 |
Marco MAMEI
Professore Ordinario
Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell'Ingegneria
|
Home |
Curriculum(pdf) |
Didattica |
Pubblicazioni
2024
- Digital Twin for Continual Learning in Location Based Services
[Articolo su rivista]
Lombardo, Gianfranco; Picone, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Mordonini, Monica; Poggi, Agostino
abstract
Decoupling the physical world and providing standardized service interfaces is still challenging when devel-oping Location Based Services (LBS). This lack also hinders the possibility of developing Intelligent services on top of LBS architectures. In this paper, we propose a multi-layer Digital Twin-based architecture that aims to enable the development of machine learning-based Intelligent LBS (I-LBS) that are able to adapt, evolve, and perform Continual Learning (CL). The platform uses Digital Twins to ensure physical abstraction and provide cyber-physical knowledge to the I-LBSs, which is defined as an execution graph of operation modules. Finally, we simulated a use-case for this platform in the complex scenario of Healthcare organization and management where the I-LBS classifies allowed/not allowed trajectories of users inside a real-existing hospital scenario depending on their role in the organization. The use case is implemented as a Deep Learning-based reconstruction task of high-resolution trajectories processed by the DT architecture that also deploys the I-LBS. The platform is evaluated in terms of physical complexity and computational time on the DT side and on both a traditional machine learning setting and a replay-based CL one for the intelligence side to demonstrate the flexibility and adaptability features introduced by the components for dynamic or unseen scenarios.
2023
- 5G MEC Architecture for Vulnerable Road Users Management Through Smart City Data Fusion
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Rossini, Enrico; Pietri, Marcello; Cavicchioli, Roberto; Picone, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Querio, Roberto; Colazzo, Laura; Procopio, Roberto
abstract
2023
- A Flexible and Modular Architecture for Edge Digital Twin: Implementation and Evaluation
[Articolo su rivista]
Picone, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
IoT systems based on Digital Twins (DTs) - virtual copies of physical objects and systems - can be very effective to enable data-driven services and promote better control and decisions, in particular by exploiting distributed approaches where cloud and edge computing cooperate effectively. In this context, digital twins deployed on the edge represents a new strategic element to design a new wave of distributed cyber-physical applications. Existing approaches are generally focused on fragmented and domain-specific monolithic solutions and are mainly associated to model-driven, simulative or descriptive visions. The idea of extending the DTs role to support last-mile digitalization and interoperability through a set of general purpose and well-defined properties and capabilities is still underinvestigated. In this paper, we present the novel Edge Digital Twins (EDT) architectural model and its implementation, enabling the lightweight replication of physical devices providing an efficient digital abstraction layer to support the autonomous and standard collaboration of things and services. We model the core capabilities with respect to the recent definition of the state of the art, present the software architecture and a prototype implementation. Extensive experimental analysis shows the obtained performance in multiple IoT application contexts and compares them with that of state-of-the-art approaches.
2023
- How to Change a Light Bulb in Your Smart Home: A Digital-Twin Based Approach
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zdankin, Peter; Picone, Marco; Schaffeld, Matthias; Mamei, Marco; Weis, Torben
abstract
2023
- Measuring Digital Twin Entanglement in Industrial Internet of Things
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bellavista, Paolo; Bicocchi, Nicola; Fogli, Mattia; Giannelli, Carlo; Mamei, Marco; Picone, Marco
abstract
Digital Twins (DTs) have recently emerged as a valuable approach for modeling, monitoring, and controlling physical objects in Industrial Internet of Things applications. Measuring the quality of entanglement between the digital and physical counterparts plays a crucial role in the adoption of DTs. In this paper, we propose a concise yet expressive metric for representing the quality of entanglement, namely Overall Digital Twin Entanglement (ODTE), based on two key factors: timeliness and completeness. Furthermore, the paper presents the development of our industrial testbed implemented on top of Kubernetes, where we show practical applications of the proposed ODTE metric by highlighting and discussing its benefits in realistic use cases.
2023
- Requirements and design patterns for adaptive, autonomous, and context-aware digital twins in industry 4.0 digital factories
[Articolo su rivista]
Bellavista, Paolo; Bicocchi, Nicola; Fogli, Mattia; Giannelli, Carlo; Mamei, Marco; Picone, Marco
abstract
2023
- Using mobile phone data to map evacuation and displacement: a case study of the central Italy earthquake
[Articolo su rivista]
Giardini, F.; Hadjidimitriou, N. S.; Mamei, M.; Bastardi, G.; Codeluppi, N.; Pancotto, F.
abstract
Population displacement is one of the most common consequences of disasters, and it can profoundly affect communities and territories. However, gaining an accurate measure of the size of displacement in the days and weeks following a major disaster can be extremely difficult. This study uses aggregated Call Detail Records as an inexpensive and efficient technique to measure post-disaster displacement in four Italian regions affected by repeated earthquakes in 2016-2017. By comparing post-disaster mobile phone count with a forecast computed before the earthquake hit, we can compute an index of change in the presence of mobile phones (MPE). This measure, obtained thanks to advanced analytical techniques, provides a reliable indication of the effect of the earthquake in terms of immediate and medium-term displacement. We test this measure against census data and in combination with other datasets. Looking into available data on economic activities and requests for financial support to rebuild damaged buildings, we can explain MPE and identify significant factors affecting population displacement. It is possible to apply this innovative methodology to other disaster scenarios and use it by policymakers who want to understand the determinants of population displacement.
2022
- A Digital-Twin Based Architecture for Software Longevity in Smart Homes
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zdankin, P.; Picone, M.; Mamei, M.; Weis, T.
abstract
2022
- Activity Imputation of Shared e-Bikes Travels in Urban Areas
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Hadjidimitriou, N. S.; Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.
abstract
In 2017, about 900 thousands motorbikes were registered in Europe. These types of vehicles are often selected as the only alternative when the congestion in urban areas is high, thus consistently contributing to environmental emissions. This work proposes a data-driven approach to analyse trip purposes of shared electric bikes users in urban areas. Knowing how e-bikes are used in terms of trip duration and purpose is important to integrate them in the current transportation system. The data set consists of GPS traces collected during one year and three months representing 6,705 trips performed by 91 users of the e-bike sharing service located in three South European cities (Malaga, Rome and Bari). The proposed methodology consists of computing a set of features related to the temporal (time of the day, day of the week), meteorological (e.g. weather, season) and topological (the percentage of km traveled on roads with cycleways, speed on different types of roads, proximity of arrival to the nearest Point of Interest) characteristics of the trip. Based on the identified features, logistic regression and random forest classifiers are trained to predict the purpose of the trip. The random forest performs better with an average accuracy, over the 10 random splits of the train and test set, of 82%. The overall accuracy decreases to 67% when training and test sets are split at the level of users and not at the level of trips. Finally, the travel activities are predicted for the entire data set and the features are analysed to provide a description of the behaviour of shared e-bike users.
2022
- Digital twin oriented architecture for secure and QoS aware intelligent communications in industrial environments
[Articolo su rivista]
Bellavista, P.; Giannelli, C.; Mamei, M.; Mendula, M.; Picone, M.
abstract
In modern networking industrial environments, characterized by the integration of Operation Technology and Information Technology, there is a strong need to ensure both safety and security of operations and communications. In this regard, IEC 62443 zones and conduits represent powerful high-level abstractions stressing the importance of clearly separating machines in relation to safety requirements and of clearly defining inter-machine communication security requirements. However, their actual implementation is still demanded to human-centric error-prone procedures performed by technicians directly on network elements, without any integrated plant-wide point of view. To overcome these issues, first of all we originally state the need of applying the Digital Twin approach to zones and conduits, making easier the definition and management of inter-machine security requirements. For instance, industrial technicians can specify that communication among two zones should always flows through a ciphered conduit with a given algorithm and key length, at the cost of increased latency. Secondly, we state the need of exploiting an intelligent reasoner to monitor the current state of the environment (represented by asset and network Digital Twins), actively reconfiguring them in case desired requirements are not satisfied. Then, the reasoner allows to enforce requirements while also considering the fulfillment of a proper trade-off between security and performance, e.g., by reducing the ciphering complexity to ensure prompt packet dispatching whenever required. Performance results based on our working prototype demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed solution under stringent requirements typical of industrial environments. In particular, in terms of better flexibility we proved that our orchestrator is able to create a new Digital Twin in less than 2.5 s in a typical edge node with a medium load. In addition, proposed routing policies based on our machine learning reasoner led to the satisfaction of well-defined low latency requirements (250 ms) while avoiding packet dropping.
2022
- Towards Smart Cities for Tourism: the POLIS-EYE Project
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Seravalli, Alessandro; Busani, Mariaelena; Venturi, Simone; Brutti, Arianna; Petrovich, Carlo; Frascella, Angelo; Paolucci, Fabrizio; Di Felice, Marco; Lombardi, Michele; Bellodi, Elena; Zese, Riccardo; Bertasi, Francesco; Balugani, Elia; Cecaj, Alket; Gamberini, Rita; Mamei, Marco; Picone, Marco
abstract
Novel and widespread ICT and Internet of Things (IoT) technology can provide fine-grained real-time information to the tourist sector, both to support the demand side (tourists) and the supply side (managers and organizers). We present the POLIS-EYE project that aims to build decision-support systems helping tourist-managers to organize and optimize policies and resources. In particular, we focus on a service to monitor and forecast people presence in tourist areas by combining heterogeneous datasets with a special focus on data collected from the mobile phone network.
2021
- A Data Driven Approach to Match Demand and Supply for Public Transport Planning
[Articolo su rivista]
Hadjidimitriou, Natalia; Lippi, Marco; Mamei, Marco
abstract
2021
- Application-driven Network-aware Digital Twin Management in Industrial Edge Environments
[Articolo su rivista]
Bellavista, P.; Giannelli, C.; Mamei, M.; Mendula, M.; Picone, M.
abstract
The application of Internet of Things (IoT) within industrial environments is fostering the adoption of the Digital Twin (DT) approach, applied at the edge of the network to handle heterogeneity stemming from siloed application management solutions and from protocols originated by different manufacturing tools and enterprise services. In this challenging context, network heterogeneity also represents a critical element that can significantly limit the design and deployment of DT-oriented applications. The paper proposes the Application-driven Digital Twin Networking (ADTN) middleware with the twofold objective of: (1) Simplifying the interaction among heterogeneous devices by allowing DTs to exploit IP-based protocols instead of specialized industrial ones and to enhance packet content expressiveness, by enriching data via well-defined standards. (2) Dynamically managing network resources in edge industrial environments, applying Software Defined Networking (SDN) to exploit the communication mechanisms most suitable to application requirements, ranging from native IP to more articulated based on packet content.
2021
- Forecasting Parking Lots Availability: Analysis from a Real-World Deployment
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Barraco, M.; Bicocchi, N.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
Smart parking technologies are rapidly being deployed in cities and public/private places around the world for the sake of enabling users to know in real time the occupancy of parking lots and offer applications and services on top of that information. In this work, we detail a real-world deployment of a full-stack smart parking system based on industrial-grade components. We also propose innovative forecasting models (based on CNN-LSTM) to analyze and predict parking occupancy ahead of time. Experimental results show that our model can predict the number of available parking lots in a ±3% range with about 80% accuracy over the next 1-8 hours. Finally, we describe novel applications and services that can be developed given such forecasts and associated analysis.
2021
- Sensing and Forecasting Crowd Distribution in Smart Cities: Potentials and Approaches
[Articolo su rivista]
Cecaj, Alket; Lippi, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The possibility of sensing and predicting the movements of crowds in modern cities is of fundamental importance for improving urban planning, urban mobility, urban safety, and tourism activities. However, it also introduces several challenges at the level of sensing technologies and data analysis. The objective of this survey is to overview: (i) the many potential application areas of crowd sensing and prediction; (ii) the technologies that can be exploited to sense crowd along with their potentials and limitations; (iii) the data analysis techniques that can be effectively used to forecast crowd distribution. Finally, the article tries to identify open and promising research challenges.
2021
- WIP: Preliminary evaluation of digital twins on MEC software architecture
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Picone, M.; Mariani, S.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.; Berlier, M.
abstract
Digital Twins (DTs) are becoming a reference design abstraction for many Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios. Also, data processing is shifting to a decentralised setting leveraging the edge computing paradigm to move computation closer to the physical devices. In this context, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) technologies on 5G cellular networks are redefining the IoT networking infrastructure by enabling ultra low latency, and reliable and responsive connectivity. However, evaluation of the MEC architecture from the application developer standpoint is currently missing from literature, as well as an assessment of performance while adopting DT on top of MEC. Therefore, this paper reports on a MEC implementation based on OpenNESS toolkit, in the context of DT-based mobility, and an evaluation of its service-level performance.
