What About Inclusive Education and ICT in Italy: a Scoping Study

Strategies and approaches to inclusion in the classroom are important in developing a high quality, inclusive experience for students with Special Education Needs. Generally, strategies are not geared towards specific exceptionalities, but are instead designed to be implemented across exceptionality categories. Pavone (2014) and de Anna, Gaspari, Mura (2015) determined through their systematic literature review and research results that co-operation among staff, commitment and accountability to the teaching of all students, differentiation of instruction, and recognizing “that social interaction is the means through which student knowledge is developed” are key to successful inclusion of students with SEN. This paper looks at the issue of school inclusion by referring to the most recent laws about the inclusive education of students with special educational needs in Italy. Inclusive education means that all students attend and are welcomed by their neighbourhood schools in age-appropriate, regular classes and are supported to learn, contribute and participate in all aspects of the life of the school. Inclusive education is about how we develop and design our schools, classrooms, programs and activities so that all students learn and participate together. So ICT should be considered as a key tool for promoting equity in educational opportunities, that is using ICT to support the learning of learners with disabilities and special educational needs in inclusive settings within compulsory education. The paper also argues how the Italian teachers can realized good practices for inclusion through the use of ICT

Sensor Artificial Intelligence and its Application to Space Systems - A White Paper

A white paper resulting from the 1st Workshop on Sensor AI, April 2020; organized by DLR and the ECDF.Information and communication technologies have accompanied our everyday life for years. A steadily increasing number of computers, cameras, mobile devices, etc. generate more and more data, but at the same time we realize that the data can only partially be analyzed with classical approaches. The research and development of methods based on artificial intelligence (AI) made enormous progress in the area of interpretability of data in recent years. With growing experience, both, the potential and limitations of these new technologies are increasingly better understood. Typically, AI approaches start with the data from which information and directions for action are derived. However, the circumstances under which such data are collected and how they change over time are rarely considered. A closer look at the sensors and their physical properties within AI approaches will lead to more robust and widely applicable algorithms. This holistic approach which considers entire signal chains from the origin to a data product, "Sensor AI", is a highly relevant topic with great potential. It will play a decisive role in autonomous driving as well as in areas of automated production, predictive maintenance or space research. The goal of this white paper is to establish "Sensor AI" as a dedicated research topic. We want to exchange knowledge on the current state-of-the-art on Sensor AI, to identify synergies among research groups and thus boost the collaboration in this key technology for science and industry

Study to determine potential flight applications and human factors design guidelines for voice recognition and synthesis systems

A study was conducted to determine potential commercial aircraft flight deck applications and implementation guidelines for voice recognition and synthesis. At first, a survey of voice recognition and synthesis technology was undertaken to develop a working knowledge base. Then, numerous potential aircraft and simulator flight deck voice applications were identified and each proposed application was rated on a number of criteria in order to achieve an overall payoff rating. The potential voice recognition applications fell into five general categories: programming, interrogation, data entry, switch and mode selection, and continuous/time-critical action control. The ratings of the first three categories showed the most promise of being beneficial to flight deck operations. Possible applications of voice synthesis systems were categorized as automatic or pilot selectable and many were rated as being potentially beneficial. In addition, voice system implementation guidelines and pertinent performance criteria are proposed. Finally, the findings of this study are compared with those made in a recent NASA study of a 1995 transport concept

