Cognitive Models and Computational Approaches for improving Situation Awareness Systems

2016 - 2017The world of Internet of Things is pervaded by complex environments with smart services available every time and everywhere. In such a context, a serious open issue is the capability of information systems to support adaptive and collaborative decision processes in perceiving and elaborating huge amounts of data. This requires the design and realization of novel socio-technical systems based on the “human-in-the-loop” paradigm. The presence of both humans and software in such systems demands for adequate levels of Situation Awareness (SA). To achieve and maintain proper levels of SA is a daunting task due to the intrinsic technical characteristics of systems and the limitations of human cognitive mechanisms. In the scientific literature, such issues hindering the SA formation process are defined as SA demons. The objective of this research is to contribute to the resolution of the SA demons by means of the identification of information processing paradigms for an original support to the SA and the definition of new theoretical and practical approaches based on cognitive models and computational techniques. The research work starts with an in-depth analysis and some preliminary verifications of methods, techniques, and systems of SA. A major outcome of this analysis is that there is only a limited use of the Granular Computing paradigm (GrC) in the SA field, despite the fact that SA and GrC share many concepts and principles. The research work continues with the definition of contributions and original results for the resolution of significant SA demons, exploiting some of the approaches identified in the analysis phase (i.e., ontologies, data mining, and GrC). The first contribution addresses the issues related to the bad perception of data by users. We propose a semantic approach for the quality-aware sensor data management which uses a data imputation technique based on association rule mining. The second contribution proposes an original ontological approach to situation management, namely the Adaptive Goal-driven Situation Management. The approach uses the ontological modeling of goals and situations and a mechanism that suggests the most relevant goals to the users at a given moment. Lastly, the adoption of the GrC paradigm allows the definition of a novel model for representing and reasoning on situations based on a set theoretical framework. This model has been instantiated using the rough sets theory. The proposed approaches and models have been implemented in prototypical systems. Their capabilities in improving SA in real applications have been evaluated with typical methodologies used for SA systems. [edited by Author]XXX cicl

adaptive goal selection for improving situation awareness the fleet management case study

Abstract: Lack of Situation Awareness (SA) when dealing with complex dynamic environments is recognized as one of the main causes of human errors, leading to serious and critical incidents. One of the main issues is the attentional tunneling manifested, for instance, by human operators (in Decision Support Systems) focusing their attention on a single goal and loosing the awareness of the global picture of the monitored environments. A further issue is represented by stimuli, coming from such environments, which may divert the attention of the operators from the most important aspects and cause erroneous decisions. Thus, the need to define systems helping human operators to improve SA with respect to the two aforementioned drawbacks emerges. These systems should help operators in focusing their attention on active goals and, when really needed, switching it on new goals, in a sort of continuous adaptation. In this work an adaptive goal selection approach exploiting both goal-driven and data-driven information processing is proposed. The approach has been defined and injected in an existing multi-agent framework for Situation Awareness and applied in a Fleet Management System. The approach has been evaluated by means of the SAGAT methodology

An AmI-Based Software Architecture Enabling Evolutionary Computation in Blended Commerce: The Shopping Plan Application

This work describes an approach to synergistically exploit ambient intelligence technologies, mobile devices, and evolutionary computation in order to support blended commerce or ubiquitous commerce scenarios. The work proposes a software architecture consisting of three main components: linked data for e-commerce, cloud-based services, and mobile apps. The three components implement a scenario where a shopping mall is presented as an intelligent environment in which customers use NFC capabilities of their smartphones in order to handle e-coupons produced, suggested, and consumed by the abovesaid environment. The main function of the intelligent environment is to help customers define shopping plans, which minimize the overall shopping cost by looking for best prices, discounts, and coupons. The paper proposes a genetic algorithm to find suboptimal solutions for the shopping plan problem in a highly dynamic context, where the final cost of a product for an individual customer is dependent on his previous purchases. In particular, the work provides details on the Shopping Plan software prototype and some experimentation results showing the overall performance of the genetic algorithm

Skin graft donor site: a procedure for a faster healing

Background: The authors want to evaluate the efficacy of fibrillary tabotamp dressing in skin graftdonor site. A comparison was made with Vaseline gauzes. Tabotamp is an absorbable haemostatic product of Ethicon (Johnson and Johnson) obtained by sterile and oxidized regenerated cellulose (Rayon). It is used for mild to moderate bleeding. Materials and methods: 276 patients were subject to skin graft and divided into two group: Group A and Group B. The donor site of patients in Group A was medicated with fibrillary tabotamp, while the patients of Group B were medicated only with Vaseline gauze. We recorded infection, timing of healing, number of dressing change, the pain felt during and after the dressing change with visual analog scale (VAS) and a questionnaire. Results: Patients allocated in Group A healed faster than the Group B. Questionnaires and VAS analysis showed lower pain felt, lower intake of pain drugs and lower infection rate in the Group A than the Group B. Analysis of coast showed lower dressing change in Group A than the Group B. Conclusion: We believe that the use of tabotamp is a very viable alternative to improve healing. (www.actabiomedica.it)

Ischemic Damage of the Flaps: New Treatments.