2021
- WLDT: A general purpose library to build IoT digital twins
[Articolo su rivista]
Picone, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
2020
- Comparing deep learning and statistical methods in forecasting crowd distribution from aggregated mobile phone data
[Articolo su rivista]
Cecaj, A.; Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
Accurately forecasting how crowds of people are distributed in urban areas during daily activities is of key importance for the smart city vision and related applications. In this work we forecast the crowd density and distribution in an urban area by analyzing an aggregated mobile phone dataset. By comparing the forecasting performance of statistical and deep learning methods on the aggregated mobile data we show that each class of methods has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the forecasting scenario. However, for our time-series forecasting problem, deep learning methods are preferable when it comes to simplicity and immediacy of use, since they do not require a time-consuming model selection for each different cell. Deep learning approaches are also appropriate when aiming to reduce the maximum forecasting error. Statistical methods instead show their superiority in providing more precise forecasting results, but they require data domain knowledge and computationally expensive techniques in order to select the best parameters.
2020
- Forecasting Crowd Distribution in Smart Cities
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cecaj, A.; Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
In this work we present a forecasting method that can be used to predict crowd distribution across the city. Specifically, we analyze and forecast cellular network traffic and estimate crowd on such basis. Our forecasting model is based on a neural network combined with time series decomposition techniques. Our analysis shows that this approach can give interesting results in two directions. First, it creates a forecasting solution that fits all the variability in our dataset without having to create specific features and without complex search procedures for optimal parameters. Second, the method performs well, showing to be robust even in the presence of spikes in the data thus enabling better applications such as event management and detection of crowd gathering.
2020
- The SOTA approach to engineering collective adaptive systems
[Articolo su rivista]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda B.; Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The emergence of collective adaptive systems-i.e., computational systems made up of an ensemble of autonomous components that have to operate in a coordinated and adaptive way in open-ended and unpredictable environments-calls for innovative modeling and software engineering tools, to support their systematic and rigorous design and development. In this paper, we present a general model for collective adaptive systems called SOTA ("State Of The Affairs"). SOTA brings together the lessons of goal-oriented requirements modeling, context-aware system modeling, and dynamical systems modeling. It has the potential for acting as a general reference model to help tackling some key issues in the design and development of collective adaptive systems. In particular, as we will show with reference to a scenario of collectives of autonomous vehicles, SOTA enables: early verification of requirements, identification of knowledge requirements for self-adaptation, and the identification of the most suitable architectural patterns for self-adaptation.
2019
- Argumentation-based coordination in IoT: A speaking objects proof-of-concept
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, S.; Bicego, A.; Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
Coordination of Cyberphysical Systems is an increasingly relevant concern for distributed systems engineering, mostly due to the rise of the Internet of Things vision in many application domains. Against this background, Speaking Objects has been proposed as a vision of future smart objects coordinating their collective perception and action through argumentation. Along this line, in this paper we describe a Proof-of-Concept implementation of the Speaking Objects vision in a smart home deployment.
2019
- Deliver intelligence to integrate care: the Connecare way
[Abstract in Rivista]
Mariani, Stefano; Vargiu, Eloisa; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Miralles, Felip
abstract
2019
- Distributed Speaking Objects: A Case for Massive Multiagent Systems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Mariani, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
Smart sensors and actuators, embedding learning and reasoning features and associated to everyday objects and locations, will soon densely populate our everyday environments. Being capable of understanding, reasoning, and reporting about what is happening (for sensors) and about what they can make possibly happen (for actuators), these “speaking objects” will thus be assimilable to autonomous situated agents. Accordingly, populations of speaking objects will define dense and massive multiagent systems, devoted to monitor and control our environments, let them be homes, industries or, in the large-scale, whole cities. In this context, the necessary coordination among speaking objects will be likely to become associated with the capability of argumenting about situations and about the current state of the affairs, triggering and directing proper distributed conversations, and eventually collectively reach future desirable state of the affairs. In this article, we detail the speaking objects vision, overview the key enabling technologies, and analyze the key challenges for engineering large-scale collectives of speaking objects and their conversations.
2019
- Evaluating origin–destination matrices obtained from CDR data
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, M.; Bicocchi, N.; Lippi, M.; Mariani, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
Understanding and correctly modeling urban mobility is a crucial issue for the development of smart cities. The estimation of individual trips from mobile phone positioning data (i.e., call detail records (CDR)) can naturally support urban and transport studies as well as marketing applications. Individual trips are often aggregated in an origin–destination (OD) matrix counting the number of trips from a given origin to a given destination. In the literature dealing with CDR data there are two main approaches to extract OD matrices from such data: (a) in time-based matrices, the analysis focuses on estimating mobility directly from a sequence of CDRs; (b) in routine-based matrices (OD by purpose) the analysis focuses on routine kind of movements, like home-work commute, derived from a trip generation model. In both cases, the OD matrix measured by CDR counts is scaled to match the actual number of people moving in the area, and projected to the road network to estimate actual flows on the streets. In this paper, we describe prototypical approaches to estimate OD matrices, describe an actual implementation, and present a number of experiments to evaluate the results from multiple perspectives.
2019
- Improve Education Opportunities for Better Integration of Syrian Refugees in Turkey
[Capitolo/Saggio]
Mamei, M.; Cylasun, S. M.; Lippi, M.; Pancotto, F.; Tumen, S.
abstract
2019
- Investigating economic activity concentration patterns of co-agglomerations through association rule mining
[Articolo su rivista]
Cecaj, A.; Mamei, M.
abstract
Economic activity tends to concentrate in particular geographic areas forming agglomerations and co-locations of firms. These agglomerations bring benefits for the firms themselves by increasing productivity, access to human resources, labor pooling, innovation, knowledge spillovers and regional growth. In this paper, we present a method for the discovery and analysis of such agglomerations. The method allows to spot patterns of co-locations in the composition of the agglomerations. Those patterns identify important relationships between the firms compounding the agglomerations thus describing the dynamics that exists inside the agglomeration itself.
2019
- Policy implications of the D4R Challenge
[Capitolo/Saggio]
Ali Salah, Albert; Tarık Altuncu, M.; Balcisoy, Selim; Frydenlund, Erika; Mamei, Marco; Ali Akyol, Mehmet; Yavuz Arslanlı, Kerem; Bensason, Ivon; Boshuijzen-van Burken, Christine; Bosetti, Paolo; Boy, Jeremy; Bozcaga, Tugba; Mümin Cilasun, Seyit; Işık, Oğuz; Kalaycıoğlu, Sibel; Seyyide Kaptaner, Ayse; Kayi, Ilker; Ozan Kılıç, Özgün; Kjamili, Berat; Kucukali, Huseyin; Martin, Aaron; Lippi, Marco; Pancotto, Francesca; Rhoads, Daniel; Sevencan, Nur; Sezgin, Ervin; Solé-Ribalta, Albert; Sterly, Harald; Surer, Elif; Taşkaya Temizel, Tuğba; Tümen, Semih; Uluturk, Ismail
abstract
The Data for Refugees (D4R) Challenge resulted in many insights related to the movement patterns of the Syrian refugees within Turkey. In this chapter, we summarize some of the important findings, and suggest policy recommendations for the main areas of the challenge. These recommendations are sometimes broad suggestions, as the policy interventions involve many factors that are difficult to take into account. We give examples of such issues to help policy-makers.
2018
- An Argumentation-based Perspective over the Social IoT
[Articolo su rivista]
Lippi, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The crucial role played by social interactions between smart objects in the Internet of Things is being rapidly recognized by the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) vision. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced vision of Speaking Objects – “things” interacting through argumentation – to show how different forms of human dialogue naturally fit cooperation and coordination requirements of the SIoT. In particular, we show how speaking objects can exchange arguments in order to seek for information, negotiate over an issue, persuade others, deliberate actions, and so on, namely, striving to reach consensus about the state of affairs and their goals. In this context, we illustrate how argumentation naturally enables such a form of conversational coordination through practical examples and a case study scenario.
2018
- Analysis of tourist classification from cellular network data
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, M.; Colonna, M.
abstract
We present and evaluate a classification method to estimate tourist presence in an area from cellular network data. Our approach is based on setting up a classifier to label users according to five main classes: residents, commuters, people in-transit, tourists and excursionists. We experiment the approach in some important tourist cities in Italy: Venice, Florence, Turin and Lecce. In the lack of sound groundtruth data, we analysed the composition of different classes obtaining results in line with domain knowledge. Moreover, these results are also supported by an analysis of the locations frequented by the tourists that well conforms with expectations. Finally, the number of users classified as tourists is strongly correlated with official statistics on tourist presence in the area.
2018
- Engineering Collectives of Self-driving Vehicles: The SOTA Approach
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda B.; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Future cities will be populated by myriads of autonomous self-driving vehicles. Although individual vehicles have their own goals to pursue in autonomy, they may also be part of a collective of vehicles, as in the case of a fleet of vehicles of a car sharing company. Accordingly, they may also be required to act in a coordinated way towards the achievement of specific collective goals, or to meet specific city-level objectives. This raises the issue of properly engineering the behavior of such collective of vehicles, by properly capturing their collective requirements also in consideration of their individual goals, and understanding which knowledge about the state of the collective they must be provided with. In this context, this paper shows how the SOTA model can be a very effective tool to support the engineering of self-driving vehicle collectives. SOTA, by bringing together the lessons of goal-oriented requirements engineering, context-aware systems, and dynamical systems modeling, has indeed the potential for acting as a general reference model to help tackle some key issues in the design and development of complex collective systems immersed in dynamic environments, as collectives of self-driving vehicles are.
2018
- Is social capital associated with synchronization in human communication? An analysis of Italian call records and measures of civic engagement
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Pancotto, Francesca; De Nadai, Marco; Lepri, Bruno; Vescovi, Michele; Zambonelli, Franco; Pentland, Alex
abstract
Social capital has been studied in economics, sociology and political science as one of the key elements that promote the development of modern societies. It can be defined as the source of capital that facilitates cooperation through shared social norms. In this work, we investigate whether and to what extent synchronization aspects of mobile communication patterns are associated with social capital metrics. Interestingly, our results show that our synchronization-based approach well correlates with existing social capital metrics (i.e., Referendum turnout, Blood donations, and Association density), being also able to characterize the different role played by high synchronization within a close proximity-based community and high synchronization among different communities. Hence, the proposed approach can provide timely, effective analysis at a limited cost over a large territory.
2018
- Predict Cellular network traffic with markov logic
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
Forecasting spatio-temporal data is a challenging task in transportation scenarios involving agents. In this paper, we propose a statistical relational learning approach to cellular network traffic forecasting, that exploits spatial relationships between close cells in the network grid. The approach is based on Markov logic networks, a powerful framework that combines first-order logic and graphical models into a hybrid model capable of handling both uncertainty in data, and background knowledge of the problem. Experimental results conducted on a real-world data set show the potential of using such information. The proposed methodology can have a strong impact in mobility demand forecasting and in transportation applications.
2017
- Classification of Livebus arrivals user behavior
[Articolo su rivista]
Hadjidimitriou, N.; Mamei, M.; Dell'Amico, M.; Kaparias, I.
abstract
With the increasing use of Intelligent Transport Systems, large amounts of data are created. Innovative information services are introduced and new forms of data are available, which could be used to understand the behavior of travelers and the dynamics of people flows. This work analyzes the requests for real-time arrivals of bus routes at stops in London made by travelers using Transport for London's LiveBus Arrivals system. The available dataset consists of about one million requests for real-time arrivals for each of the 28 days under observation. These data are analyzed for different purposes. LiveBus Arrivals users are classified based on a set of features and using K-Means, Expectation Maximization, Logistic regression, One-level decision tree, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) by Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO). The results of the study indicate that the LiveBus Arrivals requests can be classified into six main behaviors. It was found that the classification-based approaches produce better results than the clustering-based ones. The most accurate results were obtained with the SVM-SMO methodology (Precision of 97%). Furthermore, the behavior within the six classes of users is analyzed to better understand how users take advantage of the LiveBus Arrivals service. It was found that the 37% of users can be classified as interchange users. This classification could form the basis of a more personalized LiveBus Arrivals application in future, which could support management and planning by revealing how public transport and related services are actually used or update information on commuters.
2017
- Coordinating Distributed Speaking Objects
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lippi, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
In this paper we sketch a vision of future environments densely populated by smart sensors and actuators-possibly embedded in everyday objects-that, rather than simply producing streams of data, are capable of understanding and reporting, via factual assertions and arguments, about what is happening (for sensors) and about what they can make possibly happen (for actuators). These 'speaking objects' form the nodes of a dense distributed computing infrastructure that can be exploited to monitor and control activities in our everyday environment. However, the nature of speaking objects will dramatically change the approaches to implementing and coordinating the activities of distributed processes. In fact, distributed coordination is likely to become associated with the capability of argumenting about situations and about the current 'state of the affairs', with the aim of triggering and directing proper distributed 'conversations' to collectively reach a future desirable state. Accordingly, we discuss how such a novel vision can build upon some readily available technologies, and the research challenges that it poses. Two case studies are used as exemplary scenarios.
2017
- Data fusion for city life event detection
[Articolo su rivista]
Cecaj, A.; Mamei, M.
abstract
The automatic detection of events happening in urban areas from mobile phones’ and social networks’ datasets is an important problem that would enable novel services ranging from city management and emergency response, to social and entertainment applications. In this work we present a simple yet effective method for discovering events from spatio-temporal datasets, based on statistical anomaly detection. Our approach can combine multiple sources of information to improve results. We also present a method to automatically generate a keyword-based description of the events being detected. We run experiments in two cities with data coming from a mobile phone operator (call detail records–CDRs) and from Twitter. We show that this method gives interesting results in terms of precision and recall. We analyze the parameters of our approach and discuss its strengths and weaknesses.
