry sectors. The rapid emergence of pervasive human and environment sensing technologies, novel immersive presentation devices and high performance, globally connected network and cloud infrastructures is generating huge opportunities for application providers, service provider and content providers. These new applications are driving convergence across devices, clouds, networks and services, and the merging of industries, technology and society. Yet the developers of such systems face many challenges in understanding how to optimise their solutions (Quality of Service – QoS) to enhance user experience (Quality of Experience – QoE) and how their disruptive innovations can be introduced into the market with appropriate business models.