Crowdsourcing and Scholarly Culture: Understanding Expertise in an Age of Popularism

The increasing volume of digital material available to the humanities creates clear potential for crowdsourcing. However, tasks in the digital humanities typically do not satisfy the standard requirement for decomposition into microtasks each of which must require little expertise on behalf of the worker and little context of the broader task. Instead, humanities tasks require scholarly knowledge to perform and even where sub-tasks can be extracted, these often involve broader context of the document or corpus from which they are extracted. That is the tasks are macrotasks, resisting simple decomposition. Building on a case study from musicology, the In Concert project, we will explore both the barriers to crowdsourcing in the creation of digital corpora and also examples where elements of automatic processing or less-expert work are possible in a broader matrix that also includes expert microtasks and macrotasks. Crucially we will see that the macrotask–microtask distinction is nuanced: it is often possible to create a partial decomposition into less-expert microtasks with residual expert macrotasks, and crucially do this in ways that preserve scholarly values

Crowdsourcing and Scholarly Culture: Understanding Expertise in an Age of Popularism

The increasing volume of digital material available to the humanities creates clear potential for crowdsourcing. However, tasks in the digital humanities typically do not satisfy the standard requirement for decomposition into microtasks each of which must require little expertise on behalf of the worker and little context of the broader task. Instead, humanities tasks require scholarly knowledge to perform and even where sub-tasks can be extracted, these often involve broader context of the document or corpus from which they are extracted. That is the tasks are macrotasks, resisting simple decomposition. Building on a case study from musicology, the In Concert project, we will explore both the barriers to crowdsourcing in the creation of digital corpora and also examples where elements of automatic processing or less-expert work are possible in a broader matrix that also includes expert microtasks and macrotasks. Crucially we will see that the macrotask–microtask distinction is nuanced: it is often possible to create a partial decomposition into less-expert microtasks with residual expert macrotasks, and crucially do this in ways that preserve scholarly values

The Need of Multidisciplinary Approaches and Engineering Tools for the Development and Implementation of the Smart City Paradigm

This paper is motivated by the concept that the successful, effective, and sustainable implementation of the smart city paradigm requires a close cooperation among researchers with different, complementary interests and, in most cases, a multidisciplinary approach. It first briefly discusses how such a multidisciplinary methodology, transversal to various disciplines such as architecture, computer science, civil engineering, electrical, electronic and telecommunication engineering, social science and behavioral science, etc., can be successfully employed for the development of suitable modeling tools and real solutions of such sociotechnical systems. Then, the paper presents some pilot projects accomplished by the authors within the framework of some major European Union (EU) and national research programs, also involving the Bologna municipality and some of the key players of the smart city industry. Each project, characterized by different and complementary approaches/modeling tools, is illustrated along with the relevant contextualization and the advancements with respect to the state of the art

Enumerating Query Plans via Conditional Tableau Interpolation

Database query optimization studies the problem of finding equivalent and efficient query execution plans for user queries under schema constraints. Logic-based approaches to query optimization leverage automated theorem proving and Craig interpolation to enumerate query plans that are correct and performance-optimal. In this thesis, we investigate and improve one of the state-of-the-art logic-based query optimizers – the Interpolation Test Bed (ITB). We begin by formally capturing the physical data independence framework and query optimization problem with first-order logic. Then, we give a gentle introduction to the classical results from logic that form the basis of logic-based query optimizers. We re-establish the correctness of ITB’s conditional tableau interpolation mechanism by reduction to free-variable tableau interpolation. To facilitate the reduction proof, we introduce interpolation rules for the free-variable tableau and prove the correctness of interpolation. Then we show the correctness of conditional tableau interpolation by reduction. We investigate a limitation of ITB’s forward chaining design, which causes missing optimal plans. To address this limitation, we propose a rewriting procedure inspired by Magic Set Transformation (MST), to extend the plan space for the current ITB system. We show that the propose rewriting procedure effectively generates the missing query plans, which are otherwise not found, while accommodating the existing forward chaining design

SEMANTIC DATA CLOUDING OVER THE WEBS

Very often, for business or personal needs, users require to retrieve, in a very fast way, all the available relevant information about a focused target entity, in order to take decisions, organize business work, plan future actions. To answer this kind of \u201centity\u201d- driven user needs, a huge multiplicity of web resources is actually available, coming from the Social Web and related user-centered services (e.g., news publishing, social networks, microblogging systems), from the Semantic Web and related ontologies and knowledge repositories, and from the conventional Web of Documents. The Ph.D. thesis is devoted to define the notion of in-cloud and a semantic clouding approach for the construction of in-clouds that works over the Social Web, the Semantic Web, and the Web of Documents. in-clouds are built for a target entity of interest to organize all relevant web resources, modeled as web data items, into a graph, on the basis of their level of prominence and reciprocal closeness. Prominence captures the importance of a web resource within the in-cloud, by distinguishing, also in a visual way \u201ca la tagcloud\u201d, how much relevant web resources are with respect to the target entity. The level of closeness between web resources is evaluated using matching and clustering techniques, with the goal of determining how similar web resources are to each other and with respect to the target entity