2017
- On Recommending Opportunistic Rides
[Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Research on social and mobile technologies recently provided tools to collect and mine massive amounts of mobility data. Ride sharing is one of the most prominent applications in this area. While a number of research and commercial initiatives already proposed solutions for long-distance journeys, the opportunities provided by modern pervasive systems can be used to promote local, daily ride sharing within the city. We present a set of algorithms to analyze urban mobility traces and to recognize matching rides along similar routes. These rides are amenable for ride sharing recommendations. We validate the proposed methodology using data provided by a large Italian telecom operator. Assuming the full set of considered users are willing to accept 1-km detours, experimental results on two large cities show that more than 60% of trips could be saved. These results can be used to evaluate the potential of a ride sharing system before its actual deployment and to actually support an opportunistic ride sharing recommender system.
2017
- Towards Argumentation-based Recommendations for Personalised Patient Empowerment
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Juan Manuel Fernandez, ; Mamei, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Felip, Miralles; Alexander, Steblin; Vargiu, Eloisa; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Patient empowerment is a key issue in healthcare. Approaches to increase patient empowerment encompass patient self-management programs. In this paper we present ArgoRec, a recommender system that exploits argumentation for leveraging explanatory power and natural language interactions so as to improve patients' user experience and quality of recommendations. ArgoRec is part of a great effort concerned with supporting complex chronic patients in, for instance, their daily life activities after hospitalisation, pursued within the CONNECARE project by following a co-design approach to define a comprehensive Self-Management System.
2016
- Automatic identification of relevant places from cellular network data
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Colonna, Massimo; Galassi, Marco
abstract
We present a methodology to automatically identify users’ relevant places from cellular network data.1 In this work we used anonymized Call Detail Record (CDR) comprising information on where and when users access the cellular network. The key idea is to effectively cluster CDRs together and to weigh clusters to determine those associated to frequented places. The approach can identify users’ home and work locations as well as other places (e.g., associated to leisure and night life). We evaluated our approach threefold: (i) on the basis of groundtruth information coming from a fraction of users whose relevant places were known, (ii) by comparing the resulting number of inhabitants of a given city with the number of inhabitants as extracted by the national census. (iii) Via stability analysis to verify the consistency of the extracted results across multiple time periods. Results show the effectiveness of our approach with an average 90% precision and recall.
2016
- Estimating attendance from cellular network data
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Colonna, Massimo
abstract
An automatic estimate of the number of attendees to events happening in the city can provide valuable information to geographic information systems and geo-located applications. We present a methodology to estimate the number of events’ attendees from cellular network data. In this work, we used anonymized Call Detail Records (CDRs) comprising data on where and when users access the cellular network. Our approach is based on two key ideas: (1) we identify the network cells associated with the event location. (2) We verify the attendance of each user, as a measure of whether (s)he generates CDRs during the event, but not during other times. We evaluate our approach to estimate the number of attendees to a number of events ranging from football matches in stadiums to concerts and festivals in open squares. Comparing our results with the best groundtruth data available, our estimates provide a median error of less than 15% of the actual number of attendees.
2016
- Method and system for a posteriori computation of origin-destination matrices relating to gathering of people through analysis of mobile communication network data
[Brevetto]
Colonna, Massimo; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Method and system for a posteriori computation of origin-destination matrices relating to gathering of people through analysis of mobile communication network data
2016
- Method and system for a real time counting of a number of persons in a crowd by means of aggregated data of a telecommunication network
[Brevetto]
Colonna, Massimo; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Method and system for a real time counting of a number of persons in a crowd by means of aggregated data of a telecommunication network
2016
- Method and system for a real-time counting of a number of participants at a public happening
[Brevetto]
Colonna, Massimo; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Method and system for a real-time counting of a number of participants at a public happening
2016
- Method and system for estimating a number of persons in a crowd
[Brevetto]
Colonna, Massimo; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Method and system for estimating a number of persons in a crowd
2016
- Method and system for estimating a posteriori a number of persons in one or more crowds by means of aggregated data of a telecommunication network
[Brevetto]
Colonna, Massimo; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Method and system for estimating a posteriori a number of persons in one or more crowds by means of aggregated data of a telecommunication network
2016
- Method and system for real-time computing of origin-destination matrices relating to attendees at one or more public happenings through analysis of mobile communication network data
[Brevetto]
Colonna, Massimo; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Method and system for real-time computing of origin-destination matrices relating to attendees at one or more public happenings through analysis of mobile communication network data
2016
- Re-identification and information fusion between anonymized CDR and social network data
[Articolo su rivista]
Cecaj, Alket; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The analysis of multiple datasets on users’ behaviors opens interesting information fusion possibilities and, at the same time, creates a potential for re-identification and de-anonymization of users’ data. On the one hand, this kind of approaches can breach users’ privacy despite anonymization. On the other hand, combining different datasets is a key enabler for advanced context-awareness in that information from multiple sources can complement and enrich each other. In this work we analyze different anonymized mobility datasets in the direction of highlighting re-identification and information fusion possibilities. In particular we focus on call detail record (CDR) datasets released by mobile telecom operators and datasets comprising geo-localized messages released by social network sites. Results shows that: (1) in line with previous findings, few (about 4) data points are enough to uniquely pin point the majority (90 %) of the users, (2) more than 20 % of CDR users have a single social network user exhibiting a number of matching data points. We speculate that these two users might be the same person. (3) We derive an estimate of the probability of two users begin the same person given the number of data points they have in common, and estimate that for 3 % of the social network users we can find a CDR user very likely (>90 % probability) to be the same person.
2015
- Crowd steering in public spaces: Approaches and strategies
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Sassi, Andrea; Borean, Claudio; Giannantonio, Roberta; Mamei, Marco; Mana, Dario; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Smart phones and environmental sensors make it possible to dynamically monitor the positions and patterns of movements of people in urban areas and public spaces, identify or predict possible dangerous situations (e.g., overcrowded areas) or simply recognize the profitability of a different patterns of distribution and collective movements. In this article, we focus on the problem of using such technologies also to steer the movement of people in public and urban spaces, i.e., suggesting people where to move to eventually reach some desirable global configuration in terms of crowd distribution. In particular, we overview and motivate the general problem of crowd steering, identify the technologies that can be put into play, and the possible strategies to direct people movements. Following, we present the results of a set of simulations that we have performed to assess the effectiveness of two exemplary crowd steering strategies.
2015
- Developing pervasive multi-agent systems with nature-inspired coordination
[Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Omicini, Andrea; Anzengruber, Bernhard; Castelli, Gabriella; De Angelis, Francesco L.; Serugendo, Giovanna Di Marzo; Dobson, Simon; Fernandez Marquez, Jose Luis; Ferscha, Alois; Mamei, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Molesini, Ambra; Montagna, Sara; Nieminen, Jussi; Pianini, Danilo; Risoldi, Matteo; Rosi, Alberto; Stevenson, Graeme; Viroli, Mirko; Ye, Juan
abstract
Pervasive computing systems can be modelled effectively as populations of interacting autonomous components. The key challenge to realizing such models is in getting separately-specified and -developed sub-systems to discover and interoperate with each other in an open and extensible way, supported by appropriate middleware services. In this paper, we argue that nature-inspired coordination models offer a promising way of addressing this challenge. We first frame the various dimensions along which nature-inspired coordination models can be defined, and survey the most relevant proposals in the area. We describe the nature-inspired coordination model developed within the SAPERE project as a synthesis of existing approaches, and show how it can effectively support the multifold requirements of modern and emerging pervasive services. We conclude by identifying what we think are the open research challenges in this area, and identify some research directions that we believe are promising.
2015
- Engineering Pervasive Service Ecosystems: The SAPERE approach
[Articolo su rivista]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Emerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws--based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases.
2015
- How to Develop Pervasive Social Applications with the SAPERE Middleware
[Articolo su rivista]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
SAPERE ("Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems'') is a general framework to support the decentralized execution of self-organizing pervasive computing services. In this paper we present the rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference conceptual architecture. Following, we sketch the middleware infrastructure of SAPERE and detail the interaction model implemented by it, based on a limited set of "eco-laws'' allowing general-purpose distributed self-organizing schemes. Finally, we show how a social application can be easily implemented exploiting such an infrastructure and report on performances.
2015
- Method and system for computing an o-d matrix obtained through radio mobile network data
[Brevetto]
Colonna, Massimo; Galassi, Marco; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Method and system for computing an o-d matrix obtained through radio mobile network data
2015
- Opportunistic Ride Sharing via Whereabouts Analysis
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Smart phones and social networking tools allow to collect large-scale data about mobility habits of people. These data can support advanced forms of sharing, coordination and cooperation possibly able to reduce the overall demand for mobility. We present a methodology, based on the extraction of suitable information from mobility traces, to identify rides along the same trajectories that are amenable for ride sharing. Results on a real dataset show that, assuming users are willing to share rides and tolerate 1Km detours, about 60% of trips could be saved.
2015
- Urban crowd steering: An overview
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Borean, Claudio; Giannantonio, Roberta; Mamei, Marco; Mana, Dario; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Smart phones and environmental sensors make it possible to dynamically monitor the positions and patterns of movements of people in urban areas and public spaces, identify or predict possible dangerous situations (e.g., overcrowded areas) or simply recognize the profitability of a different patterns of distribution and collective movements. In this overview paper, we focus on the problem of using such technologies also to steer the movement of people. In particular, this paper has the goal of motivating the general problem of crowd steering, identifying the technologies that can be put to play to enforce crowd steering strategies, and presenting the possible strategies that can be adopted to steer people movements, other than the key research challenges.
2014
- Discovering Events in the City Via Mobile Network Analysis
[Articolo su rivista]
L., Ferrari; Mamei, Marco; M., Colonna
abstract
Can we automatically identify relevant places
and events happening in the city from the analysis of
mobile network use? In this paper we present a methodology
to discover events from human mobility patterns as
recorded by mobile network usage. Experiments conducted
over an extensive dataset from the main Italian telecom
operator show that the proposed approach is effective and
can be applied to a number of different scenarios. These
results can have a strong impact on a wide range of pervasive
applications ranging from location-based services to
urban planning.
2014
- Investigating Ride Sharing Opportunities through Mobility Data Analysis
[Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Smart phones and social networking tools allow to collect large-scale data
about mobility habits of people. These data can support advanced forms
of sharing, coordination and cooperation possibly able to reduce the overall
demand for mobility. Our goal is to develop a recommender system - to
be integrated in smart phones, tablets, and in-vehicle platforms - capable of
identifying opportunities for sharing cars and rides. We present a methodol-
ogy, based on the extraction of suitable information from mobility traces, to
identify rides along the same trajectories that are amenable for ride sharing.
We provide experimental results showing the impact of this technology and
we illustrate aWeb-based platform implementing the key concepts presented.
2014
- Method and system for identifying significant locations through data obtainable from a telecommunication network
[Brevetto]
Colonna, Massimo; Galassi, Marco; Mamei, Marco
abstract
A method for identifying and locating at least one relevant location visited by at least one individual within a geographical area served by a wireless telecommunication network is proposed. The method comprising the following steps: selecting (203) a predetermined time period (T) over which the identifying and locating of the at least one relevant location have to be performed, selecting (206,209) a typology of relevant location to be identified and located, retrieving (218) recorded time and position data recorded by the telecommunication network and regarding events (e i ) in which a user equipment carried by the at least one individual interacted with the telecommunication network, computing (236) a probability that each event for which recorded time and position data have been retrieved occurred in the relevant location of the selected type based on the recorded time data, identifying and clustering (239) events occurred within a predefined distance from each other and having a similar probability, computing (242) a weight value for each cluster of events identified in order to take into account statistical aspects that affect the identification and the positioning of the selected relevant location, comparing (251) the weight value with a threshold weight value, if the weight value is equal to, or greater than, the threshold weight value, identifying (254) the relevant location as belonging to the selected typology of relevant location, and providing (230) an indication of the position of the at least one relevant location based on the recorded position data of the events of the cluster, or if the weight value is lower than the threshold weight value, identifying (224) the relevant location as not belonging to the selected typology of relevant location.
2014
- Programming Self-organizing Pervasive Applications with SAPERE
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto
abstract
SAPERE (“Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems”) is a general framework to support the decentralized execution of self-organizing pervasive computing services. In this paper, we present the rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference conceptual architecture. Following, we sketch the middleware infrastructure of SAPERE and detail the interaction model implemented by it, based on a limited set of “eco-laws”. Finally, we show how in SAPERE one can express general-purpose distributed self-organizing schemes.
2014
- Re-identification of Anonymized CDR datasets Using Social Network Data
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cecaj, Alket; Mamei, Marco; Bicocchi, Nicola
abstract
In this work we examine a large dataset of 335 million anonymized call records made by 3 million users during 47 days in a region of northern Italy. Combining this dataset with publicly available user data, from different social networking ser-vices, we present a probabilistic approach to evaluate the potential of re-identification of the anonymized call records dataset. In this sense, our work explores different ways of analyzing data and data fusion techniques to integrate different mobility datasets together. On the one hand, this kind of approaches can breach users' privacy despite anonymization, so it is worth studying carefully. On the other hand, combining different datasets is a key enabler for advanced context-awareness in that information form multiple sources can complement and enrich each other.
