Valerio Perticone

Early usage of Pokmon Go and its personality correlates

Pokmon Go is a popular augmented reality mobile game. Players find imaginary creatures by wandering into the real world, which can then be collected and used in combat. In this paper an assessment of Pokmon Go early usage in the Italian community and of its correlates with the Big Five personality traits is given. The resulting profile of early PG player is one of a more Introverted, close person with high agreeability and conscientiousness. Extraversion and Stability are positively correlated with the collection part of the game, while Agreeableness is a negative predictor thereof. Openness is correlated to the level of proficiency. Display Omitted We assess Pokmon Go early usage and its correlates with the Big Five traits.Early PG player are more Introverted and Close, highly Agreeable and Conscientious.Extraversion and Stability are positively correlated with collection.Agreeableness is a negative predictor of collection.Openness is positively correlated to the level of proficiency reached in the game.

Computational Intelligence and Citizen Communication in the Smart City

Information and communication are at the core of the intelligent city of tomorrow, and the key components of a smart city cannot prescind from data exchanges and interconnectedness. Citizen communication is an integral part of the smart city’s development plans: freedom of information and involvement in collective decisions, e-democracy and decision-making feedback can be greatly enhanced in an intelligent city, and, among other smart city components, foster a new era of participation and wise decisions. In this contribution we describe the methodologies that can be implemented in order to correctly develop automatic recognition systems for citizen communication, paying special attention to computational intelligence approaches, and how such methodologies could be usefully employed in the essential task of understanding linguistic registers, and suggest how the use of argumentation techniques can be beneficial to citizen communication.

Technology and human sciences: A dialogue to be constructed or a common tread to be rediscovered?

In this contribution we begin to discuss the thesis that an analysis of the similarities and differences of typical methodologies of human sciences, technology and hard sciences show some unforeseen but strong similarities between human sciences and technologies. In this context fuzzy sets ideas provide useful tools which help to render the analysis more quantitative but without loosing the connection with a purely descriptive analysis. These kinds of considerations would have been hardly conceivable in the setting of XIX Century conception of science. It is the development of Information sciences that has allowed these problems to emerge. In this paper we shall then briefly outline the general context in which the questions must be asked. The present paper, then, should be considered a (necessary but only a) prolegomenon to a future more specific analysis, the main (in our view) steps of which will be listed in the final Section.

Towards the Improvement of Citizen Communication Through Computational Intelligence

When dealing with problems that arise from collective sharing of resources in metropolitan areas (i.e., energy, pollution, traffic, health) most of the interaction between citizens and local governance is usually carried out through the use of natural languages. Digital technologies allows smart cities residents to communicate with a broad range of experts (e.g. bureaucrats, legislators, urbanists, etc.) that routinely use technical terminology seldom accessible to the layperson, or linguistic styles that are not immediately understandable. Although information technology should encourage citizen participation in governance at many levels, the different levels of knowledge possessed by the actors can lead to incomprehension, as well as social exclusion. Computational Intelligence approaches can be used in order to alleviate such difficulties and improve the efficiency of communication through automation and collective cognitive systems. In this paper we discuss how use of techniques such as CWW and Fuzzy Classifiers can be beneficial toward the reduction of the communication gap between citizens and government.

Agents Displacement in Arbitrary Geometrical Spaces

In many different social contexts, communication allows a collective intelligence to emerge. However, a correct way of exchanging information usually requires determined topological configurations of the agents involved in the process. Such a configuration should take into account several parameters, e.g. agents positioning, their proximity and time efficiency of communication. Our aim is to present an algorithm, based on evolutionary programming, which optimizes agents placement on arbitrarily shaped areas. In order to show its ability to deal with arbitrary bi-dimensional topologies, this algorithm has been tested on a set of differently shaped areas that present concavities, convexities and obstacles. This approach can be extended to deal with concrete cases, such as object localization in a delimited area.

A fuzzy methodology to alleviate information overload in eLearning

Some aspects of eLearning experience can be enhanced in a very natural way by using the basic tools offered by fuzzy logic. As a matter of example, consider the uncontrolled growth of information produced in a collaborative-oriented context, in which each participant (e.g. students, teachers) is able to insert and share new contents (e.g. comments, texts) concerning a university course. All the incrementally added pieces of information can be evaluated in several ways: by the intervention of a “dictator” (e.g. the teacher), using a rating form, or even according to the frequency of access. As contents rapidly become unusable for the effects of information overload, basic tools of fuzzy logic such as membership functions and measures of fuzziness can help to distinguish between relevant and trivial content, without thereby canceling any contribution. This very same idea can of course also be applied to different contexts.

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.