Questioning and responding in Italian

Questions are design problems for both the questioner and the addressee. They must be produced as recognizable objects and must be comprehended by taking into account the context in which they occur and the local situated interests of the participants. This paper investigates how people do ‘questioning’ and ‘responding’ in Italian ordinary conversations. I focus on the features of both questions and responses. I first discuss formal linguistic features that are peculiar to questions in terms of intonation contours (e.g. final rise), morphology (e.g. tags and question words) and syntax (e.g. inversion). I then show additional features that characterize their actual implementation in conversation such as their minimality (often the subject or the verb is only implied) and the usual occurrence of speaker gaze towards the recipient during questions. I then look at which social actions (e.g. requests for information, requests for confirmation) the different question types implement and which responses are regularly produced in return. The data shows that previous descriptions of “interrogative markings” are neither adequate nor sufficient to comprehend the actual use of questions in natural conversation

Cooperative Content Dissemination on Vehicle Networks

As redes veiculares têm sido alvo de grandes avanços nos últimos anos, sobretudo devido ao crescente interesse por veículos inteligentes e autónomos que motiva investimentos avultados por parte da indústria automóvel. A inexistência de uma forma oportuna e económica de executar atualizações OTA (over-the-air) está a contribuir para o adiar do lançamento de grandes frotas de veículos inteligentes. O custo associado à transmissão de dados através de redes celulares é muito elevado e não se pode garantir que cada veículo tenha acesso a uma estação ou estacionamento com conectividade adequada em tempo útil, onde possa obter os dados esperados. Com base nestas premissas, esta tese apresenta a concepção e implementação de um protocolo cooperativo de disseminação de conteúdos que aproveita as ligações Veículo-a-Veículo (V2V) para assegurar uma distribuição de dados pela rede com custos reduzidos. Além disso, este trabalho é complementado e suportado com uma análise do desempenho do protocolo numa rede de 25 veículos.Vehicular networks have seen great advancements over the last few years, mostly due to the increased eagerness for smart and autonomous vehicles that motivate hefty investments by the automotive industry. The absence of a timely and cost-effective way to perform over-the-air (OTA) updates is contributing to defer the deployment of large fleets of connected vehicles. There is a high cost associated with transmitting data over cellular networks and it cannot be expected that every vehicle has access to a station or depot with adequate connectivity where it can get the awaited data cheaply nor that this solution happens timely enough. With this in mind, this thesis presents the design and implementation of a cooperative content dissemination protocol that takes advantage of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication links to distribute data across a network with reduced costs. Moreover, this work is complemented with a performance analysis of the protocol on a deployed network of 25 vehicles

Ambient Data Collection with Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the most important applications for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is Data Collection, where sensing data arecollected at sensor nodes and forwarded to a central base station for further processing. Since using battery powers and wirelesscommunications, sensor nodes can be very small and easily attached at specified locations without disturbing surroundingenvironments. This makes WSN a competitive approach for data collection comparing with its wired counterpart. In this paper,we review recent advances in this research area. We first highlight the special features of data collection WSNs, by comparingwith wired data collection network and other WSN applications. With these features in mind, we then discuss issues and priorsolutions on the data gathering protocol design. Our discussion also covers different approaches for message dissemination, whichis a critical component for network control and management and greatly affects the overall performance of a data collectionWSNsystem