2014
- Social Collective Awareness in Socio-Technical Urban Superorganisms
[Capitolo/Saggio]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Cecaj, Alket; Fontana, Damiano; Mamei, Marco; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Smart cities are characterized by the close integration of ICT devices and humans. However, the vast majority of current deployments of smart technologies relies on sensing devices collecting data and data mining techniques squeezing little meanings out of them. Nevertheless, we believe that citizens integrated with ICT technologies could collaboratively constitute large-scale socio-technical superorganisms supporting collective awareness and behaviours. This paper clarifies our vision on urban superorganisms, identifies the key challenges towards their actual deployment and proposes a prototype architecture supporting their development.
2014
- Towards a General Infrastructure for Location-based Smart Mobility Services
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Sassi, Andrea; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Penetration of smart phones and localization technologies are enabling a variety of smart location-based social mobility services that can notably improve the quality life of citizens on the go. Most existing solutions are shaped from a specific set of data sources processed through predefined computational flows to provide a specific class of services, and rarely strive for generality and urban-scale goals. The contribution of this paper is to presents an architectural model for a general-purpose distributed coordination infrastructure to support the dynamic composition of a variety of smart social mobility services, by focusing on the coordination of the agents involved to address both individual mobility needs and urban-scale mobility issues. Following, it analyzes the key requirements that the implementation of such infrastructure should satisfy. Finally, to exemplify, we show how the framework can be applied to a urban ride-sharing service.
2013
- Classification and prediction of whereabouts patterns from the Reality Mining dataset
[Articolo su rivista]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Classification and prediction of users’ whereabouts patterns is important for many emerging ubiquitous computing applications. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a powerful mechanism to extract recurrent behaviors and high-level patterns (called topics) from mobility data in an unsupervised manner. One drawback of LDA is that it is difficult to give meaningful and usable labels to the extracted topics. We present a methodology to automatically classify the topic with meaningful labels so as to support their use in applications. We also present a topic prediction mechanism to infer user’s future whereabouts on the basis of the extracted topics. Both these two mechanisms are tested and evaluated using the Reality Mining dataset consisting of a large set of continuous data on human behavior.
2013
- Collective Awareness and Action in Urban Superorganisms
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Fontana, Damiano; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Future urban scenarios will be characterized by the close integration of ITC devices and humans. Citizens using their own capabilities integrated with ITC technologies could collaboratively constitute a large-scale socio-technical superorganism to support collective “urban” awareness and activities. This position paper, with the help of a representative case study, identifies the key challenges for future urban superorganisms and proposes a two-tier architecture to support their development.
2013
- Collective Awareness for Human-ICT Collaboration in Smart Cities
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Cecaj, Alket; Fontana, Damiano; Mamei, Marco; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Future urban scenarios will be characterized by the close integration of ICT devices and humans. Citizens using their own capabilities integrated with ICT technologies could collaboratively constitute a large-scale socio-technical superorganism to support collective urban awareness and activities. This position paper, with the help of a representative case study in the area of intelligent transportation systems, identifies the key challenges for future urban superorganisms and proposes a two-tier architecture to support their development.
2013
- Developing Pervasive Agent-Based Applications: A Comparison of Two Coordination Approaches
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
I., Ayala; M., Amor; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pervasive computing is concerned with making our lives easier through digital environments that are sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to human needs. Different approaches have shown the suitability of the agent paradigm for the development of pervasive applications. However, so far no dominant approach has been adopted for the development of agent-based pervasive systems. In particular, two key classes of approaches exist, based on FIPA interaction protocols and tuple spaces. The contribution of this paper is the comparison and evaluation of tuple spaces and FIPA-compliant coordination mechanisms for the development of pervasive applications. We are therefore going to compare two approaches that exemplify these agent technologies: MalacaTiny-Sol and SAPERE.
2013
- Developing Social Applications in SAPERE
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Self-adaptability and spontaneous configuration are necessary features for emerging and future pervasive service systems. SAPERE (``Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems'') is a general framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized deployment, execution, and management, of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. In this paper, we firstly present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE, and its reference conceptual architecture. Following, we sketch the middleware infrastructure of SAPERE, and detail the specific coordination model implemented by it, based on a limited set of ``eco-laws". Finally, we show how, via the SAPERE eco-laws, it is possible to express and easily program a variety of general-purpose social applications.
2013
- Identifying and Understanding Urban Sport Areas using Nokia Sports Tracker
[Articolo su rivista]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Current advancements in pervasive technologies allow users to create and share an increasing amount of whereabouts data. Thus, some rich datasets on human mobility are becoming available on the Web. In this paper we extracted approximately 790,000 mobility traces from a web-based repository of GPS tracks—the Nokia Sports Tracker Service. Using data mining mechanisms, we show that this data can be analyzed to uncover daily routines and interesting schemes in the use of public spaces. We first show that our approach supports large-scale analysis of people whereabouts by comparing behavioral patterns across cities. Then, using Kernel Density Estimation, we present a mechanism to identify popular sport areas in individual cities. This kind of analysis allows to highlight human-centered geographies that can support a wide range of applications ranging from location-based services to urban planning.
2013
- Integrating Social Sensors and Pervasive Services: Approaches and Perspectives
[Articolo su rivista]
Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The key objective of this paper is to overview the many issues related to the integration of social sensing and pervasive sensing in the support of adaptive context-aware services.
2013
- Multiagent Environment Design for Pervasive Human-ICT Systems: The SAPERE Approach
[Capitolo/Saggio]
G., Castelli; Mamei, Marco; A., Rosi; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The environment in which agents are situated has been recognized as an explicit and exploitable element in the design of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). It can be assigned a number of responsibilities whose mechanisms for fulfillment would be more difficult to design solely using the notion of agents. To support the engineering of means to fulfill these responsibilities, we propose a novel nature-inspired approach developed by the EU project SAPERE. In particular, the intent of this chapter is to present a framework-based approach providing for context-awareness, dependability, openness, flexible and robust evolution. In such a framework all of these issues can be solved via a limited set of “laws” embedded in the framework to support and govern its self-organizing activities.
2013
- Pervasive Social Context: Taxonomy and Survey
[Articolo su rivista]
M., Endler; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; D., Schuster; T., Springer; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
As pervasive computing meets social networks, there is a fast growing research field called Pervasive Social Computing. Applications in this area exploit the richness of information arising out of people using sensor-equipped pervasive devices in their everyday life combined with intense use of different Social Net- working Services. We call this set of information Pervasive Social Context. We provide a taxonomy to classify Pervasive Social Context along the dimensions space, time, people, and information source (STiPI) as well as commenting on the type and reason for creating such context. A survey of recent research work shows the applicability and usefulness of the taxonomy in classifying and assessing applications and systems in the area of Pervasive Social Computing. Finally, we present some research challenges in this area and illustrate how they affect the systems being surveyed.
2013
- Pervasive social context: Taxonomy and survey
[Articolo su rivista]
Schuster, D.; Rosi, A.; Mamei, M.; Springer, T.; Endler, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
As pervasive computing meets social networks, there is a fast growing research field called pervasive social computing. Applications in this area exploit the richness of information arising out of people using sensorequipped pervasive devices in their everyday life combined with intense use of different social networking services.We call this set of information pervasive social context.We provide a taxonomy to classify pervasive social context along the dimensions space, time, people, and information source (STiPI) as well as commenting on the type and reason for creating such context. A survey of recent research shows the applicability and usefulness of the taxonomy in classifying and assessing applications and systems in the area of pervasive social computing. Finally, we present some research challenges in this area and illustrate how they affect the systems being surveyed. © 2013 ACM.
2013
- Preface to the special section on self-organizing coordination
[Abstract in Rivista]
Casadei, M.; Mamei, M.; Menezes, R.
abstract
2012
- Behavior Predictability Despite Non-Determinism in the SAPERE Ecosystem
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
How can we have confidence that self organizing
systems actually do what we expect them to? In this position
paper we overview some mechanisms at the basis of controlling
and predicting the behavior of autonomous and self-organizing
systems despite components’ autonomy and non-deterministic
behavior. In particular we focus the analysis on the SAPERE
ecosystem as an exemplary model to frame the discussion. We
identify three main directions with which to gain confidence
on the overall system behavior: (i) confidence from layering,
(ii) confidence from large numbers, (iii) confidence form the
structure and dynamics of the state space. In the paper we
describe this ideas and their implication in the design of self
organizing applications.
2012
- Behavior predictability despite non-determinism in the SAPERE ecosystem preliminary ideas
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, G.; Mamei, M.; Rosi, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
How can we have confidence that self organizing systems actually do what we expect them to? In this position paper we overview some mechanisms at the basis of controlling and predicting the behavior of autonomous and self-organizing systems despite components' autonomy and non-deterministic behavior. In particular we focus the analysis on the SAPERE ecosystem as an exemplary model to frame the discussion. We identify three main directions with which to gain confidence on the overall system behavior: (i) confidence from layering, (ii) confidence from large numbers, (iii) confidence form the structure and dynamics of the state space. In the paper we describe this ideas and their implication in the design of self organizing applications.
2012
- Experiences on sensor fusion with commonsense reasoning
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; M., Lasagni; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Multi-modal sensor fusion recently became a widespread technique to provide pervasive services with context-recognition capabilities. However, classifiers commonly used to implement this technique are still far from being perfect. Thus, fusion algorithms able to deal with significant inaccuracies are required. In this paper we present preliminary results obtained with a novel approach that combines diverse classifiers through commonsense reasoning. The approach maps classification labels produced by classifiers to concepts organized within the ConceptNet network. Then it verifies their semantic proximity by implementing a greedy sub-graph search algorithm. Specifically, different classifiers are fused together on a commonsense basis for both: (i) improving classification accuracy and (ii) dealing with missing labels. Experimental results are discussed through a real-world case study in which three classifiers are fused to recognize both user activities and locations.
2012
- People Get Together on Special Events: discovering happenings in the city via cell network analysis
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco; M., Colonna
abstract
Several pervasive and mobile computing systems
would benefit from being notified about special events happening
in the city. In this paper we present a methodology to
discover events from human mobility patterns as recorded by
cell network usage. Experiments conducted over an extensive
dataset from the main Italian telecom operator show that the
proposed approach is effective and can be applied to a number
of different scenarios. These results can have a strong impact on
pervasive applications including online map services, automatic
gazetteers, urban planning, and disaster response.
2012
- Self-organizing Virtual Macro Sensors
[Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The future mass deployment of pervasive and dense sensor network infrastructures calls for proper mechanisms to enable extracting general-purpose data from them at limited energy costs and in a compact way. The approach presented in this paper relieson a simple algorithm to let a sensor network self-organize a virtual partitioning in correspondence of spatial regions characterized by similar sensing patterns, and to let distributed aggregation of sensorial data take place on a per-region basis.The result of this process is that a sensor network can be modeled as made up of virtual macro sensors, each associated to a well-characterized region of the physical environment. Within each region, each physical sensor has the local availability of aggregated data related to its region and can act as an access point to such data. This feature promises to be very suitable for a number of emerging usage scenarios. Our approach is described and analyzed, evaluated both in a simulation environment andon a real test bed, and quantitatively compared with related works in the area. The current limitations of our approach and the areas for future research are also discussed.
2011
- "All-about" diaries: Concepts and experiences
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Smart phones and pervasive computing technologies enablethe vision of all-about diaries: tools for recording, in abrowsable and machine-processable format, the everydayactivities and events of people, communities, objects andplaces. Diaries oer a wealth of opportunities for consumersand industries. Yet, while proposals exist indicating promisingapproaches to implement parts of them, several challengesstill have to be faced to produce fully-edged workingsystems. In this paper we discuss opportunities and technologiesthat enable such diaries to be created. Then, wepresent a prototype of a diary based on location data.
2011
- A Coordination Approach to Adaptive Pervasive Service Ecosystems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Viroli; E., Nardini; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Technology evolution is providing new pervasiveservice scenarios characterised by a huge number of distributedand dynamic devices. Accordingly, a new generation of servicesand infrastructures are emerging which support situatedness,adaptivity and diversity. In this paper we model the overallworld of services, data and devices, as a distributed computationalecosystem. As such, each entity will be modelled asan autonomous, spatially-situated individual of the ecosystem,whose existence and state is reified by an LSA (Live SemanticAnnotation). Ecosystem behaviour is controlled by coordinationrules called eco-laws, which are chemical-like reactions evolvingthe population of LSAs.We describe an architecture supportingthis vision along with a model of eco-laws, and show theirusefulness in a scenario of adaptive pervasive displays.
2011
- All-about Digital Diaries: Opportunities and Challenges
[Articolo su rivista]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
All-about diaries—software platforms that record, in a browsable and machine-processable format, the everyday activities of people, communities, and objects—offer a wealth of application opportunities, but their full-fledge implementation will require overcoming several challenges.