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Improvements of Decision Support Systems for Public Administrations via a Mechanism of Co-creation of Value

This paper focuses on a possible improvement of knowledge-based decision support systems for human resource management within Public Administrations, using a co-creation of value's mechanism, according to the Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) paradigm. In particular, it applies ontology-driven data entry procedures to trigger the cooperation between the Public Administration itself and its employees. Advantages in such sense are evident: constraining the data entry process by means of the term definition ontology improves the quality of gathered data, thus reducing potential mismatching problems and allowing a suitable skill gap analysis among real and ideal workers competence profiles. The procedure foresees the following steps: analyzing organograms and job descriptions; modelling Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes (KSA) for job descriptions; transforming KSAs of job descriptions into a standard-based model with integrations of other characteristics; extracting information from Curricula Vitae according to the selected model; comparing profiles and roles played by the employees. The 'a priori' ontology-driven approach adequately supports the operations that involve both the Public Administration and employees, as for the data storage of job descriptions and curricula vitae. The comparison step is useful to understand if employees perform roles that are coherent with their own professional profiles. The proposed approach has been experimented on a small test case and the results show that its objective evaluation represents an improvement for a decision support system for the re-organization of Italian Public Administrations where, unfortunately often, people are engaged in activities that are not so close to their competences

Recensioni

- Giuditta Alessandrini, Maria Luisa De Natale (a cura di) Il dibattito sulle competenze. Quale prospettiva pedagogica? Pensa MultiMedia, Lecce-Brescia 2015, pp. 391 di Fabrizio D'Aniello;- Michele Corsi La bottega dei genitori. Di tutto e di più sui nostri figli Franco Angeli, Milano 2016, pp. 160 di Giuseppe Burgio; - Lucio Cottini Potenziare la memoria in classe. Percorsi di didattica inclusiva Carocci Faber, Roma 2015, pp. 167 di Tommaso Fratini;  - Giuseppe Elia Prospettive di ricerca pedagogica Progedit, Bari 2016, pp. 134 di Valeria Rossini.

Analytical Marketing with Collective Perception

Social networks, forums and blogs are widely considered as a valuable source of information for many applications and in different domains. Being able to extract, analyze and use the knowledge, opinions and sentiments the users share on the Web can become a competitive advantage for any company or organization. Specifically, information about the feelings and the opinions of the users of a Web community with respect to a product or a service can be useful for marketing. In this context, the concept of collective perception is gaining momentum as a way to process, evaluate and quantify the perception and the sentiment that a community of users share about a given phenomenon. In this work, we propose an approach, based on Fuzzy Logic and Sentiment Analysis techniques, which allows to evaluate, also in a quantitative manner, the collective perception of a Web community with respect to a specific product or service. Keywords: Collective Perception; Analytical Marketing; Fuzzy Logic; Sentiment Analysis

A case of extramammary inguinal Paget disease in a male patient: surgical treatment with an abdominal advancement cutaneous flap

Extramammary Paget disease (EMPD) is a rare neoplasm. The clinical case of a 55-year-old man with a two-year history of a pruritic, painless erythematous skin rash on the inguinal region and scrotum is described. After a delay due to improper diagnosis and improper treatments, the patient came to the attention of the Division of plastic surgery. He underwent a punch biopsy and the pathology report came back as EMPD. Surgical excision was carried out, and an abdominal advancement cutaneous flap was performed for the defect repair. This is the first description of a reconstruction after surgical removal of inguinal EMPD with a flap of this type and we think that this type of treatment can be useful and reliable for disease localization in the groin area, especially for patients that present an excess of abdominal skin

Vitamin D and bone metabolism in adult patients with neurofibromatosis type 1

Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is a genetic multisystemic autosomal dominant disorder determining reduced life expectancy due to higher risk of developing benign and malignant tumors. Low levels of vitamin D and reduced bone mineral density (BMD) have been reported in young patients with NF1. However, correlation between vitamin D and NF1 phenotype needs to be elucidated. Aim of this study was to assess vitamin D levels and bone metabolism in NF1 patients, analyzing potential correlations with clinical phenotype. A cross-sectional study was carried out in a monocentric series of NF1 patients, evaluating genotype, clinical phenotype, BMD, biochemical evaluation with focus on serum 25OH-vitamin D, parathyroid hormone (PTH), calcium and phosphate levels. Correlations between clinical manifestations, neurofibromas, and vitamin D status have been studied in comparison with healthy controls. 31 NF1 adult patients were matched for sex, age and body mass index with 31 healthy controls. A significantly difference in vitamin D level emerged in NF1 patients compared to controls. Interestingly low vitamin D levels correlated with a more aggressive phenotype and with a bigger size of neurofibromas. These data underline that vitamin D deficiency/insufficiency may play a role in clinical severity of neurofibromas in patients with NF1, suggesting the need to check bone status and replace vitamin D in these patients