Logic Programming as a Service (LPaaS): Intelligence for the IoT

The widespread diffusion of low-cost computing devices, such as Arduino boards and Raspberry Pi, along with improvements of Cloud computing platforms, are paving the way towards a whole new set of opportunities for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services. Varying degrees of intelligence are often required for supporting adaptation and self-management—yet, they should be provided in a light-weight, easy to use and customise, highly-interoperable way. Accordingly, in this paper we explore the idea of Logic Programming as a Service (LPaaS) as a novel and promising re-interpretation of distributed logic programming in the IoT era. After introducing the reference context and motivating scenarios of LPaaS as a key enabling technology for intelligent IoT, we define the LPaaS general system architecture. Then, we present a prototype implementation built on top of the tuProlog system, which provides the required interoperability and customisation. We showcase the LPaaS potential through a case study designed as a simplification of the motivating scenarios

A platform for P2P agent-based collaborative applications

The operational environment can be a valuable source of information about the behavior of software applications and their usage context. Although a single instance of an application has limited evidence of the range of the possible behaviors and situations that might be experienced in the field, the collective knowledge composed by the evidence gathered by the many instances of a same application running in several diverse user environments (eg, a browser) might be an invaluable source of information. This information can be exploited by applications able to autonomously analyze how they behave in the field and adjust their behavior accordingly. Augmenting applications with the capability to collaborate and directly share information about their behavior is challenging because it requires the definition of a fully decentralized and dependable networked infrastructure whose nodes are the user machines. The nodes of the infrastructure must be collaborative, to share information, and autonomous, to exploit the available information to change their behavior, for instance, to better accommodate the needs of the users to prevent known problems. This paper describes the initial results that we obtained with the design and the development of an infrastructure that can enable the execution of collaborative scenarios in a fully decentralized way. Our idea is to combine the agent-based paradigm, which is well suited to design collaborative and autonomous nodes, and the peer-to-peer paradigm, which is well suited to design distributed and dynamic network infrastructures. To demonstrate our idea, we augmented the popular JADE agent-based platform with a software layer that supports both the creation of a fully decentralized peer-to-peer network of JADE platforms and the execution of services within that network, thus enabling JADE multiagent systems (MASs) to behave as peer-to-peer networks. The resulting platform can be used to study the design of collaborative applications running in the field

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

Effective Communication without Verbs? Sure!

Nominal utterances are very frequent, especially in social media texts, and play a crucial role as they are very dense from a semantic point of view. In spite of this, their automatic identification has received little to no attention. We have thus developed a framework for the annotation of nominal utterances and created the manually annotated corpus COSMIANU (Corpus Of Social Media Italian Annotated with Nominal Utterances), which could be used to train automatic systems.Gli enunciati nominali sono un fenomento linguistico molto frequente, specialmente nello scritto dei social media, e di cruciale importanza, data la loro alta densità semantica. Tuttavia, ben poca attenzione è stata dedicata al loro riconoscimento automatico. In quest’ottica, questo lavoro illustra le guidelines per l’annotazione manuale degli enunciati nominali da noi sviluppate e presenta il corpus dell’italiano dei social media da noi annotato con gli enunciati nominali (COSMIANU), utilizzabile per addestrare sistemi automatici

Forward refutation for Gödel-Dummett Logics

We propose a refutation calculus to check the unprovability of a formula in Gödel-Dummett logics. From refutations we can directly extract countermodels for unprovable formulas, moreover the calculus is designed so to support a forward proof-search strategy that can be understood as a top-down construction of a model

How to access ancient landscapes? Field survey and legacy data integration for research on Greek and Roman settlement patterns in Eastern Sicily

The integration of field survey data from Eastern Sicily (the Plain of Catania) with legacy data avai- lable for the region will expand our knowledge on Mediterranean ancient rural landscapes. With an extent of 430 km2, the area is a perfect case study due to its geographical unity and the number of archaeological projects (both excavations and surveys) carried out within it in recent decades. Indeed, combining data from earlier research projects with new archaeological survey data allows us to conduct a settlement pattern analysis of the project’s study area. Heterogenous datasets have been integrated throu- gh their implementation into a geo-database, featuring the management and integration of topographical units and archaeological entities through semantic relations. Through geospatial data analysis based on the complete gazetteer of archaeological sites (whether sherd scatters, ruins, caves dwellings, tombs or tracks), a new image of rural landscapes for this area of Eastern Sicily from the Greek Archaic to the Late Roman Age can be visualized, beyond the traditional Sicilia frumentaria narrative