2011
- Augmenting mobile localization with activities and common sense knowledge
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Location is a key element for ambient intelligence services. Due to GPS inaccuracies, inferring high level information (i.e., being at home, at work, in a restaurant) from geographic coordinates in still non trivial. In this paper we use information about activities being performed by the user to improve location recognition accuracy. Unlike traditional methods, relations between locations and activities are not extracted from training data but from an external commonsense knowledge base. Our approach maps location and activity labels to concepts organized within the ConceptNet network. Then, it verifies their commonsense proximity by implementing a bio-inspired greedy algorithm. Experimental results show a sharp increase in localization accuracy.
2011
- Coordinating spatially-situated pervasive service ecosystems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Viroli, M.; Nardini, E.; Castelli, G.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
Technology evolution is providing new pervasive service scenarios characterised by a huge number of distributed and dynamic devices. Accordingly, a new generation of services and infrastructures are emerging which support situatedness, adaptivity and diversity. In this paper we model the overall world of services, data and devices, as a distributed computational ecosystem. Each entity will be modelled as an autonomous, spatially-situated individual of the ecosystem, whose existence is reified by an LSA (Live Semantic Annotation). Ecosystem's behaviour is controlled by coordination rules called eco-laws, which are sort of chemical-like reactions evolving the population of LSAs. We describe an architecture supporting this vision, a formal model of eco-laws, and finally show their usefulness in a scenario of crowd steering through pervasive displays.
2011
- Discovering City Dynamics through Sports Tracking Applications
[Articolo su rivista]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Researchers can use kernel density estimation to analyze spatiotemporal data from mobile devices to uncover human mobility patterns in urban spaces. Such analysis can support various applications ranging from location-based services to urban planning.
2011
- Discovering Daily Routines from Google Latitude with Topic Models
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Discovering users’ whereabouts patterns is importantfor many emerging ubiquitous computing applications.Life-log systems, advertisement and smart environments areonly some of the applications that can be supported byinformation regarding user patterns and routine behaviors.Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a powerful mechanismto extract recurrent behaviors and high-level patterns (calledtopics) from mobility data in an unsupervised manner. In thispaper we test the effectiveness of LDA in identifying users’routine behaviors from mobility data collected with GoogleLatitude. Results show that the proposed technique providesgood results in discovering patterns and routine behaviors.
2011
- Extracting Urban Patterns from Location-based Social Networks
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferrari, Laura; Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Social networks attract lots of new users every day and ab- sorb from them information about events and facts happen- ing in the real world. The exploitation of this information can help identifying mobility patterns that occur in an urban environment as well as produce services to take advantage of social commonalities between people. In this paper we set out to address the problem of extracting urban patterns from fragments of multiple and sparse people life traces, as they emerge from the participation to social networks. To investigate this challenging task, we analyzed 13 millions Twitter posts (3 GB) of data in New York. Then we test upon this data a probabilistic topic models approach to au- tomatically extract urban patterns from location-based so- cial network data. We nd that the extracted patterns can identify hotspots in the city, and recognize a number of ma- jor crowd behaviors that recur over time and space in the urban scenario.
2011
- Identifying and Understanding Urban Sport Areas using Nokia Sports Tracker
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco
abstract
The recent availability of large datasets of people whereaboutsprovides an unprecedented opportunity to study the pulse of thecity. We develop tools to apply Kernel Density Estimation to whereaboutsdata collected though GPS-logging applications. We evaluatedsuch mechanisms using approximately 790,000 GPS traces extractedfrom Nokia Sports Tracker. We first show that our approach can beapplied to identify popular areas of the city. Then, we present somenovel applications of the above technique. This kind of analysis allowsto highlight human-centered geographies that can support city planningand context-aware pervasive services for urban spaces.
2011
- Improving Situation Recognition via Commonsense Sensor Fusion
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pervasive services often rely on multi-modal classification to implement situation-recognition capabilities. However, current classifiers are still inaccurate and unreliable. In this paper we present preliminary results obtained with a novel approach that combines well established classifiers using a commonsense knowledge base. The approach maps classification labels produced by independent classifiers to concepts organized within the Concept Net network. Then it verifies their semantic proximity by implementing a greedy approximate sub-graph search algorithm. Specifically, different classifiers are fused together on a commonsense basis for both: (i) improve classification accuracy and (ii) deal with missing labels. Experimental results are discussed through a real-world case study in which two classifiers are fused to recognize both user's activities and visited locations.
2011
- Integrating Pervasive Middleware with Social Networks in SAPERE
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto
abstract
Any middleware for pervasive computing services
has to adaptive eectively support both spatially-situated activities
and social models of interactions. In this paper, we
present the solution integrated in the tuple-based SAPERE
middleware to tackle this problem. The idea is to exploit the
graph of a social network along with relations deriving from
spatial proximity to rule the actual topology of interactions
among devices, users, and services. The proposed approach can
facilitate the autonomous and adaptive activities of pervasive
services while accounting for both social and spatial issues, can
support eective service discovery and orchestration, and can
enable tackling critical privacy issues.
2011
- Landslide Monitoring with Sensor Networks: Experiences and Lessons Learnt from a Real-world Deployment
[Articolo su rivista]
Rosi, Alberto; M., Berti; Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Corsini, Alessandro; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Wireless sensor networks have the potentials to be a very useful technology for fine-grained monitoring in remote and hostile environments. This paper reports on the implementation and deployment of a system for landslide monitoring in the Northern Italy Apennines, and analyzes the positive results we have achieved with it. Yet, the paper also critically analyzes the problems and the inherent limitations/difficulties we had to face in developing and deploying such a system, challenging many of the “big claims” that are often heard around wireless sensor networks.
2011
- Macro Programming a Spatial Computer with Bayesian Networks
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco
abstract
Macro programming a spatial computer is the ability to specify application tasks at a global level while relying
on compiler-like software to translate the global tasks into the individual component activities. Bayesian
networks can be regarded as a powerful tool for macro programming a spatial computer, such as a dense
sensor network, in a variety of data analysis applications. In this article we present our architecture to
program a spatial computer by means of a distributed Bayesian network and present some applications we
developed over a sensor network testing both inference and anomaly-detection analysis.
2011
- Middleware Infrastructures for Self-organising Pervasive Computing Systems
[Capitolo/Saggio]
M., Casadei; Mamei, Marco; VILLALBA CARDOZO, Cynthia Emilia; M., Viroli; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
In this chapter, we focus on the need for innovative open pervasive middleware infrastructures to support self-organisation, self-adaptation and evolvability, in distributed applications, with a particular attention to pervasive computing scenarios. We discuss how such middleware infrastructures should be at the basis of a nature-inspired architectural approach to system design, enabling the modelling and the deployment of services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices interacting with one another. A reference conceptual architecture is presented to clarify the concepts expressed and the role of middleware within it, and several possible approaches to realise the idea are surveyed and critically analysed, also with the help of a simple case study. Two concrete examples of middleware infrastructures—namely the TOTA (Tuples On The Air) middleware supporting a physically-inspired computing model and the TuCSoN (Tuple Centres over the Network) middleware supporting a chemical-inspired one—are detailed along with examples showing how to use such infrastructures.
2011
- Pervasive Middleware Goes Social: the SAPERE Approach
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pervasive computing middleware, to support thespatially and socially situated activities of users, has to eectivelysupport both self-organizing spatial activities and socialmodels of interactions. In this paper, we present the solutionthat we are going to integrate in the SAPERE middleware totackle this problem. The basic idea is to exploit the graph of asocial network (e.g., Facebook), in conjunction with relationsderiving from spatial proximity, to drive and rule the actualtopology of interactions among devices, users, and services. Aswe will discuss trough this paper, such an approach: facilitatesthe autonomous and adaptive activities of pervasive serviceswhile accounting for both social and spatial issues; supportseective service discovery and orchestration; enables tacklingcritical privacy issues.
2011
- Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Castelli, Gabriella; Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; G., Di Marzo; M., Risoldi; A., Tchao; S., Dobson; G., Stevenson; E., Ye; E., Nardini; A., Omicini; S., Montagna; M., Viroli; A., Ferscha; S., Maschek; B., Wally
abstract
Here we present the overall objectives and approach of the SAPERE (“Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems”) project, focussed on the development of a highly-innovative nature-inspired framework, suited for the decentralized deployment, execution, and management, of self-aware and adaptive pervasive services in future network scenarios.
2011
- Self-optimized Cognitive Network of Networks
[Articolo su rivista]
A., Manzalini; P. H., Deussen; S., Nechifor; Mamei, Marco; R., Minerva; C., Moiso; A., Salden; T., Wauters; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
uture processing, storage and communication services will be highly pervasive: people, smart objects, machines and the surrounding space (all embedding devices such as with sensors, RFID tags etc.) will define a highly decentralized cyber environment of resources interconnected by dynamic networks of networks. As communications will extend to cover any combination of ’people, machines and things’, future networks will be increasingly complex and heterogeneous, yet always endorsed with the challenging task of ensuring end-to-end QoS. This paper proposes the groundwork for an advanced cognitive networking paradigm exploitable in future wired and wireless infrastructures: a decentralized cognitive plane to allow for cross-layer, cross-node and cross-network domain self-management, self-control and self-optimization, while being compatible with legacy management and control systems.
2011
- Social Sensors and Pervasive Services: Approaches and Perspectives
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; S., Dobson; G., Stevenson; J., Ye
abstract
Social Networks represent ones of the most mature expressionof Web 2.0 advent. If from one side, social networkingsites provide us the opportunity to browse new digitalworlds, make friends, share moments and resources withthe rest of the internet community, from another side theyrepresent a sophisticated tool for measuring properties of agroup of people, allowing for the extraction of up-to-date,valuable and full of context information. In this paper weinvestigate how the above Social Sensing can be integratedin pervasive services and infrastructures. In particular, weframe the possible approach that can be undertake to pursuesuch integration, and survey the leading proposals inliterature. From the limitations of actual approaches andimplementations come a general discussion on open issuesand challenges that researchers have to overcome to makesocial sensing a general-purpose tool for forthcoming pervasiveapplications.
2011
- The Changing Role of Pervasive Middleware: from Discovery and Orchestration to Recommendation and Planning
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Future pervasive computing scenarios will be characterized by an increasing diversity and dynamics of services and of contextual data sources, and by an increasing exploitation of crowdsourcing for social sensing and human computation. Accordingly, the role of middleware should no longer be limited to facilitating interactions and compositions via discovery and orchestration, but should approach that of a recommendation engine capable of dynamically and adaptively planning patterns of service interaction and composition on a best-effort basis. Along these lines, this position paper elaborates on the limitations of traditional middleware infrastructures in meeting the new requirements of the emerging pervasive computing scenarios. Then, it introduces two case study scenarios to motivate and clarify the concepts expressed. Finally, it identifies some key research challenges for future pervasive middleware infrastructures.
2011
- Towards a Coordination Approach to Adaptive Service Ecosystems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Viroli; E., Nardini; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Technology evolution is providing new pervasive service scenarios characterised by a huge number of distributed and dynamic devices. Accordingly, a new generation of services and infrastructures are emerging which support situatedness, adaptivity and diversity. In this paper we model the overall world of services, data and devices, as a distributed computational ecosystem. As such, each entity will be modelled as an autonomous, spatially-situated individual of the ecosystem, whose existence and state is reified by an LSA (Live Semantic Annotation). Ecosystem behaviour is controlled by coordination rules called eco-laws, which are chemical-like reactions evolving the population of LSAs-similarly to the approaches in [1], [2]. We describe an architecture that is at the basis of the SAPERE project ("Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems", www.sapere-project.eu), supporting the vision along with a model of eco-laws, and show their usefulness in a scenario of adaptive pervasive displays.
2010
- A Self-Organizing Approach for Building and Maintaining Knowledge Networks
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pervasive and mobile devices can generate huge amounts of contextual data, from which knowledge about situations occurring in the world can be inferred for the use of pervasive services. Due to the overwhelming amount of data and the distributed and dynamic nature of pervasive systems, this may be not a trivial task. Indeed the management of contextual data should be run by a dedicate middleware layer, i.e., knowledge networks in charge of organizing and aggregating such data to facilitate its exploitation by pervasive services. In this paper we introduce a unsupervised, distributed and self-organizing approach to build and maintain such a layer based on simple agents that organize and extract useful information from the data space. We also present a Java-based implementation of the approach and discuss experimental results.
2010
- A self-organizing architecture for pervasive ecosystems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
C., Villalba; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
It is getting increasingly recognized that the models and tools of standard service-oriented architectures are not adequate to tackle the decentralized, pervasive, and very dynamic scenarios of modern ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) systems, and that innovative and flexible software architectures have to be identified. This paper discusses how these architectures could get inspiration from natural systems, so as to enforce those features of self-adaptability and evolvability that are inherent in natural systems. In particular, we propose to get inspiration from ecological systems to model and deploy services as autonomous individuals, spatially-situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources and pervasive devices. Services will be able to self-organize their interaction patterns according to a sort of “food web” and in respect of a limited set of interaction laws. Accordingly, the paper introduces a general reference architecture to frame the key concepts of our ecological approach, details its characteristics, and also with the help of a case study, discusses its implementation and presents simulation results to show the effectiveness of the approach.
