Mobile Music Distribution: A Multichannel Approach

In contrast to what is happening in the Internet-based scenario, the music market in the mobile scenario is far from beingconsidered a large success. Several studies state that excessive downloading time and high cost are the main burdens.Motivated by the growth of social and mobile applications, in this paper we propose an approach that aims at reducing both the downloadingtime and the cost to get digital music when acquired in the mobile scenario. The proposed architecture exploits the usage ofpersonal communication technologies embedded in cellphones (e.g., Bluetooth and Wi-Fi) to couple the current distributionmodel (mainly based on 3G networks), so as to provide a multichannel distribution model where users are free to redistributedigitalmusic. The architecture includes a license-based securitymechanism that prevents unauthorized usage of digitalmusic, and makes use of an incentive mechanism to stimulate and reward the music distribution among customers. By analyzing pros and cons of the music distribution chain, results show that the proposed architecture might help in reducing both the downloading time and the cost to get digital music when acquired in the mobile scenario. Therefore, it might be helpful to the success of the mobile music scenario

Method for analyzing web space data

A method for analyzing data from the web that determine the importance that a chosen subject has in society, e.g., subject matter relating a concert, a scientific discovery, a football match, a person, a corporation, a brand, or a car, and analyze such data that can represent the entire society better than the known techniques. The method according to the invention can avoid malicious alterations and is able to measure and detect the temporal relations among all the web resources that talk about a particular topic or subject matter

Location privacy and public metadata in social media platforms: attitudes, behaviors and opinions

The highavailability of geolocation technologies is changing the social media mobile scenario and is exposing users to privacy risks. Different studies have focused on location privacy in the mobile scenario, but the results are conflicting: some say that users are concerned about location privacy, others say they are not. In this paper, we initially investigate attitudes and behaviors of people toward a location-aware scenario; then, we show users the amount of personal and sensitive data that can be extracted from contents publicly available in social platforms, and finally we ask for their opinions about a location-aware scenario. Results show that people who were not initially concerned about privacy are the most worried about the location-aware scenario; conversely, people who were initially concerned are less worried about the location-aware scenario and find the scenario interesting. A deeper analysis of the obtained results allows us to draw guidelines that might be helpful to build an effective location-aware scenario

SIWeb: understanding the Interests of the Society through Web data Analysis

The high availability of user-generated contents in the Web scenario represents a tremendous asset for understanding various social phenomena. Methods and commercial products that exploit the widespread use of the Web as a way of conveying personal opinions have been proposed, but a critical thinking is that these approaches may produce a partial, or distorted, understanding of the society, because most of them focus on definite scenarios, use specific platforms, base their analysis on the sole magnitude of data, or treat the different Web resources with the same importance. In this paper, we present SIWeb (Social Interests through Web Analysis), a novel mechanism designed to measure the interest the society has on a topic (e.g., a real world phenomenon, an event, a person, a thing). SIWeb is general purpose (it can be applied to any decision making process), cross platforms (it uses the entire Webspace, from social media to websites, from tags to reviews), and time effective (it measures the time correlatio between the Web resources). It uses fractal analysis to detect the temporal relations behind all the Web resources (e.g., Web pages, RSS, newsgroups, etc.) that talk about a topic and combines this number with the temporal relations to give an insight of the the interest the society has about a topic. The evaluation of the proposal shows that SIWeb might be helpful in decision making processes as it reflects the interests the society has on a specific topic

Chapter Effects of an experimental online education support on lectures fruition and teaching effectiveness

In this paper, we describe and discuss the implementation, the effects, and the consequences of an experimental service designed to capture, record, edit and stream video lectures. This service, named ONELab, is operating since September 2017 at the Department of Communication and Economics of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia to support the courses offered by the six degree programs available at the Department. Before the pandemic emergency, traditional face-to-face classes were regularly held, but ONELab was intended to provide flexibility to the educational contents (i.e., no time and geographical constraints) and to improve the students' learning process. The usage analyses show that, when given the opportunity, students tend to customise the learning process to their needs and life-style, with a large quote of usage in the late afternoon/night hours and during the week-ends. Video lectures are watched mostly during the teaching semester, but a significant part of students resort to watch them when the semester is over. The number, frequency and variety of accesses allow to describe different styles of usage, and students who use ONELab show better achievements, both in terms of acquired credits and in terms of grades, than those who never accessed the system. Moreover, some usage styles can help predicting the risk of dropout, signaling students who should be furtherly supported in order to prevent them from abandoning their studies

MovieRemix: Having Fun Playing with Videos

The process of producing new creative videos by editing, combining, and organizing pre-existing material (e.g., video shots) is a popular phenomenon in the current web scenario. Known as remix or video remix, the produced videomay have new and different meanings with respect to the sourcematerial. Unfortunately, whenmanaging audiovisual objects, the technological aspect can be a burden for many creative users.Motivated by the large success of the gaming market, we propose a novel game and an architecture to make the remix process a pleasant and stimulating gaming experience. MovieRemix allows people to act like amovie director, butinstead of dealing with cast and cameras, the player has to create a remixed video starting from a given screenplay and from video shots retrieved from the provided catalog. MovieRemix is not a simple video editing tool nor is a simple game: it is a challenging environment that stimulates creativity. To temp to play the game, players can access different levels of screenplay (original, outline, derived) and can also challenge other players. Computational and storage issues are kept at the server side, whereas the client device just needs to have the capability of playing streaming videos

Editorial: Smart Objects and Technologies

Smart objects are entering everyday life and are heavily modifying it. Healthcare, communication, art, entertainment, safety, environment, education, democracy, and human rights, are just a few examples of scenarios that are radically changing thanks to the use of smart objects and technologies. In this context, the popularity of portable computing devices, such as smartphones, tablets, or smart watches combined with the emergence of many other small smart objects with computational, sensing and communication capabilities coupled with the popularity of social networks and new human-technology interaction paradigms is creating unprecedented opportunities for each of us to do something useful, ranging from a single person to the whole world. Furthermore, Internet of Things, Smart-cities, distributed sensing and Fog computing are representative examples of modern ICT paradigms that aim to describe a dynamic and globally cooperative infrastructure built upon objects intelligence and self-configuring capabilities. These connected objects are finding their way into our pockets, vehicles, urban areas and infrastructure, thus becoming the very texture of our society and providing us the possibility, but also the responsibility, to shape it

TRank: ranking Twitter users according to specific topics

Abstract-Twitter is the most popular real-time microblogging service and it is a platform where users provide and obtain information at rapid pace. In this scenario, one of the biggest challenge is to find a way to automatically identify the most influential users of a given topic. Currently, there are several approaches that try to address this challenge using different Twitter signals (e.g., number of followers, lists, metadata), but results are not clear and sometimes conflicting. In this paper, we propose TRank, a novel method designed to address the problem of identifying the most influential Twitter users on specific topics identified with hashtags. The novelty of our approach is that it combines different Twitter signals (that represent both the user and the user's tweets) to provide three different indicators that are intended to capture different aspects of being influent. The computation of these indicators is not based on the magnitude of the Twitter signals alone, but they are computed taking into consideration also human factors, as for example the fact that a user with many active followings might have a very noisy time lime and, thus, miss to read many tweets. The experimental assessment confirms that our approach provides results that are more reasonable than the one obtained by mechanisms based on the sole magnitude of data