Digital Competence and Family Mediation in the Perception of Online Risk to Adolescents. Analysis of the Montenegro Case Study

Da diversi anni il dibattito scientifico e politico internazionale ha manifestato un interesse sempre più crescente sulla digital literacy e la digital education, quali strumenti di tutela del minore rispetto ai rischi derivanti dall’utilizzo incontrollato e inconsapevole di diversi mezzi di comunicazione. Contemporaneamente, diversi filoni della letteratura scientifica hanno approfondito i temi dei rischi e delle opportunità legate all’utilizzo della rete, da cui spesso sono stati promossi interventi territoriali politici, di sensibilizzazione o di formazione per arginare gli effetti potenzialmente nocivi e incrementare quelli positivi, legati soprattutto alle opportunità di crescita individuale e di inclusione socioculturale che le tecnologie possono contribuire a determinare. Il paper si inserisce all’interno di questo quadro per riflettere sul modo in cui il possesso o meno di alcune competenze digitali possa influenzare o meno il comportamento di fruizione mediale dei giovani, incrementando o meno il rischio di esposizione mediale all’interno di un contesto socioculturale circoscritto. Per intraprendere questo tipo di riflessione, il paper focalizza la propria attenzione sul caso di studio del Montenegro e analizza alcuni risultati della ricerca Eukids on line del 2016, per riflettere sulla relazione fra competenze digitali e livello di rischio espositivo dei bambini compresi fra i 9 e i 17 anni all’interno di aree territoriali socioculturali circoscritte.For several years, international scientific and political debate has shown increasing interest in digital literacy and digital education as tools to protect minors from the risks associated with the unmonitored and unaware use of various media. At the same time, various strains in the scientific literature have more deeply analyzed the themes of the risks and opportunities associated with using the web; this has often resulted in the promotion of political, awareness-raising, or educational interventions on the local level, to contain the potentially harmful effects and augment the positive ones linked especially to the opportunities for individual growth and sociocultural inclusion that these technologies can help bring about. This paper enters into this framework to explore how whether or not digital competence is possessed can influence young people’s media use behaviour, while increasing or not increasing the risk of media exposure within a circumscribed sociocultural context. To undertake this kind of reflection, this paper focuses its attention on the Montenegro case study and analyzes some results of the 2016 Global kids on line research work, to consider the relationship between digital competence and the exposure risk level of children between 12 and 17 years of age within circumscribed sociocultural areas

Sharing, privacy and trust issues for photo collections

Digital libraries are quickly being adopted by the masses. Technological developments now allow community groups, clubs, and even ordinary individuals to create their own, publicly accessible collections. However, users may not be fully aware of the potential privacy implications of submitting their documents to a digital library, and may hold misconceptions of the technological support for preserving their privacy. We present results from 18 autoethnographic investigations and 19 observations / interviews into privacy issues that arise when people make their personal photo collections available online. The Adams' privacy model is used to discuss the findings according to information receiver, information sensitivity, and information usage. Further issues of trust and ad hoc poorly supported protection strategies are presented. Ultimately while photographic data is potentially highly sensitive, the privacy risks are often hidden and the protection mechanisms are limited

Fast scalable visualization techniques for interactive billion-particle walkthrough

This research develops a comprehensive framework for interactive walkthrough involving one billion particles in an immersive virtual environment to enable interrogative visualization of large atomistic simulation data. As a mixture of scientific and engineering approaches, the framework is based on four key techniques: adaptive data compression based on space-filling curves, octree-based visibility and occlusion culling, predictive caching based on machine learning, and scalable data reduction based on parallel and distributed processing. In terms of parallel rendering, this system combines functional parallelism, data parallelism, and temporal parallelism to improve interactivity. The visualization framework will be applicable not only to material simulation, but also to computational biology, applied mathematics, mechanical engineering, and nanotechnology, etc

CITIZENS AND INSTITUTIONS BETWEEN COMPUTERS AND INTERNET - AN EMPYRICAL EVIDENCE FROM THE ITALIAN CASE

The diffusion of ICT technologies that generated the Internet phenomenon, is responsible of the world-wide incredible expectation level related to its high potential contribution to problem solution in many socio-economic sectors. In facts, the contribution of ICT in some sectors, as organizations management (public or private, profit or no-profit), was undoubtedly highly effective. The interaction between citizens and institutions is also considered extremely interesting, as the specific funds appropriation since the end of 90es of European Union on these topics can demonstrate. This wide interest caused the expectation of a remarkable services improvement, but the obtained results doesn’t seem as much satisfactory. This international and European scenario had a meaningful reflex also in Italian case, because the lack of information flows between Institutions and citizens in our country is always strongly perceived as critical point. In a former study of 1998 (Tesauro, Campisi), some institutional web sites was included in a wider study sample about the usage of internet communications, reaching unflattering results. Nevertheless, some recent “accidents” in citizen-institution relationships, widely reported by mass media and strictly related to computer technologies, suggest remarkable doubts about the usage of these technologies. This happen in spite of the creation of a specific Ministry in Italy and five years later the cited study, an incredible amount of time in terms of evolutionary dynamic of virtual environment). So, the main objective of this contribution is to show a scenario of citizen-institution relation via Internet in Italy at different scales (national, regional and local), identifying strength or weak points not only from users viewpoint and trying to underline the difficulties inherited from a poor usage of actual computer knowledge.

Immersive Analytics of Large Dynamic Networks via Overview and Detail Navigation

Analysis of large dynamic networks is a thriving research field, typically relying on 2D graph representations. The advent of affordable head mounted displays however, sparked new interest in the potential of 3D visualization for immersive network analytics. Nevertheless, most solutions do not scale well with the number of nodes and edges and rely on conventional fly- or walk-through navigation. In this paper, we present a novel approach for the exploration of large dynamic graphs in virtual reality that interweaves two navigation metaphors: overview exploration and immersive detail analysis. We thereby use the potential of state-of-the-art VR headsets, coupled with a web-based 3D rendering engine that supports heterogeneous input modalities to enable ad-hoc immersive network analytics. We validate our approach through a performance evaluation and a case study with experts analyzing a co-morbidity network