2010
- Applying Commonsense Reasoning to Place Identification
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco
abstract
Some recent mobile computing applications try to automatically
identify the places being visited by the user from a log of GPS
readings. Such applications reverse geocode the GPS data to
discover the actual places (shops, restaurants, etc.) where the user
has been. Unfortunately, because of GPS errors, the actual
addresses and businesses being visited cannot be extracted
unambiguously and often only a list of candidate places can be
obtained. Commonsense reasoning can notably help the
disambiguation process by invalidating some unlikely findings
(e.g., a user visiting a cinema in the morning). In this paper we
illustrate the use of Cyc – an artificial intelligence system
comprising a database of commonsense knowledge – to improve
automatic place identification. Cyc allows to probabilistically rank
the list of candidate places in consideration of the commonsense
likelihood of that place being actually visited on the basis of the
user profile, the time of the day, what happened before, etc. The
system has been evaluated using real data collected from a mobile
computing application.
2010
- Automatic Analysis of Geotagged Photos for Intelligent Tourist Services
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Web communities are making available an increasing volume of free, fresh, detailed and powerful information about living people. Among them, the Flickr photo-sharing service offers to researchers a database of several millions of geotagged pictures from users all around the world. Working on that opens the door to the study of meaningful mobility data, where title and description of a geotagged picture represent a mine from which extract labels to detect places and events, and useful information about user trends, behaviors and tastes. Our approach goes in the direction of developing an intelligence and unattended system able to extract and take advantage of up-to-date and spontaneous information embedded with pictures, making cities intelligent and able to reach user expectations. Such system, learning from past touristic user experiences, could make customized recommendations on “where to go”, and “what to see”, to people going to visit touristic places for the first time.
2010
- Classification of whereabouts patterns from large-scale mobility data
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferrari, L.; Mamei, M.
abstract
Classification of users' whereabouts patterns is important for many emerging ubiquitous computing applications. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a powerful mechanism to extract recurrent behaviors and high-level patterns (called topics) from mobility data in an unsupervised manner. One drawback of LDA is that it is difficult to give meaningful and usable labels to the extracted topics. We present a methodology to automatically classify the topics with meaningful labels so as to support their use in applications. This mechanism is tested and evaluated using the Reality Mining dataset consisting of about 350000 hours of continuous data on human behavior.
2010
- Detecting Activities from Body-Worn Accelerometers via Instance-based Algorithms
[Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The automatic and unobtrusive identification of user’s activities is one of the challenging goals of context-aware computing. This paper discusses and experimentally evaluates instance-based algorithms to infer user’s activities on the basis of data acquired from body-worn accelerometer sensors. We show that instance-based algorithms can classify simple and specific activities with high accuracy. In addition, due to their low requirements, we show how they can be implemented on severely resource-constrained devices. Finally, we propose mechanisms to take advantage of the temporal dimension of the signal, and to identify novel activities at run time.
2010
- Environmental Monitoring and Task-Driven Computing
[Articolo su rivista]
Rosi, Alberto; M., Berti; Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Corsini, Alessandro; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; e. t. a., L.
abstract
We report on our early experience in landslide monitoring with sensor networks.
2010
- Handling dynamics in diffusive aggregation schemes: An evaporative approach
[Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Distributed computing in large-size dynamic networks often requires the availability at each and every node of globally aggregated information about some overall properties of the network. In this context, traditional broadcasting solutions become inadequate as the number of participating nodes increases. Therefore, aggregation schemes inspired by the physical/biological phenomenon of diffusion have been recently proposed as a simple yet effective alternative to solve the problem. However, diffusive aggregation algorithms require solutions to cope with the dynamics of the network and/or of the values being aggregated solutions, which are typically based on periodic restarts (epoch-based approaches). This paper proposes an original and autonomic solution, relying on coupling diffusive aggregation schemes with the “bio-inspired” mechanism of evaporation. While a gossip-based diffusive communication scheme is used to aggregate values over a network, gradual evaporation of values can be exploited to account for network and value dynamics without requiring periodic restarts. A comparative performance evaluation shows that the evaporative approach is able to manage the dynamism of the values and of the network structure in an effective way: in most situations it leads to more accurate aggregate estimations than epoch-based techniques.
2010
- Place Recognition and automatic semantic annotation via the Whereabouts diary
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco
abstract
Purpose – Modern handheld devices provided with localization capabilities can create a diary of the user whereabouts, and provide a description of the user habits and a complement of the user profile in several applications. The places we go, in fact, reveal something about us; for example, two persons can be matched as compatible given the fact that they visit the same places. The purpose of this paper is to describe the Whereabouts diary in this context.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the Whereabouts diary, an application/service to log the places visited by the user and to label them, in an automatic way, with descriptive semantic information. Web-retrieved information, and the temporal patterns with which different places are visited, can be used to automatically define meaningful semantic labels to the visited places.
Findings – The paper verified that such diary application can be created and can effectively classify the places visited by the user. In particular, geocoding and white-pages web services were used to extract information about a place, and Bayesian networks to classify places on the basis of the time at which they have been visited.
Research limitations/implications – The paper discusses this implementation, and presents experimental results. Experiments show that the identification of places and the accuracy of the place classification mechanism are effective, while the accuracy of geocoding and white-pages retrieval should be improved.
Originality/value – This paper shows the novel Whereabouts diary application. Several mechanisms presented are original to this approach. In addition, several applications that can exploit the diary are illustrated.
2010
- Self-optimized Cognitive Network of Networks
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
A., Manzalini; P., Deussen; S., Nechifor; Mamei, Marco; R., Minerva; C., Moiso; A., Salden; T., Wauters; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Future processing, storage and communication services will be highly pervasive: people, smart
objects, machines and the surrounding space (all embedding devices such as with sensors, RFID tags
etc.) will define a highly decentralized cyber environment of resources interconnected by dynamic
networks of networks. As communications will extend to cover any combination of ’people, machines
and things’, future networks will be increasingly complex and heterogeneous, yet always endorsed
with the challenging task of ensuring end-to-end QoS. This paper proposes the groundwork for an
advanced cognitive networking paradigm exploitable in future wired and wireless infrastructures:
a decentralized cognitive plane to allow for cross-layer, cross-node and cross-network domain selfmanagement,
self-control and self-optimization, while being compatible with legacy management
and control systems.
2010
- Self-organized Data Ecologies for Pervasive Situation-Aware Services: the Knowledge Networks Approach
[Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; M., Baumgarten; M., Brgulja; R., Kusber; Mamei, Marco; M., Mulvenna; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pervasive computing services exploit information about the physical world both to adapt their own behavior in a context-aware way and to deliver to users enhanced means of interaction with their surrounding environment. The technology to acquire digital information about the physical world is increasingly available, making services at risk of being overwhelmed by such growing amounts of data. This calls for novel approaches to represent and automatically organize, aggregate, and prune such growing amounts of data before delivering it to services. In particular, individual data items should form a sort of self-organized ecology in which, by linking and combining with each other into sorts of “knowledge networks”, they can be able to provide to services compact and easy to be managed higher-level knowledge about situations occurring in the environment. In this context, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, with the help of a simple case study, we motivate the need to evolve from models of “context-awareness” towards models of “situation-awareness” via proper self-organized “knowledge networks” tools, and introduce a general reference architecture for knowledge networks. Second, we describe the design and implementation of a knowledge network toolkit we have developed, and exemplify algorithms for knowledge self-organization integrated within it. Open issues and future research directions are also discussed.
2010
- Unsupervised Learning in Body-area Networks
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Lasagni, Matteo; Mamei, Marco; Prati, Andrea; Cucchiara, Rita; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pattern recognition is becoming a key application in bodyarea
networks. This paper presents a framework promoting
unsupervised training for multi-modal, multi-sensor classification
systems. Specifically, it enables sensors provided
with patter-recognition capabilities to autonomously supervise
the learning process of other sensors. The approach
is discussed using a case study combining a smart camera
and a body-worn accelerometer. The body-worn accelerometer
sensor is trained to recognize four user activities pairing
accelerometer data with labels coming from the camera. Experimental
results illustrate the applicability of the approach
in different conditions.
2009
- An Evaporative Approach to Handle Dynamics in Diffusive Aggregation Schemes
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Distributed computing in large-size dynamic networks oftenrequires the availability at each and every node globally ag-gregated information about some overall properties of thenetwork. In this context, since traditional broadcasting so-lutions become inadequate as the number of participatingnodes increases, aggregation schemes inspired by the phys-ical/biological phenomenon of diusion have been recentlyproposed as a simple yet eective alternative to solve theproblem. However, diusive aggregation requires specicsolutions to cope with the dynamics of the network and/orof the values being aggregated. While typical solutions arebased on periodic restarts (epoch-based approaches), in thispaper, we propose an original and more autonomic solution,relying on coupling diusive aggregation schemes with theadditional bio-inspired mechanism of evaporation. While agossip-based diusive communication scheme is used to ag-gregate values over a network, gradual evaporation of valuescan be exploited to account for network and value dynamicswithout requiring periodic restarts. A comparative perfor-mance evaluation shows that the evaporative approach isable to manage the dynamism of the values sensed over thenetwork in an eective way and, in the most of the cases,it leads to more accurate aggregate estimations than epoch-based techniques.
2009
- Extracting High-Level Information from Location Data: the W4 Diary Example
[Articolo su rivista]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Services for mobile and pervasive computingshould extensively exploit contextual information both toadapt to user needs and to enable autonomic behavior. Tofulfill this idea it is important to provide two key tools: amodel supporting context-data representation and manipulation,and a set of algorithms relying on the model toperform application tasks. Following these lines, we firstdescribe the W4 context model showing how it canrepresent a simple yet effective framework to enableflexible and general-purpose management of contextualinformation. In particular, we show the model suitability indescribing user-centric situations, e.g., describing situationsin terms of where a user is located and what he is doing.Then, we illustrate a set of algorithms to semanticallyenrich W4 represented data and to extract relevantinformation from it. In particular, starting from W4 data,such algorithms are able to identify the places that matter tothe user and to describe them semantically. Overall, weshow how the context-model and the algorithms allow tocreate an high-level, semantic and context-aware diarybasedservice. This service meaningfully collects andclassifies the user whereabouts and the places that the uservisited
2009
- Handling Dynamics in Gossip-based Aggregation Schemes
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
A problem in large and dynamic networks consists in making available at each node global information about the state of the network. Gossip-based aggregation schemes are a simple yet effective mechanism to solve the problem. However, they have to cope with the dynamics either of the network and the values being aggregated and thus have to integrate specific solutions to deal with them. The contribution of this paper is to analyze and compare three different solutions to handle network and values dynamics in gossip-based aggregation schemes: (i) an epoch-based approach based on periodic restarts, (ii) an optimized epoch-based approach based on concurrent aggregation threads and (iii) an original approach based on values evaporation that does not require periodic restarts. Experimental results show that our proposal is effective and often more accurate than epoch-based techniques
2009
- Knowledge Networks for Pervasive Services
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco; M., Baumgarten; M., Mulvenna
abstract
Technologies to pervasively acquireinformation about the physical and socialworlds – as needed by services to achievecontext-awareness – are becomingincreasingly available. Paradoxically, the riskis to make pervasive services overwhelmed bygrowing amounts of contextual data, andunable to properly exploit them. This calls forspecific approaches to automatically organizeand aggregate such data before delivering itto services. Contextual data items should forma sort of self-organized ecology within whichthey autonomously link and combine with eachother into sorts of “knowledge networks”.This can produce compact and easy-to-bemanagedhigher-level knowledge aboutsituations occurring in the environment, andeventually can make services able to easilyacquire “situation-awareness”. In this paper,after having framed the key concepts andmotivations underlying “situation-awareness”and our “knowledge networks” approach, wepresent the design and implementation of a“knowledge networks” prototype, intended asa tool to support self-organization and selfaggregationof contextual data item and tofacilitate their exploitation by pervasiveservices. A representative case study in thearea of adaptive pervasive advertisement isintroduced to clarify the concepts expressed,to exemplify the actual functioning of thetoolkit and of some specific algorithmsintegrated within it, as well as to evaluate itseffectiveness.
2009
- Programming Pervasive and Mobile Computing Applications: the TOTA Approach
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pervasive and mobile computing call for suitable middleware and programming models to supportthe activities of complex software systems in dynamic network environments. In this paper wepresent TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”), a novel middleware and programming approach for sup-porting adaptive context-aware activities in pervasive and mobile computing scenarios. The keyidea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, adaptively propagated across a networkon the basis of application-specific rules, for both representing contextual information and sup-porting uncoupled interactions between application components. TOTA promotes a simple wayof programming that facilitates access to distributed information, navigation in complex environ-ments, and achievement of complex coordination tasks in a fully distributed and adaptive way,mostly freeing programmers and system managers from the need to take care of low-level issuesrelated to network dynamics. This paper includes both application examples to clarify conceptsand performance figures to show the feasibility of the approach
2009
- Special track on self-organization in pervasive distributed systems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; J., Werfel
abstract
Special track on self-organization in pervasive distributed systems
2008
- Browsing the World with RFID Tags: Design and Implementation of an RFID-Based Distributed Environmental Memory
[Capitolo/Saggio]
Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The increasing diffusion of pervasive computing technologies via which to interact with the physical world, together with the availability of innovative GIS-like tools relying on standard Web technologies (e.g., Google Earth and Google Maps) let us envision a future in which it will be possible to access in an undifferentiated way real-time information about the physical world, Web information and services, and to transparently merge them into a single coherent user-centric and location-dependent perspective. In this chapter, after having introduced the general underlying concepts and presented current related research initiatives, we illustrate a general user-centric architecture for “browsing the world” and show some services we developed.