Wireless Sensor Data Transport, Aggregation and Security

abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSN) and the communication and the security therein have been gaining further prominence in the tech-industry recently, with the emergence of the so called Internet of Things (IoT). The steps from acquiring data and making a reactive decision base on the acquired sensor measurements are complex and requires careful execution of several steps. In many of these steps there are still technological gaps to fill that are due to the fact that several primitives that are desirable in a sensor network environment are bolt on the networks as application layer functionalities, rather than built in them. For several important functionalities that are at the core of IoT architectures we have developed a solution that is analyzed and discussed in the following chapters. The chain of steps from the acquisition of sensor samples until these samples reach a control center or the cloud where the data analytics are performed, starts with the acquisition of the sensor measurements at the correct time and, importantly, synchronously among all sensors deployed. This synchronization has to be network wide, including both the wired core network as well as the wireless edge devices. This thesis studies a decentralized and lightweight solution to synchronize and schedule IoT devices over wireless and wired networks adaptively, with very simple local signaling. Furthermore, measurement results have to be transported and aggregated over the same interface, requiring clever coordination among all nodes, as network resources are shared, keeping scalability and fail-safe operation in mind. Furthermore ensuring the integrity of measurements is a complicated task. On the one hand Cryptography can shield the network from outside attackers and therefore is the first step to take, but due to the volume of sensors must rely on an automated key distribution mechanism. On the other hand cryptography does not protect against exposed keys or inside attackers. One however can exploit statistical properties to detect and identify nodes that send false information and exclude these attacker nodes from the network to avoid data manipulation. Furthermore, if data is supplied by a third party, one can apply automated trust metric for each individual data source to define which data to accept and consider for mentioned statistical tests in the first place. Monitoring the cyber and physical activities of an IoT infrastructure in concert is another topic that is investigated in this thesis.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Group Norms and Intimacy Among Best Friends: A Normative Cross-Sectional Developmental Study

The focus of the current dissertation was on 1) the prevalence and nature of observed gossip behavior in the friendships of children in grades five and six, and 2) the associations of observed gossip behavior and perceptions of friendship quality. Scholars have argued that gossip is a normal part of communicative development and it also has been linked to perceptions of close and positive friendship (Gottman & Mettetal, 1986). The findings of the current dissertation indicated that gossip was prominent in children's conversations with their best friends, and that different forms of gossip behavior were evident. Results also confirmed the association of gossip and perceptions of friendship quality (Parker & Gottman, 1989; Sullivan, 1953), and that these relations were stronger for girls than for boys (Foster, 2004; Gottman & Mettetal, 1986; Leaper & Holliday, 1995). In addition, these relations varied depending on other contextual factors, such as whom the gossip was about. Generally, gossip functioned in two apparently contradictory ways for the friendships of girls. On the one hand, gossip was associated with positive aspects of friendship quality. On the other hand, gossip was also associated with negative aspects of friendship quality, such as conflict. Perhaps gossip was more important for the friendships of girls due to the motivations and importance of friendships for girls. In other words, girls are argued to focus their relationship efforts on building close dyadic relationships that involve high levels of disclosure and conversation whereas boys are argued to engaged in more activities that do not require as much disclosure or conversation (e.g., sports, video games; Findlay & Coplan, 2008; Leaper & Smith, 2004; Schneider & Tessier, 2007). Moreover, it may be that conflict resulted from greater engagement and higher frequencies of interaction within the friendship and thus may not necessarily indicate relationship difficulties. The results of the current dissertation highlighted the complexity of the ways in which gossip and perceptions of friendship quality were inter-related in the friendships of children, as well as provided direction for further investigations of the general functions of gossip

Distributed mining of time--faded heavy hitters

We present \textsc{P2PTFHH} (Peer--to--Peer Time--Faded Heavy Hitters) which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first distributed algorithm for mining time--faded heavy hitters on unstructured P2P networks. \textsc{P2PTFHH} is based on the \textsc{FDCMSS} (Forward Decay Count--Min Space-Saving) sequential algorithm, and efficiently exploits an averaging gossip protocol, by merging in each interaction the involved peers' underlying data structures. We formally prove the convergence and correctness properties of our distributed algorithm and show that it is fast and simple to implement. Extensive experimental results confirm that \textsc{P2PTFHH} retains the extreme accuracy and error bound provided by \textsc{FDCMSS} whilst showing excellent scalability. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we prove that the averaging gossip protocol can be used jointly with our augmented sketch data structure for mining time--faded heavy hitters; (ii) we prove the error bounds on frequency estimation; (iii) we experimentally prove that \textsc{P2PTFHH} is extremely accurate and fast, allowing near real time processing of large datasets.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1806.0658