Il Diversity Management a Scuola

Lo scopo di questa ricerca \ue8 verificare se le scuole per accogliere la crescente domanda di diversit\ue0 possono utilizzare approcci al Diversity Management. Questa ricerca intitolata \u201c Il Diversity Management a scuola\u201d prende in esame tre scuole di tre paesi della Comunit\ue0 Europea con l\u2019intento di rispondere alla domanda di ricerca: \uabCi sono elementi riconoscibili di DM nelle scuole studiate?\ubb Figure esperte dell\u2019inclusione della diversit\ue0 nelle scuole hanno aiutato ad identificare scuole d\u2019eccellenza per la loro gestione della diversit\ue0 in Irlanda in Italia e a Malta. Per svolgere questo lavoro \ue8 stato scelto un approccio qualitativo. La raccolta dei dati ha privilegiato l\u2019intervista semi-strutturata (video-registrata) e osservazioni condotte da tre ricercatori-osservatori originari dei tre paesi, che hanno partecipato attivamente durante l\u2019intero processo di raccolta e analisi dei dati. I dati raccolti sono stati fedelmente trascritti e un\u2019analisi tematica \ue8 stata condotta durante vari focus group. L\u2019analisi dei dati che segue la Grounded Theory ha seguito un approccio induttivo bottom-up. Dagli estratti delle interviste sono state codificate delle parole chiave che hanno permesso di identificare dei sotto-temi racchiusi in quattro temi principali: percezione, pro-azione e strategie, applicazione e competenze. La percezione risulta essere un tema importante nella gestione delle diversit\ue0 di queste scuole, perch\ue9 si tratta di un processo di costruzione e attribuzione di significato. La diversit\ue0 \ue8 stata riconosciuta come un costrutto sociale da cui possono sorgere stereotipi o individualit\ue0. Perci\uf2 l\u2019ethos della scuola sembra essere fondamentale nella gestione della diversit\ue0. Essa \ue8 percepita come una sfida, ma viene vista anche come un arricchimento per l\u2019individuo e per l\u2019intero sistema scolastico. La Diversit\ue0 spesso genera paura dell\u2019ignoto, ciononostante gli intervistati riconoscono che non pu\uf2 essere percepita come un\u2019eccezione poich\ue9 \ue8 la norma. Questa nuova percezione o prospettiva porta gli stakeholders a reagire in modo pro-attivo rispetto alla gestione della diversit\ue0. Nelle scuole studiate le strategie pro-attive sono impiegate per generare pi\uf9 consapevolezza e conoscenza, favoriscono cos\uec il contatto diretto e la partecipazione attiva. Inoltre, tali attivit\ue0 danno pi\uf9 risultati se sono piacevoli, se si crea un gioco di squadra e se vanno ad evidenziare la diversit\ue0 anzich\ue9 nasconderla nello sfondo (aggiungere anzich\ue9 ridurre). Un altro tema emergente \ue8 l\u2019applicazione della gestione della diversit\ue0. Le strategie sono applicate a vari livelli (individuo, gruppo, comunit\ue0), utilizzano modalit\ue0 curricolari, extracurricolari e speciali e per la loro realizzazione richiedono una tempistica progettuale pianificata a medio e lungo termine. Dalla raccolta dei dati sembra chiaro che la gestione delle diversit\ue0 necessiti di competenze che emergono da capacit\ue0 acquisite tramite esperienze o dalla formazione, che sembra essere fondamentale per un\u2019efficace gestione. In conclusione questa ricerca rivela che le scuole studiate utilizzano aspetti del Diversity Management. I risultati emersi da questo studio qualitativo sono orientati a far emergere nuove idee e raccomandazioni possibili per aiutare a formulare best practices nella gestione della diversit\ue0, da applicare nei contesti scolastici sempre pi\uf9 colorati dalla diversit\ue0

Manager’s and citizen’s perspective of positive and negative risks for small probabilities

So far „risk‟ has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL, being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the event. The so called risk matrix is based on this definition. Also for favorable events one usually refers to the expected gain PG, being G the gain incurred as a consequence of the positive event. These “measures” are generally violated in practice. The case of insurances (on the side of losses, negative risk) and the case of lotteries (on the side of gains, positive risk) are the most obvious. In these cases a single person is available to pay a higher price than that stated by the mathematical expected value, according to (more or less theoretically justified) measures. The higher the risk, the higher the unfair accepted price. The definition of risk as expected value is justified in a long term “manager‟s” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen‟s perspective to the definition of risk