Primary User Emulation Detection in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radios (CRs) have been proposed as a promising solution for improving spectrum utilization via opportunistic spectrum sharing. In a CR network environment, primary (licensed) users have priority over secondary (unlicensed) users when accessing the wireless channel. Thus, if a malicious secondary user exploits this spectrum access etiquette by mimicking the spectral characteristics of a primary user, it can gain priority access to a wireless channel over other secondary users. This scenario is referred to in the literature as primary user emulation (PUE). This dissertation first covers three approaches for detecting primary user emulation attacks in cognitive radio networks, which can be classified in two categories. The first category is based on cyclostationary features, which employs a cyclostationary calculation to represent the modulation features of the user signals. The calculation results are then fed into an artificial neural network for classification. The second category is based on video processing method of action recognition in frequency domain, which includes two approaches. Both of them analyze the FFT sequences of wireless transmissions operating across a cognitive radio network environment, as well as classify their actions in the frequency domain. The first approach employs a covariance descriptor of motion-related features in the frequency domain, which is then fed into an artificial neural network for classification. The second approach is built upon the first approach, but employs a relational database system to record the motion-related feature vectors of primary users on this frequency band. When a certain transmission does not have a match record in the database, a covariance descriptor will be calculated and fed into an artificial neural network for classification. This dissertation is completed by a novel PUE detection approach which employs a distributed sensor network, where each sensor node works as an independent PUE detector. The emphasis of this work is how these nodes collaborate to obtain the final detection results for the whole network. All these proposed approaches have been validated via computer simulations as well as by experimental hardware implementations using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) software-defined radio (SDR) platform

Fast Gravitational Approach for Rigid Point Set Registration with Ordinary Differential Equations

This article introduces a new physics-based method for rigid point set alignment called Fast Gravitational Approach (FGA). In FGA, the source and target point sets are interpreted as rigid particle swarms with masses interacting in a globally multiply-linked manner while moving in a simulated gravitational force field. The optimal alignment is obtained by explicit modeling of forces acting on the particles as well as their velocities and displacements with second-order ordinary differential equations of motion. Additional alignment cues (point-based or geometric features, and other boundary conditions) can be integrated into FGA through particle masses. We propose a smooth-particle mass function for point mass initialization, which improves robustness to noise and structural discontinuities. To avoid prohibitive quadratic complexity of all-to-all point interactions, we adapt a Barnes-Hut tree for accelerated force computation and achieve quasilinear computational complexity. We show that the new method class has characteristics not found in previous alignment methods such as efficient handling of partial overlaps, inhomogeneous point sampling densities, and coping with large point clouds with reduced runtime compared to the state of the art. Experiments show that our method performs on par with or outperforms all compared competing non-deep-learning-based and general-purpose techniques (which do not assume the availability of training data and a scene prior) in resolving transformations for LiDAR data and gains state-of-the-art accuracy and speed when coping with different types of data disturbances.Comment: 18 pages, 18 figures and two table

Innovative technologies, certification and assessment tools for a sustainable building heritage