2008
- Engineering Contextual Information for Pervasive Multiagent Systems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Multiagent systems for mobile and pervasive computing should
extensively exploit contextual information both to adapt to user needs and to
enable autonomic behavior. This raises the problem of how to represent,
organize, aggregate, and make available such data so as to have it become
meaningful and usable knowledge, facilitating the design and development of
agents, and enabling them to acquire high-degrees of context awareness at
limited efforts. In this paper, we identify the key software engineering
challenges introduced by the need of accessing and exploiting huge amount of
heterogeneous contextual information. Following, we survey the relevant
proposals in the area of context-aware pervasive computing, data mining and
granular computing discussing their potentials and limitations. On these bases,
we propose the W4 model for contextual data and show how it can represent
an effective model to enable flexible general-purpose management of
contextual knowledge, to facilitate agents in achieving high degrees of
context-awareness and, overall, to facilitate the design and development of
complex multiagent systems.
2008
- Engineering Contextual Knowledge for Autonomic Pervasive Services
[Articolo su rivista]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Services for mobile and pervasive computing should extensively exploit contextualinformation both to adapt to user needs and to enable autonomic behavior. This raises theproblem of how to represent, organize, aggregate, and make available such data to servicesso as to have it become meaningful and usable knowledge, facilitating the design anddevelopment of autonomic pervasive services, and enabling them to acquire high-degrees ofcontext awareness at limited efforts. In this paper, we identify the key software engineeringchallenges introduced by the need of accessing and exploiting huge amount ofheterogeneous contextual information. Following, we survey the relevant proposals in thearea of context-aware pervasive computing, data mining and granular computing discussingtheir potentials and limitations with regard to their adoption in the development of contextawarepervasive services. On these bases, we propose the W4 model for contextual data andshow how it can represent a simple yet effective model to enable flexible general-purposemanagement of contextual knowledge, to facilitate services in achieving high degrees ofcontext-awareness and, overall, to facilitate the design and development of complexpervasive services. A summarizing discussion and the identification of open researchdirections conclude the paper.
2008
- Field-based Coordination for Pervasive Computing Applications
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Emerging pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags can be embedded in our everyday environment to digitally store and elaborate a variety of information. By having application agents access in a dynamic and wireless way such distributed information, it is possible to enforce a notable degree of context-awareness in applications, and increase the capabilities of interacting with the physical world. In particular, biologically inspired field-based data structures such as gradients and pheromones are suitable to represent information in a variety of pervasive computing applications. This paper discusses how both sensor networks and RFID tags can be used to that purpose, outlining the respective advantages and drawbacks of these technologies.
2008
- Pervasive Self-Learning with multi-modal distributed sensors
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Prati, Andrea; Cucchiara, Rita; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Truly ubiquitous computing poses new and significantchallenges. One of the key aspects that will condition theimpact of these new tecnologies is how to obtain a manageablerepresentation of the surrounding environment startingfrom simple sensing capabilities. This will make devicesable to adapt their computing activities on an everchangingenvironment. This paper presents a frameworkto promote unsupervised training processes among differentsensors. This framework allows different sensors to exchangethe needed knowledge to create a model to classifyevents. In particular we developed, as a case study,a multi-modal multi-sensor classification system combiningdata from a camera and a body-worn accelerometer to identifythe user motion state. The body-worn accelerometerlearns a model of the user behavior exploiting the informationcoming from the camera and uses it later on to classifythe user motion in an autonomous way. Experimentsdemonstrate the accuracy of the proposed approach in differentsituations.
2008
- Supporting Location-Aware Services for Mobile Users with the Whereabouts Diary
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Modern handheld devices provided with localization capabilities could be used to automatically create a diary of user's whereabouts, and use it as a complement of the user profile in many applications. In this paper we present the Whereabouts diary, an application/service to log the places visited by the user and to label them, in an automatic way, with descriptive semantic information. In particular, Web-retrieved data and the temporal patterns in which places are visited can be used to define such meaningful semantic labels. In this paper, we describe the general idea at the basis of our service and discuss our implementation and the associated experimental results. In addition, we illustrate an application that can fruitfully exploit the whereabouts diary as a supporting service, and discuss areas for future work.
2007
- A Simple Model and Infrastructure for Context-aware Browsing of the World
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services for "browsing the world", i.e., for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, interacting with it, and understanding it. However, for this to occur, proper models and infrastructures must be developed. In this paper we propose a simple model for the representation of contextual information, the design and implementation of a general infrastructure for browsing the world, as well as some exemplar services we have implemented over it.
2007
- Current Developments and Future Challenges of Coordination in Pervasive Environments
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Bortenschlager; G., Kotsis; Mamei, Marco
abstract
With the miniaturization of computing elements, their in- creasing number, interconnection, and penetration of our daily lives, pervasive computing environments start to be- come more and more complex. This results in an apparent claim for improved coordination mechanisms, to optimize, to enhance effectiveness and eventually to provide the users with a sufficient level of quality. We took this as our mo- tivation to investigate the concept of coordination applied to pervasive environments in more details. This report is the summary of the CoMA workshop held at IEEE WET- ICE 2007 and highlights the current research efforts and outlines potential future challenges with respect to coordi- nation in pervasive environments
2007
- Landslide Monitoring with Sensor Networks: a Case for Autonomic Communication Services
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
A., Rosi; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; A., Manzalini
abstract
Abstract. Wireless sensor networks can be a very useful technology for monitoring remote and hostile environments. In this paper, we firstly report on our experience with landslide monitoring, and analyze the issues and the challenges we had to face in programming and deploying a suitable and useful wireless sensor network infrastructure. Following, we discuss how, within the CASCADAS project, we are contributing to the development of a novel component-based framework to facilitate the design and development of autonomic and situation-aware communication services for the use in modern network scenarios. Such a framework can become a useful tool to facilitate the development of easy-to-deploy, robust, and flexible sensor-network-based monitoring systems and, in particular, of landslide monitoring systems.
2007
- Macro Programming through Bayesian Networks: Distributed Inference and Anomaly Detection
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; R., Nagpal
abstract
Macro programming a distributed system, such as a sensor network, is the ability to specify application tasks at a global level while relying on compiler-like software to translate the global tasks into the individual component activities. Bayesian networks can be regarded as a powerful tool for macro programming a distributed system in a variety of data analysis applications. In this paper we present our architecture to program a sensor network by means of Bayesian networks. We also present some applications developed on a microphone-sensor network, that demonstrate calibration, classification and anomaly detection.
2007
- Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities
[Articolo su rivista]
Platon, E; Mamei, Marco; Sabouret, N; Honiden, S; Parunak, Hv
abstract
The environment has been recognized as an explicit and exploitable element to design multi-agent systems (MAS). It can be assigned a number of responsibilities that would be more difficult to design with the sole notion of agents. To support the engineering of these responsibilities, we identify a set of mechanisms that offer solutions to software designers. We describe the mechanisms, their usage in representative projects, and potential opportunities for further research and applications. The purpose of this article is to clarify the notion of environment in terms of mechanisms, from their abstract description to their practical exploitation. Mechanisms are expected to provide agent-based software designers with a set of design elements to build MAS that take advantage of the environment.
2007
- Pervasive Pheromone-Based Interaction with RFID Tags
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Despite the growing interest in pheromone-based interaction to enforce adaptive and context-awarecoordination, the number of deployed systems exploiting digital pheromones to actually coordinate the activitiesof situated autonomous agents is still very limited. In this paper, we present a simple, low-cost and generalpurposeimplementation of a pheromone-based interaction mechanism for pervasive environments. This isrealized by making use of RFID tags to store digital pheromones, and by having humans or robots spread/sensepheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags populating the surrounding physical environment. Weexemplify and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach via an application for object-tracking. This applicationallows robots and humans to find "forgotten-somewhere" objects by following pheromones trails associatedwith them. In addition, we sketch further potential applications of our approach in pervasive computingscenarios, discuss related work in the area, and identify future research directions.
2007
- Programming Modular Robots with the TOTA Middleware
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Modular robots represent a perfect application scenario for multiagent coordination. The autonomous modules composing the robot must coordinate their respective activities to enforce a specific global shape or a coherent motion gait. Here we show how the TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”) middleware can be effectively exploited to support agents’ coordination in this context. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, spread across the robot, to guide the agents’ activities in moving and reshaping the robot. Three simulated examples are presented to support our claims.
2007
- Self-organizing Spatial Regions for Sensor Network Infrastructures
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
This paper focuses on sensor networks as shared environmental infrastructures, and presents an approach to enable a sensor network to self-partition itself, at pre-defined energy costs, into spatial regions of nodes characterized by similar patterns of sensed data. Such regions can then be used to aggregate data on a per-region basis and to enable multiple mobile users to extract information at limited and pre-defined costs.
2007
- Supporting situation-aware services with virtual macro sensors
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Next-generation communication services will be required to adapt their behavior to the specific characteristics of the physical and social environment in which they will be invoked. The technology to acquire contextual information will be increasingly available, e.g., in the form of highly-pervasive sensor networks infrastructure. Indeed, such infrastructure can lead to the production of overwhelming amounts of information, difficult to be managed and interpreted by services. This calls for proper solutions to enable services to extract meaningful general-purpose data from distributed sensors in a compact way. The approach presented in this paper relies on a simple algorithm to let a sensor network self-organize a virtual partitioning in correspondence of spatial regions characterized by similar sensing patterns, and to let distributed aggregation of sensorial data take place on a per-region basis. This makes it possible for services to gather information about the surrounding world as if it was generated by a limited number of virtual macro sensors, independently of the actual structure and density of the underlying sensing infrastructure.
2007
- The Whereabouts Diary
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto
abstract
The user profile is one of the main context-information in a wide range of pervasive computing applications. Modern handheld devices provided with localization capabilities could automatically create a diary of user’s whereabouts and use that information as a surrogate (or a complement) of the user profile. The places we go, in fact, reveal also something about us, for example, two persons can be matched as compatible given the fact they visit the same places. Web-retrieved information, and the temporal patterns with which different places are visited, can be used to automatically define meaningful semantic labels to the visited places. In our work we used geocoding and white-pages Web-services to extract information about a place, and Bayesian networks to classify places on the basis of the time in which they have been visited. In this paper we describe the general idea at the basis of the whereabouts diary, discuss our implementation, and present experimental results. Finally, several applications that can exploit the diary are illustrated.
2007
- Towards Self-organizing Virtual Macro Sensors
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The future mass deployment of pervasive and dense sensor network infrastructures calls for proper mechanisms to enable extracting general-purpose data from them at limited costs and in a compact way. The approach presented in this paper relies on a simple algorithm to let a sensor network self-organize a virtual partitioning in correspondence of spatial regions characterized by similar sensed patterns, and to let distributed aggregation of sensorial data take place on a per-region basis. This makes it possible to perceive the network as if it were composed of a limited number of virtual macro sensors, a feature which promises to be very suitable for a number of incoming usage scenarios.
2007
- Ubiquitous Browsing of the World
[Capitolo/Saggio]
Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
The imminent mass deployment of pervasivecomputing technologies such as sensor networks andRFID tags, together with the increasing participationof the Web community in feeding geo-locatedinformation within tools such as Google Earth, willsoon make available an incredible amount ofinformation about the physical and social worlds andtheir processes. This opens up the possibility ofexploiting all such information for the provisioning ofpervasive context-aware services for “browsing theworld”, i.e., for facilitating users in gatheringinformation about the world, interacting with it, andunderstanding it. However, for this to occur, propermodels and infrastructures must be developed. In thischapter we propose a simple model for therepresentation of contextual information, the designand implementation of a general infrastructure forbrowsing the world, as well as some exemplarservices we have implemented over it.
2007
- Urban Traffic Control with Co-Fields
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Camurri, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Traffic control can be regarded as a multiagent application in which car-agents and traffic-light-agents need to coordinate with each other to optimize the traffic flow and avoid congestions. Environment abstractions naturally suit this scenario in that agents actions are mainly driven by traffic-related information that are distributed across the environment both at a practical and conceptual level. In this context we present traffic-control mechanisms on the basis of our Co-Fields model and discuss some experimental results we obtained in simulations that validate our proposal
2006
- Augmenting the Physical Environment Through Embedded Wireless Technologies
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Emerging pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags can be embedded in our everyday environment to digitally store and elaborate a variety of information about the surrounding. By having application agents access in a dynamic and wireless way such distributed information, it is possible to enforce a notable degree of context-awareness in applications, increase the capabilities of interacting with the physical world, and eventually give a concrete meaning to the abstract concept of agent situatedness. This paper discusses how both sensor networks and RFID tags can be used to that purpose, outlining the respective advantages and drawbacks of these technologies. Then, to ground the discussion, it presents a multiagent application for physical object tracking, facilitating the finding of forgot-somewhere objects in an environment.
