Visual analysis of sensor logs in smart spaces: Activities vs. situations

Models of human habits in smart spaces can be expressed by using a multitude of representations whose readability influences the possibility of being validated by human experts. Our research is focused on developing a visual analysis pipeline (service) that allows, starting from the sensor log of a smart space, to graphically visualize human habits. The basic assumption is to apply techniques borrowed from the area of business process automation and mining on a version of the sensor log preprocessed in order to translate raw sensor measurements into human actions. The proposed pipeline is employed to automatically extract models to be reused for ambient intelligence. In this paper, we present an user evaluation aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach, by comparing it wrt. a relevant state-of-the-art visual tool, namely SITUVIS

Chatbots as a novel access method for government open data

IIn this discussion paper, we propose to employ chatbots as a user-friendly interface for open data published by organizations, specifically focusing on public administrations. Open data are especially useful in e-Government initiatives but their exploitation is currently hampered to end users by the lack of user-friendly access methods. On the other hand, current UX in social networks have made people used to chatting. Building on cognitive technologies, we prototyped a chatbot on top of the OpenCantieri dataset published by the Italian Ministero delle Infrastrutture e Trasporti, and we argue that such a model can be extended as a generally available access method to open data

Surveying human habit modeling and mining techniques in smart spaces

A smart space is an environment, mainly equipped with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, able to provide services to humans, helping them to perform daily tasks by monitoring the space and autonomously executing actions, giving suggestions and sending alarms. Approaches suggested in the literature may differ in terms of required facilities, possible applications, amount of human intervention required, ability to support multiple users at the same time adapting to changing needs. In this paper, we propose a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that classifies most influential approaches in the area of smart spaces according to a set of dimensions identified by answering a set of research questions. These dimensions allow to choose a specific method or approach according to available sensors, amount of labeled data, need for visual analysis, requirements in terms of enactment and decision-making on the environment. Additionally, the paper identifies a set of challenges to be addressed by future research in the field

Encouraging persons to visit cultural sites through mini-games

Gamification has been recently proposed as a technique to improve user engagement in different activities, including visits to cultural sites and cultural tourism in general. We present the design, development and initial validation of the NEPTIS Poleis system, which consists of a mobile application and a Web interface for curators, allowing the definition, and subsequent fruition by users, of different minigames suitable for open-air assets

Supporting Governance in Healthcare Through Process Mining: A Case Study

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage and reduce costs. In many cases, despite management already gained some kind of qualitative intuition about inefciencies and possible bottlenecks related to the enactment of patients' careows, it does not have the right tools to extract knowledge from available data and make decisions based on a quantitative analysis. To tackle this issue, starting from a real case study conducted in San Carlo di Nancy hospital in Rome (Italy), this article presents the results of a process mining project in the healthcare domain. Process mining techniques are here used to infer meaningful knowledge about the patient careflows from raw event logs consisting of clinical data stored by the hospital information systems. These event logs are analyzed using the ProM framework from three different perspectives: the control flow perspective, the organizational perspective and the performance perspective. The results on the proposed case study show that process mining provided useful insights for the governance of the hospital. In particular, we were able to provide answers to the management of the hospital concerning the value of last investments, and the temporal distribution of abandonments from emergency room and exams without reservation

Counter-terrorism in cyber–physical spaces:Best practices and technologies from the state of the art

Context: The demand for protection and security of physical spaces and urban areas increased with the escalation of terroristic attacks in recent years. We envision with the proposed cyber–physical systems and spaces, a city that would indeed become a smarter urbanistic object, proactively providing alerts and being protective against any threat. Objectives: This survey intend to provide a systematic multivocal literature survey comprised of an updated, comprehensive and timely overview of state of the art in counter-terrorism cyber–physical systems, hence aimed at the protection of cyber–physical spaces. Hence, provide guidelines to law enforcement agencies and practitioners providing a description of technologies and best practices for the protection of public spaces. Methods: We analyzed 112 papers collected from different online sources, both from the academic field and from websites and blogs ranging from 2004 till mid-2022. Results: (a) There is no one single bullet-proof solution available for the protection of public spaces. (b) From our analysis we found three major active fields for the protection of public spaces: Information Technologies, Architectural approaches, Organizational field. (c) While the academic suggest best practices and methodologies for the protection of urban areas, the market did not provide any type of implementation of such suggested approaches, which shows a lack of fertilization between academia and industry. Conclusion: The overall analysis has led us to state that there is no one single solution available, conversely, multiple methods and techniques can be put in place to guarantee safety and security in public spaces. The techniques range from architectural design to rethink the design of public spaces keeping security into account in continuity, to emerging technologies such as AI and predictive surveillance.</p

Your Friends Mention It. What About Visiting It? A Mobile Social-Based Sightseeing Application

In this short poster paper, we present an application for suggesting attractions to be visited by users, based on social signal processing technique

Toward domotic appliances control through a self-paced P300-based BCI

During recent years there has been a growing interest in Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems as an alternative means of interaction with the external world for people with severe motor disabilities. The use of the P300 event-related potentials as control feature allows users to choose between various options (letters or icons) requiring a very short calibration phase. The aim of this work is to improve performances and flexibility of P300 based BCIs. An efficient BCI system should be able to understand user's intentions from the ongoing EEG, abstaining from doing a selection when the user is engaged in a different activity, and changing its speed of selection depending on current user's attention level. Our self-paced system addresses all these issues representing an important step beyond the classical synchronous P300 BCI that forces the user in a continuous control task. Experimentation has been performed on 10 healthy volunteers acting on a BCI-controlled domestic environment in order to demonstrate the potential usability of BCI systems in everyday life. Results show that the self-paced BCI increases information transfer rate with respect to the synchronous one, being very robust, at the same time, in avoiding false negatives when the user is not engaged in a control task