FirstLife. A geo-social network to support participation in urban design

FirstLife (http://www.firstlife.org/) is a civic social network, developed by the “Social Computing” research group of the Department of Computer Science, University of Turin. It is a civic media, since it explicitly conceives users as active players in the production of social knowledge to innovate and renovate the city. It offers a geo-referenced representation of crowdsourced data, by using a map-based interface where users can add places, events, news and stories as well as starting discussions about interested areas of change. Users can create open and public groups linked to a place in order to promote collaboration between citizens and strengthen social cohesion in the real world. First Life has been involved in an ongoing project “Riscopri Risorse” that will be presented as case study. The project is structured in four phases throughout two years to progressively activate the local communities of six municipalities in the province of Turin in micro-regeneration actions. The first phase, from September 2016 to November 2017, involved over 70 classes of 30 schools ranging from primary to high schools, with about 60 teachers, a group of public officers in each city, two trainers and facilitators of the University of Turin and four members of the promoter charity. During this phase, the methodology to integrate of a digital mapping tool in the regeneration process has been co-designed with teachers and facilitators in order to define use patterns based on the platform functionalities and common guidelines to map public spaces and commons and analyse these places. From November 2016 to January 2017, each school developed a proposal for a selection of public spaces in each municipality, with a final validation by the municipal technical officers, and a final selection of one place to be collaboratively regenerated. The project will continue from March 2017 to June 2018 documenting the regeneration process through the platform, and opening the participation to families and new local actors operating in the project areas

Foundations of Map-based Web Applications - A Survey of the Use, Limits and Opportunities Offered by Digital Maps

Traditional maps are one of the oldest way to express relevant information on a locality base, as synthetic representations of reality. The traditional visualization theory of maps and the related principles used to structure spatial information can inspire the modelling of new solutions in the field of information management in web application. But, the fast and generalized spreading of digital maps, and the related production of geo-localized social media is not followed by a deep integration of map in web applications, preventing the effectiveness of digital maps in solving pressing issues like aggregation, retrieval, recommendation and presentation of spatial media. Through the analysis of key concepts of maps, this contribution addresses the foundations of map-based applications, discussing the limits of current approaches and introducing new opportunities based on deep integration between maps and applications

WiP: Personalizing Focus Area in Map-Based Applications

Scaling and visualization theories about traditional maps can be extended to digital maps in order to develop web applications using maps as information management systems, data viewer and recommender systems. Starting from current limitations of web application using maps, we outline an alternative approach based on building an indexing system connecting scales and contents, on fixing visualization and styling rules, and attributing an active role to the user in defining goals, area of interest and related contents. This contribution presents the first steps towards a theoretical framework to develop map-based applications where contents are connected to the map entities and the user interactions impact on the status of the map and of the application at the same time

Social media analysis applied to childhood vaccines in Italy: insights for redefining the INHS communication strategies

Italy is a country that provides an increasing number of vaccines free-of-charge to individuals, still, anti-vaccination movements are increasingly active. Since social networks represent today the most popular marketplace for ideas about health topics, the literature has started to study vaccine hesitancy online. Our research objectives are: (1) To study the sentiment regarding childhood vaccines (sentiment analysis), classifying contents into three sentiment groups: positive, neutral, and negative; (2) to point out the key features of social media communication dynamics on vaccines. Online conversations about vaccines in three Italian Regions (Veneto, Trentino and Alto Adige) in 2019 (in order to avoid bias from the COVID pandemics) are gathered and analysed, considering 421 web articles, 6698 Facebook comments and 931 tweets. Our results suggest that Facebook is an effective platform for promoting public discussion and interactions about vaccines. An interesting relationship between the tone of voice of the original post, and the sentiment of the related users’ contents was also found. Furthermore, a relevant impact of personal storytelling on the level of engagement was registered. Further research, based on these insights, could now be developed on the anti-Covid 19 vaccination campaign now in progress, which was started at the end of 2020. Social media are studied in many different disciplines from different perspectives, as computing science which is relevant in understanding and analysing large sets of shared content and their geo-spatial and temporal details. The theoretical background of our study is based on the literature around three main topics: (1) social media use for online discussion through text posts (specifically on Facebook and Twitter), (2) the more general context of vaccines evolution in Italy and (3) communication strategies in vaccinations. By exploring ideas and sentiments of users online, this work, allows to understand the relevance of the different perspectives on vaccinations (positive, neutral and negative) and the way opinions are expressed. Doing this, the healthcare authorities will obtain useful insights on (a) which online platform to use in order to engage people and (b) how to better communicate to people exploiting social media in order to reinforce the diffusion of a pro-vax perspective

