Forecasting the Spreading of Technologies in Research Communities

Technologies such as algorithms, applications and formats are an important part of the knowledge produced and reused in the research process. Typically, a technology is expected to originate in the context of a research area and then spread and contribute to several other fields. For example, Semantic Web technologies have been successfully adopted by a variety of fields, e.g., Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, Biology, and many others. Unfortunately, the spreading of technologies across research areas may be a slow and inefficient process, since it is easy for researchers to be unaware of potentially relevant solutions produced by other research communities. In this paper, we hypothesise that it is possible to learn typical technology propagation patterns from historical data and to exploit this knowledge i) to anticipate where a technology may be adopted next and ii) to alert relevant stakeholders about emerging and relevant technologies in other fields. To do so, we propose the Technology-Topic Framework, a novel approach which uses a semantically enhanced technology-topic model to forecast the propagation of technologies to research areas. A formal evaluation of the approach on a set of technologies in the Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence areas has produced excellent results, confirming the validity of our solution

2100 AI: Reflections on the mechanisation of scientific discovery

The pace of research is nowadays extremely intensive, with datasets and publications being published at an unprecedented rate. In this context data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics are providing researchers with new automatic techniques which not only help them to manage this flow of information but are also able to identify automatically interesting patterns and insights in this vast sea of information. However, the emergence of mechanised scientific discovery is likely to dramatically change the way we do science, thus introducing and amplifying serious societal implications on the role of researchers themselves, which need to be analysed thoroughly

Classifying Research Papers with the Computer Science Ontology

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring and analysing the research landscape. We recently released the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 26K topics and 226K semantic relationships. CSO currently powers several tools adopted by the Springer Nature editorial team and has been used to enable a variety of solutions, such as classifying research publications, detecting research communities, and predicting research trends. As an effort to encourage the usage of CSO, we have developed the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedbacks at different levels of the ontology. In this paper, we present the CSO Classifier, an application for automatically classifying academic papers according to the rich taxonomy of topics from CSO. The aim is to facilitate the adoption of CSO across the various communities engaged with scholarly data and to foster the development of new applications based on this knowledge base

The Computer Science Ontology: A Comprehensive Automatically-Generated Taxonomy of Research Areas

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring, and analysing the research landscape. Some fields of research are comprehensively described by large-scale taxonomies, e.g., MeSH in Biology and PhySH in Physics. Conversely, current Computer Science taxonomies are coarse-grained and tend to evolve slowly. For instance, the ACM classification scheme contains only about 2K research topics and the last version dates back to 2012. In this paper, we introduce the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 14K topics and 162K semantic relationships. It was created by applying the Klink-2 algorithm on a very large dataset of 16M scientific articles. CSO presents two main advantages over the alternatives: i) it includes a very large number of topics that do not appear in other classifications, and ii) it can be updated automatically by running Klink-2 on recent corpora of publications. CSO powers several tools adopted by the editorial team at Springer Nature and has been used to enable a variety of solutions, such as classifying research publications, detecting research communities, and predicting research trends. To facilitate the uptake of CSO, we have also released the CSO Classifier, a tool for automatically classifying research papers, and the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedback on CSO. Users can use the portal to navigate and visualise sections of the ontology, rate topics and relationships, and suggest missing ones. The portal will support the publication of and access to regular new releases of CSO, with the aim of providing a comprehensive resource to the various research communities engaged with scholarly data

VoIPiggy: Implementation and evaluation of a mechanism to boost voice capacity in 802.11 WLANs

This work is at: The 31st Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM 2012), took place March 25-30, 2012 in Orlando, Florida, USA.Supporting voice traffic in existing WLANs results extremely inefficient, given the large overheads of the protocol operation and the need to prioritize this traffic over, e.g., bulky transfers. In this paper we propose a simple scheme to improve the efficiency of WLANs when voice traffic is present. The mechanism is based on piggybacking voice frames over the acknowledgments, which reduces both frame overheads and time spent in contentions. We evaluate its performance in a large-scale testbed consisting on 33 commercial off-the-shelf devices. The experimental results show dramatic performance improvements in both voice-only and mixed voice-and-data scenarios.The research leading to these results was funded by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-5) under grant agreement n.257263 (FLAVIA) and by the the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TEC2010- 10440-E. It was supported in part by the MEDIANET Project (grant S2009/TIC-1468) from the General Directorate of Universities and Research of the Regional Government of Madrid.Publicad

Pedagogia, disabilità e sport-terapia: dalle Paralimpiadi alla salute per tutti

This article retraces the main pedagogical moments, history and science leded the Paralympics to play a role, as well as therapeutic, even philanthropic and social-ransom in people with disabilities.The disability subdget is generally a disadvantaged person in modern society, but in recent decades, starting from an intuition of dr. Ludwig Guttman, the handicap world is undergoing profound changes.The Paralympic Movement, parallel to the traditional Olympic Games in fact, born in the middle of the last century in order to bring help to recovery the veterans of the Second World War. Over the decades, the idea of sports and physical activity as a “therapy” has managed more and more to find a definition and an institutional space. The concept of disability has reached a wider, in fact contemplates operating difficulties of person both personally and in the participation in a social activity. So today to physical activity and sport can place alongside the rehabilitation and educational process, helping to improve physical health, quality of life, enhancing the individual through conscious action and anthropologically justified educational-relational intervention.Con il presente articolo si vogliono ripercorre i principali momenti pedagogici, storici e scientifici che hanno portato le Paralimpiadi a ricoprire un ruolo, oltre che terapeutico, anche filantropico e di riscatto-sociale in soggetti con disabilità. Il portatore di disabilità è generalmente un soggetto svantaggiato nella società moderna, ma negli ultimi decenni, partendo da un’intuizione del dott. Ludwig Guttman, il mondo dell’handicap sta subendo profondi cambiamenti. Il Movimento Paralimpico, parallelo ai Giochi Olimpici tradizionali infatti, nasce nella metà del secolo scorso al fine di portare aiuto nel recupero dei reduci della II Guerra mondiale. Con il passare dei decenni l’idea di sport e di attività fisica come “Terapia” è riuscito sempre più a trovare una definizione e uno spazio istituzionale. Anche il concetto di disabilità ha raggiunto un più ampio respiro, infatti contempla difficoltà di funzionamento della persona sia a livello personale che nella partecipazione alle attività sociali. Ad oggi quindi l’attività fisicae lo sport possono affiancarsi al processo riabilitativo ed educativo, contribuendo a migliorare la salute fisica, la qualità della vita, valorizzando l’individuo attraverso l’azione consapevole e antropologicamente giustificata dell’intervento educativo-relazionale annesso