Modelling and control of a flying robot interacting with the environment

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Virtual coaches for mission-based gamified smart communities.

We propose a Virtual Coach for the gamification of participatory applications in complex socio-technical systems like Smart Cities and Smart Communities. In such participatory applications, the user community is an active and essential component. Users must voluntarily take up some tasks, in order to ensure the correct operation of the application according to its requirements and goals, which, in turn, delivers collective benefits to the community. In order to facilitate users, and support their sustained engagement in a participatory application, we use a Missions metaphor to describe those volunteering tasks. Our Virtual Coach is then responsible for selecting and recommending missions to users, based on a variety of factors, including the criticality of the corresponding tasks for the application purposes, the importance of the task for the individual user that should take it up, user profile characteristics, like personal preferences and skills, and the in-game incentives the user would earn by completing the mission

An End-to-End Solution for Enabling Urban Cyclability: The Bike2Work Experience

Mobility plays a fundamental role in modern cities. How citizens experience the city, access its core services, and participate in city life, strongly depends on its mobility organization and efficiency. The challenges that municipalities face are very ambitious: on the one hand, administrators must guarantee their citizens the right to mobility and to easily access local services; on the other hand, they need to minimize the economic, social, and environmental costs of the mobility system. Municipalities are increasingly facing problems of traffic congestion, road safety, energy dependency and air pollution, and therefore encouraging a shift towards sustainable mobility habits based on active mobility is of central importance. Active modes, such as cycling, should be particularly encouraged, especially for local recurrent journeys (i.e., home-to-school, home-to-work). In this context, addressing and mitigating commuter-generated traffic requires engaging public and private stakeholders through innovative and collaborative approaches that focus not only on supply (e.g., roads and vehicles) but also on transportation demand management. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution for enabling urban cyclability. It supports the companies' Mobility Managers (MMs) acting on the promotion of active mobility for home-to-work commuting, helps the city administrators to understand the needed urban planning interventions, and motivates the citizens to sustainable mobility. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution we developed two analyses: the first to accurately analyze the user experience and any behaviour change related to the BIKE2WORK initiative, and the second to demonstrate how exploiting the collected data we can inform and possible guide the involved municipality (i.e., Ferrara, a city in Northern Italy) in improving the urban cyclability.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

ВИБІР СЕМАНТИЧНОГО ВЕБ-СЕРВІСУ НА РІВНІ ПРОЦЕСУ: НА ПРИКЛАДІ EBAY/AMAZON/PAYPAL / ПЕРЕКЛАД СТАТТІ «SEMANTICWEB SERVICE SELECTION AT THE PROCESS-LEVEL: THE EBAY/AMAZON/PAYPAL CASE STUDY» (ПЕРЕКЛАД РЕМАРОВИЧ С.)

У цій статті ми представляємо підхід до вибору сервісу на рівні процесу та оцінки його на реальній ситуації, що спричиняє високий рівень складності: eBay Веб-сервіси, Amazon E-Commerce сервіси та сервіс e-payment, запропонований PayPal. Підхід заснований на представленні сервісів на рівні процесу, тобто на BPEL і WSDL специфікаціях, і який розширює ці стандартні специфікації мінімальними семантичними анотаціями, які дозволяють виконувати ефективні, але все ж корисні, семантичні міркування для вибору Веб-сервісів на рівні процесу

Using gamification to incentivize sustainable urban mobility.

Sustainable urban mobility is an important dimension in a Smart City, and one of the key issues for city sustainability. However, innovative and often costly mobility policies and solutions introduced by cities are liable to fail, if not combined with initiatives aimed at increasing the awareness of citizens, and promoting their behavioural change. This paper explores the potential of gamification mechanisms to incentivize voluntary behavioural changes towards sustainable mobility solutions. We present a service-based gamification framework, developed within the STREETLIFE EU Project, which can be used to develop games on top of existing services and systems within a Smart City, and discuss the empirical findings of an experiment conducted in the city of Rovereto on the effectiveness of gamification to promote sustainable urban mobility