Social media analysis applied to childhood vaccines in Italy: insights for redefining the INHS communication strategies

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Supramolecular aggregation of aquaporin-4 is different in muscle and brain: correlation with tissue susceptibility in neuromyelitis optica

Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) is an autoimmune demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS) caused by autoantibodies (NMO-IgG) against the water channel aquaporin-4 (AQP4). Though AQP4 is also expressed outside the CNS, for example in skeletal muscle, patients with NMO generally do not show clinical/diagnostic evidence of skeletal muscle damage. Here, we have evaluated whether AQP4 supramolecular organization is at the basis of the different tissue susceptibility. Using immunofluorescence we found that while the sera of our cohort of patients with NMO gave typical perivascular staining in the CNS, they were largely negative in the skeletal muscle. This conclusion was obtained using human, rat and mouse skeletal muscle including the AQP4-KO mouse. A biochemical analysis using a new size exclusion chromatography approach for AQP4 suprastructure fractionation revealed substantial differences in supramolecular AQP4 assemblies and isoform abundance between brain and skeletal muscle matching a lower binding affinity of NMO-IgG to muscle compared to the brain. Super-resolution microscopy analysis with g-STED revealed different AQP4 organization in native tissues, while in the brain perivascular astrocyte endfoot membrane AQP4 was mainly organized in large interconnected and raft-like clusters, in the sarcolemma of fast-twitch fibres AQP4 aggregates often appeared as small, relatively isolated linear entities. In conclusion, our results provide evidence that AQP4 supramolecular structure is different in brain and skeletal muscle, which is likely to result in different tissues susceptibility to the NMO disease

Anti-miR21 oligonucleotide enhances chemosensitivity of T98G cell line to doxorubicin by inducing apoptosis

Various signal transduction pathways seem to be involved in chemoresistance mechanism of glioblastomas (GBMs). miR-21 is an important oncogenic miRNA which modulates drug resistance of tumor cells. We analyzed the expression of 5 miRNAs, previously found to be dysregulated in high grade gliomas, in 9 pediatric (pGBM) and in 5 adult (aGBM) GBMs. miR-21 was over-expressed, with a significant difference between pGBMs and aGBMs represented by a 4 times lower degree of expression in the pediatric compared to the adult series (p = 0.001). Doxorubicin (Dox) seems to be an effective anti-glioma agent with high antitumor activity also against glioblastoma stem cells. We therefore evaluated the chemosensitivity to Dox in 3 GBM cell lines (A172, U87MG and T98G). Dox had a cytotoxic effect after 48 h of treatment in A172 and U87MG, while T98G cells were resistant. TUNEL assay verified that Dox induced apoptosis in A172 and U87MG but not in T98G. miR-21 showed a low basal expression in treated cells and was over-expressed in untreated cells. To validate the possible association of miR-21 with drug resistance of T98G cells, we transfected anti-miR-21 inhibitor into the cells. The expression level of miR-21 was significantly lower in T98G transfected cells (than in the parental control cells). Transfected cells showed a high apoptotic rate compared to control after Dox treatment by TUNEL assay, suggesting that combined Dox and miR-21 inhibitor therapy can sensitize GBM resistant cells to anthracyclines by enhancing apoptosis

Childhood-onset Erdheim-Chester disease in the molecular era: clinical phenotypes and long-term outcomes of 21 patients

International audienc