[EN] It’s clear that good results in the field of environmental sustainability can be obtained by energy efficiency policies for buildings - mostly undertaken or in itinere - built for more than 50% before the disregarded law 373/76 that provided, in the period of the European oil crisis, constraints for design, installation, operation and maintenance of heating systems and requirements for thermal insulation of buildings to contain consumption. On the other hand, it is less clear the part of buildings subject to conservation (in accordance with the Legislative Decree 42/2004 or former regulations on the subject) or listed buildings ope legis (art. 12 of italian legislative Decree 42/2004, asset belonging to the State, regions, public territorial authorities, as well as any other public body and institute and private non-profit legal entities and which are the work of an author who is no longer alive and whose execution dates back to more than seventy years) for which it would not be possible to apply the limitations of the decrees 192/2005 and 311/2006, which relieve the buildings “in which compliance with the requirements would entail an unacceptable alteration of their nature or appearance, with particular reference to historical or artistic features” of the energy efficiency obligations. In this paper we want to justify and illustrate some choices made by international research institutes regarding the difficulty in reconciling the new requests of sustainability related to the need to reduce consumption (especially from fossil fuels) with those of the historical value of the buildings subject to intervention, presenting evaluation criteria that can provide an objective method for quantifying the compatibility between new and existing, criteria that – in order to have predictive capacity and therefore be able to guide choices ex ante and not measure them ex post - use digital design tools (BIM, GIS, etc).[IT] E' evidente che buoni risultati nel campo della sostenibilità ambientale si possono ottenere da politiche di efficienza energetica per gli edifici - per lo più realizzati o in itinere - costruiti per oltre il 50% prima della disattesa legge 373/76 che prevedeva, nel periodo del petrolio europeo crisi, vincoli per la progettazione, installazione, esercizio e manutenzione degli impianti termici e requisiti per l'isolamento termico degli edifici per il contenimento dei consumi.Meno chiara è invece la parte di fabbricato oggetto di conservazione (ai sensi del D.Lgs. 42/2004 o previgenti normative in materia) o di immobili vincolati ope legis (art. 12 D.Lgs. 42/2004, asset appartenenti allo Stato, alle regioni, agli enti pubblici territoriali, nonché ad ogni altro ente ed istituto pubblico e soggetti giuridici privati senza scopo di lucro e che siano opera di autore non più in vita e la cui esecuzione risalga a più di settant'anni ), per i quali non sarebbe possibile applicare le limitazioni dei decreti 192/2005 e 311/2006, che esonerano gli edifici "il cui rispetto dei requisiti comporterebbe un'alterazione inaccettabile della loro natura o aspetto, con particolare riferimento ai o caratteristiche artistiche"degli obblighi di efficienza energetica.In questo lavoro si vogliono giustificare e illustrare alcune scelte fatte da istituti di ricerca internazionali in merito alla difficoltà di conciliare le nuove richieste di sostenibilità legate alla necessità di ridurre i consumi (soprattutto da combustibili fossili) con quelle del valore storico degli edifici oggetto di intervento , presentando criteri di valutazione che possano fornire un metodo oggettivo per quantificare la compatibilità tra nuovo ed esistente, criteri che – per avere capacità predittiva e quindi poter guidare le scelte ex ante e non misurarle ex post – utilizzino strumenti di progettazione digitale (BIM , GIS, ecc.).Minutoli, F. 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Investigating EAST (A Scotland-Gaza English for Academic Study Telecollaboration between SET Students)

How can technology be best-harnessed to innovate pedagogical approaches to curriculum design and delivery in order to enhance university students’ learning experience? This article looks at this question from the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) perspective and reports on a number of technology-enabled interventions to the design and teaching methods used on a Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) pre-sessional course. Every summer the University of Glasgow (UK) runs an intensive ESP course for incoming international postgraduate students wanting to study SET-related disciplines. In previous years, in order to progress onto their Master’s or PhD programmes, the students had to produce a written assignment and an oral presentation which investigates an engineering problem of their choosing and a range of solutions. In August 2015 an online collaboration with a partner university in Palestine was piloted, which allowed several significant developments. During the project, 20 Palestinian students and 37 UK-based students, divided into small groups, worked together on authentic and highly contextualised SET-related scenarios from the Gaza Strip, devised by the Palestinian students. Their role was to act as critical friends, and provide content-oriented comments throughout the project, which they had been trained in on an intensive online preparatory course in constructive feedback. Based on the guidance from their peer mentors, the students in the UK analysed and evaluated possible solutions. At the end of the project, they delivered presentations to the audience in Gaza via a videoconference link. The course was evaluated highly. In an end-of-project survey, with an 81% rate of completion, the students from both institutions commented on the range of positive outcomes of the participation, for example language practice, development of digital literacies and enhancement of content knowledge. It was felt, though, that there was an imbalance in benefits and that there is need to revise the course further to offer more opportunities for mentoring input from the Palestinian participants. This article reports on the project and looks into how the technology-enabled interventions helped improve the course by strengthening the project-based learning elements of the previous course design, focusing on development of transferable skills, and above all bringing in real-world issues into the SET classroom. Working with authentic and specific issues, the UK-based students’ output seemed of higher quality in terms of critical analysis or evaluation. The paper discusses a number of related challenges too in order to help any educator interested in introducing tele-collaboration into their curriculum to avoid pitfalls and make more informed decisions