Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Dare et Capere: Virtuous Mesh and a Targeting Diagram

In Miller, P. D. and Matviyenko, S. (Eds.) (2014). The Imaginary App. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pp. 143-162

Improving National and Homeland Security through a proposed Laboratory for Information Globalization and Harmonization Technologies (LIGHT)

A recent National Research Council study found that: "Although there are many private and public databases that contain information potentially relevant to counter terrorism programs, they lack the necessary context definitions (i.e., metadata) and access tools to enable interoperation with other databases and the extraction of meaningful and timely information" [NRC02, p.304, emphasis added] That sentence succinctly describes the objectives of this project. Improved access and use of information are essential to better identify and anticipate threats, protect against and respond to threats, and enhance national and homeland security (NHS), as well as other national priority areas, such as Economic Prosperity and a Vibrant Civil Society (ECS) and Advances in Science and Engineering (ASE). This project focuses on the creation and contributions of a Laboratory for Information Globalization and Harmonization Technologies (LIGHT) with two interrelated goals: (1) Theory and Technologies: To research, design, develop, test, and implement theory and technologies for improving the reliability, quality, and responsiveness of automated mechanisms for reasoning and resolving semantic differences that hinder the rapid and effective integration (int) of systems and data (dmc) across multiple autonomous sources, and the use of that information by public and private agencies involved in national and homeland security and the other national priority areas involving complex and interdependent social systems (soc). This work builds on our research on the COntext INterchange (COIN) project, which focused on the integration of diverse distributed heterogeneous information sources using ontologies, databases, context mediation algorithms, and wrapper technologies to overcome information representational conflicts. The COIN approach makes it substantially easier and more transparent for individual receivers (e.g., applications, users) to access and exploit distributed sources. Receivers specify their desired context to reduce ambiguities in the interpretation of information coming from heterogeneous sources. This approach significantly reduces the overhead involved in the integration of multiple sources, improves data quality, increases the speed of integration, and simplifies maintenance in an environment of changing source and receiver context - which will lead to an effective and novel distributed information grid infrastructure. This research also builds on our Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD), an Internet platform for information generation, provision, and integration of multiple domains, regions, languages, and epistemologies relevant to international relations and national security. (2) National Priority Studies: To experiment with and test the developed theory and technologies on practical problems of data integration in national priority areas. Particular focus will be on national and homeland security, including data sources about conflict and war, modes of instability and threat, international and regional demographic, economic, and military statistics, money flows, and contextualizing terrorism defense and response. Although LIGHT will leverage the results of our successful prior research projects, this will be the first research effort to simultaneously and effectively address ontological and temporal information conflicts as well as dramatically enhance information quality. Addressing problems of national priorities in such rapidly changing complex environments requires extraction of observations from disparate sources, using different interpretations, at different points in times, for different purposes, with different biases, and for a wide range of different uses and users. This research will focus on integrating information both over individual domains and across multiple domains. Another innovation is the concept and implementation of Collaborative Domain Spaces (CDS), within which applications in a common domain can share, analyze, modify, and develop information. Applications also can span multiple domains via Linked CDSs. The PIs have considerable experience with these research areas and the organization and management of such large scale international and diverse research projects. The PIs come from three different Schools at MIT: Management, Engineering, and Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences. The faculty and graduate students come from about a dozen nationalities and diverse ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. The currently identified external collaborators come from over 20 different organizations and many different countries, industrial as well as developing. Specific efforts are proposed to engage even more women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities. The anticipated results apply to any complex domain that relies on heterogeneous distributed data to address and resolve compelling problems. This initiative is supported by international collaborators from (a) scientific and research institutions, (b) business and industry, and (c) national and international agencies. Research products include: a System for Harmonized Information Processing (SHIP), a software platform, and diverse applications in research and education which are anticipated to significantly impact the way complex organizations, and society in general, understand and manage critical challenges in NHS, ECS, and ASE

Improving National and Homeland Security through a proposed Laboratory for nformation Globalization and Harmonization Technologies (LIGHT)

A recent National Research Council study found that: "Although there are many private and public databases that contain information potentially relevant to counter terrorism programs, they lack the necessary context definitions (i.e., metadata) and access tools to enable interoperation with other databases and the extraction of meaningful and timely information" [NRC02, p.304, emphasis added] That sentence succinctly describes the objectives of this project. Improved access and use of information are essential to better identify and anticipate threats, protect against and respond to threats, and enhance national and homeland security (NHS), as well as other national priority areas, such as Economic Prosperity and a Vibrant Civil Society (ECS) and Advances in Science and Engineering (ASE). This project focuses on the creation and contributions of a Laboratory for Information Globalization and Harmonization Technologies (LIGHT) with two interrelated goals: (1) Theory and Technologies: To research, design, develop, test, and implement theory and technologies for improving the reliability, quality, and responsiveness of automated mechanisms for reasoning and resolving semantic differences that hinder the rapid and effective integration (int) of systems and data (dmc) across multiple autonomous sources, and the use of that information by public and private agencies involved in national and homeland security and the other national priority areas involving complex and interdependent social systems (soc). This work builds on our research on the COntext INterchange (COIN) project, which focused on the integration of diverse distributed heterogeneous information sources using ontologies, databases, context mediation algorithms, and wrapper technologies to overcome information representational conflicts. The COIN approach makes it substantially easier and more transparent for individual receivers (e.g., applications, users) to access and exploit distributed sources. Receivers specify their desired context to reduce ambiguities in the interpretation of information coming from heterogeneous sources. This approach significantly reduces the overhead involved in the integration of multiple sources, improves data quality, increases the speed of integration, and simplifies maintenance in an environment of changing source and receiver context - which will lead to an effective and novel distributed information grid infrastructure. This research also builds on our Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD), an Internet platform for information generation, provision, and integration of multiple domains, regions, languages, and epistemologies relevant to international relations and national security. (2) National Priority Studies: To experiment with and test the developed theory and technologies on practical problems of data integration in national priority areas. Particular focus will be on national and homeland security, including data sources about conflict and war, modes of instability and threat, international and regional demographic, economic, and military statistics, money flows, and contextualizing terrorism defense and response. Although LIGHT will leverage the results of our successful prior research projects, this will be the first research effort to simultaneously and effectively address ontological and temporal information conflicts as well as dramatically enhance information quality. Addressing problems of national priorities in such rapidly changing complex environments requires extraction of observations from disparate sources, using different interpretations, at different points in times, for different purposes, with different biases, and for a wide range of different uses and users. This research will focus on integrating information both over individual domains and across multiple domains. Another innovation is the concept and implementation of Collaborative Domain Spaces (CDS), within which applications in a common domain can share, analyze, modify, and develop information. Applications also can span multiple domains via Linked CDSs. The PIs have considerable experience with these research areas and the organization and management of such large scale international and diverse research projects. The PIs come from three different Schools at MIT: Management, Engineering, and Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences. The faculty and graduate students come from about a dozen nationalities and diverse ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. The currently identified external collaborators come from over 20 different organizations and many different countries, industrial as well as developing. Specific efforts are proposed to engage even more women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities. The anticipated results apply to any complex domain that relies on heterogeneous distributed data to address and resolve compelling problems. This initiative is supported by international collaborators from (a) scientific and research institutions, (b) business and industry, and (c) national and international agencies. Research products include: a System for Harmonized Information Processing (SHIP), a software platform, and diverse applications in research and education which are anticipated to significantly impact the way complex organizations, and society in general, understand and manage critical challenges in NHS, ECS, and ASE