2006
- Case studies for self-organization in computer science
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; R., Menezes; R., Tolksdorf; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Self-organization is bound to greatly affect computer science. The simplicity and yet power of self-organized models will allow researchers to propose efficient solutions to problems never before thought possible to be addressed efficiently. The published works in the field clearly demonstrate the potential of this approach. This paper first reviews a number of interesting self-organization phenomena found in nature, then it discusses their potential applicability in several computer science application scenarios.
2006
- Field-Based Coordination for Pervasive Multiagent Systems
[Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
More and more, software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system.Inspired by the behaviour of complex natural systems, scientists and engineers have started to adjust their mechanisms and techniques for self-organization and adaption to changing environments. In line with these considerations, Mamei and Zambonelli propose an interaction model inspired by the way masses and particles in our universe move and self-organize according to contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The key idea is to have the components’ actions driven by computational force fields, generated by the components themselves or by some infrastructures, and propagated across the environment. Together with its supporting middleware infrastructure – available with additional information under http://www.agentgroup.unimore.it – this model can serve as the basis for a general purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of adaptive distributed applications.
2006
- Intelligent Person-Centric Services for Smart Environments: 'Where are you?'
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Chris, Nugent; Matthias, Baumgarten; Maurice, Mulvenna; David, Craig; Zambonelli, Franco; Mamei, Marco; Bicocchi, Nicola; Kevin, Curran
abstract
This paper introduces novel techniques for person-centric services in pervasive spaces. These are focused on the support of independent living spaces for people with mild cognitive impairment, for example. We demonstrate from a technical perspective, how such services could be realised based on the emerging concepts of a distributed network of knowledge, facilitating dynamically composable and flexible service provision that engenders service continuity - beyond the home for example.
2006
- Making Tuple Spaces Physical with RFID Tags
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; R., Quaglieri; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a tuple-based distributed memory realized with the use of RFID technology. The key idea - rooted in a more general scenario of pervasive and mobile computing - is that our everyday environments will be soon pervaded by RFID-tagged objects. By accessing in a wireless way the re-writable memory of such RFID tags according to a tuple-based access model, it is possible to enforce mobile and pervasive coordination and improve our interactions with the physical world. An application example is presented to outline the potential of the approach
2006
- Mechanisms of self-organization in pervasive computing
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, N.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
The mass deployment of sensors and pervasive computing systems expected in the next few years, will require novel approaches to program and gather information from such systems. Suitable approaches will be general purpose, independent of a specific scenario and sensor deployment, and able to adapt autonomically to different scales and to a number of unforeseen circumstances. This paper focuses on the requirements and issues of upcoming pervasive computing scenario, and surveys current research initiatives to deal with them. In particular researches addressing data retrieval and aggregation, macro-programming, and data integration in pervasive computing infrastructures will be detailed. Overall, the paper illustrates our ideas on collecting information from both sensor systems and Web resources and on linking them together in overlay knowledge network offering applications comprehensive and understandable information about their computational environment.
2006
- On Concepts for Autonomic Communication Elements
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Edzard, Hofig; Bjorn, Wust; Borbala Katalin, Benko; Antonietta, Mannella; Mamei, Marco; Elisabetta Di, Nitto
abstract
Autonomic Communication aims to reduce complexity and management costs of modern communication services and networks. Au- tonomic Communication Elements (ACEs) are seen as the basis of auto- nomic communication systems. A main research task of the CASCADAS project is the definition of a component model for ACEs and the release of an open-source toolkit to simplify creation of autonomic communication systems. This paper presents the current progress of the CASCADAS project in defining the ACE component model. A platform abstraction concept is presented along with the basic structures that will be re- searched within the project. A basic model for ACEs is introduced and exemplified in regard to its properties and requirements. The idea of a Service Execution Environment (SEE) ACE is introduced, which en- ables a homogeneous and self-similar hosting environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the model and a presentation of open top- ics, giving insight into the current state of discussion.
2006
- Programming modular robots with the TOTA middleware
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Modular robots represent a perfect application scenario for
multiagent coordination. The autonomous modules com-
posing the robot must coordinate their respective activities
to enforce a specic global shape or a coherent motion gait.
Here we show how the TOTA (\Tuples On The Air") mid-
dleware can be eectively exploited to support agents' co-
ordination in this context. The key idea in TOTA is to
rely on spatially distributed tuples, spread across the robot,
to guide the agents' activities in moving and reshaping the
robot. Three simulated examples are presented to support
our claims.
2006
- Self-Maintaining Overlay Data Structures for Pervasive Autonomic Services
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Overlay data structures are a powerful mechanism to provide application components with context-information and to let them interact in dynamic-network scenarios like mobile ad-hoc networks and pervasive computing. These overlays can be propagated across a network in order to support components’ context awareness and coordination activities. We present a modeling framework and some autonomic algorithms to create overlay data structures that are able to self-maintain their intended distribution under a number of circumstances. The paper presents some experiments and performance measures to validate our approach and to show its scalability.
2006
- Self-maintained distributed data structures for field-based coordination in dynamic networks
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Field-based coordination is a promising approach to orchestrating the activities of components in a widerange of application scenarios. To implement such an approach, one can rely on distributed tuples injected into a network and then propagated to form field-like distributed data structures to be sensed by application components. Moreover, to gain the full benefits from such an approach, it is important to enable the distributed tuples to preserve their structures despite the dynamics of the network. In this paper, we show how a variety of self-maintained distributed tuples for field-based coordination can be easily programmed in the Tuples On The Air (TOTA) middleware. Several examples clarify the approach, and a case study is detailed throughout the paper to ground the discussion. Eventually, performance data are presented to verify the effectiveness of the approach. Copyright
2006
- Self-organizing approaches for large-scale spray multiagent systems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Large-scale multiagent systems will be the key software technology driving several future application scenarios. We envision a future in which clouds of microcomputers can be sprayed in an environment to provide, by spontaneously networking with each other, an endlessly range of futuristic applications. Beside this vision, similar kind of large-scale spray multiagent systems will be employed in several other scenarios ranging from ad-hoc networks of embedded and mobile devices to worldwide distributed computing. All of these scenarios present strong commonalities from the application development point of view, and new approaches and methodologies will be likely to apply, to some extent, to all of them. In particular, we argue that the issues related to the design and development of such spray multiagent systems call for novel approaches exploiting self-organization as first-class tools. With this regard, we survey a number of research projects around the world trying to apply self-organization to large-scale multiagent systems. Finally, we attempt at defining a rough research agenda that - in the long run - should integrate these ideas to develop a general and more assessed methodology for large-scale spray multiagent systems crosscutting several application domains.
2006
- The W4 model and infrastructure for contextaware browsing the world
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, G.; Mamei, .; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
The imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services for "browsing the world", i.e., for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, interacting with it, and understanding it. However, for this to occur, proper models and infrastructures must be developed. In this paper we propose a simple model for the representation of contextual information, the design and implementation of a general infrastructure for browsing the world, as well as some exemplar services we have implemented over it.
2006
- Theory and practice of field-based motion coordination in multiagent systems
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Enabling and managing coordination activities between autonomous, possibly mobile, computing entities in dynamic computing scenarios challenges traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This paper specifically focuses on the problem of motion coordination, and proposes field-based coordination as a general framework to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors. The key idea in field-based coordination is to have agents' movements driven by computational force fields, generated by the agents themselves and/or by some infrastructure, and propagated across the environment. This paper shows that field-based approaches enable the definition of adaptive and effective motion coordination schemes, which can be modeled and tested by making use of a dynamical systems formalism, and which can be easily implemented either above existing middleware infrastructures or by making use of novel middleware specifically conceived for field-based coordination.
2006
- Towards Self-organizing Knowledge Networks for Smart World Infrastructures
[Articolo su rivista]
M., Baumgarten; Bicocchi, Nicola; K., Curran; Mamei, Marco; M. D., Mulvenna; C. D., Nugent; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Current society is witnessing an age of computing ubiquity where the digital world is not longer limited to closed work, home or social environments but increasingly envelops every aspects of private and social life and their surroundings. However, if computing power is to serve us, and the converse is to be denied, then individual components and their rich panoply of services must be able to operate without significant intrusion. To achieve this, such services would require a high degree of supporting knowledge, including knowledge about the social, computational, and physical environments in which they are situated, as well as self-knowledge about their own functioning. While this provides the knowledge with which they can, eventually, manage and configure themselves it does also makes them more self-aware or in short it makes them smarter. However, in order to get ‘smarter’, the environment, its entities and services need some form of properly represented, well correlated and widely accessible repositories, which leads to the concept of knowledge networks which is the focus of this work.
2006
- Uncoupling Coordination: Tuple-based Models for Mobility
[Capitolo/Saggio]
Cabri, Giacomo; L., Ferrari; Leonardi, Letizia; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
This chapter focuses on tuple-based (Linda-like) coordination models as middleware services for mobile and pervasive computing systems. After having introduced the basic concepts of tuple-based coordination, the chapter discusses the suitability of tuple-based models for mobility and introduces a simple taxonomy of tuple-based middleware models for mobile systems. Then, on the basis of the introduced taxonomy, the chapter presents several proposals – both industrial and academic – that have been made in the area. Eventually, the paper outlines open research issues and promising research directions in the area of tuple-based coordination models for mobile computing systems.
2005
- Emergence and control of macro-spatial structures in perturbed cellular automata, and implications for pervasive computing systems
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; A., Roli; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Predicting the behavior of complex decentralized pervasive computing systems before their deployment in a dynamic environment, as well as being able to influence and control their behavior in a decentralized way, will be of fundamental importance in the near future. In this context, this paper describes the general behavior observed in a large set of asynchronous cellular automata when external perturbations influence the internal activities of cellular automata cells. In particular, we observed that stable macrolevel spatial structures emerge from local interactions among cells, a behavior that does not emerge when cellular antomata are not perturbed. Similar sorts of macrolevel behaviors are likely to emerge in the context of pervasive computing systems and need to be studied, controlled, and possibly fruitfully exploited. On this basis, the paper also reports the results of a set of experiments, showing how it is possible to control, in a decentralized way, the behavior of perturbed cellular automata, to make any desired patterns emerge.
2005
- Field-Based Motion Coordination in Pervasive Computing Scenarios
[Capitolo/Saggio]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Enabling and ruling coordination activities in mobile computing scenarios challenge traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This chapter focuses on Distributed Motion Coordination, i.e., the problem of coordinating the movements of a group of "agents" (e.g., mobile devices, users carrying on those devices, mobile robots and sensors) and focuses on the idea of field-based approaches to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors.
2005
- Motion coordination in the Quake 3 Arena environment: A field-based approach
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
This paper focuses on the problem of orchestrating the movements of bot agents in the videogame Quake 3 Arena. Since the specific patterns of movement that one may wish to enforce may be various, and serve different purposes (have bots meet somewhere, move in formation, or surrounding human players), a general and flexible approach is required. In this paper we discuss how the Co-Fields coordination model can be effectively exploited to this purpose. The key idea in Co-Fields is to model the agents' environment by means of application-specific computational force fields, leading agents' activities to a globally coordinated and adaptive motion behavior. The Co-Fields model is described both in general terms and in the specific Quake 3 Arena implementation, and several application examples are presented to clarify it. Also, the paper outlines the general applicability of the approach besides the Quake scenario and in areas such as mobile computing and mobile robots.
2005
- Pervasive pheromone-based interaction with RFID tags
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract
Despite the growing interest in pheromone-based interaction to enforce adaptive and context-aware coordination, the number of deployed systems exploiting digital pheromones to coordinate the activities of application agents is very limited. In this paper, we present a real-world, low-cost and general-purpose, implementation of pheromone-based interaction. This is realized by making use of RFID tags to store digital pheromones, and by having humans and robots to spread/sense pheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags populating the surrounding environments. We exemplify and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach via an application for object-tracking. This application allows robots and humans to find "forgot-somewhere" objects by following pheromones trails associated with them. In addition, we sketch further potential applications of our approach in pervasive computing scenarios.
2005
- Physical Deployment of Digital Pheromones Through RFID Technology
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pheromone-based multiagent interaction has received a growing attention in the past few years. Still, so far, the number of deployed systems exploiting pheromones for coordinating activities of distributed agents/robots situated in physical environments has been very limited. In this context, this paper presents a real-world, low- cost and general-purpose, implementation of pheromone interaction, realized by making use of RFID tags technology. Humans and robots can spread/sense pheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags that are likely to populate our everyday environments. The proposed solution is tested and evaluated via an application for object-tracking, allowing robots and humans to find "forgot-somewhere" objects. The application works by letting objects spread digital pheromones trails that can be tracked afterwards. The paper presents several experiments to assess the effectiveness of our approach, outlines its limitations, and sketches further potential application scenarios.
2005
- Physical deployment of digital pheromones through RFID technology
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
We describe and evaluate a system for enforcing stigmergic interactions in the physical world by deploying pheromones in RFID tags.
2005
- Programming stigmergic coordination with the TOTA middleware
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Stigmergic coordination has received a growing attention in the past few years. In fact, by decoupling interacting agents via the mediation of an active environment, stigmergy promotes the definition of robust and adaptive multiagent systems. However, beside a large amount of scientific studies, the problem of defining usable and general-purpose tools to program stigmergy-coordinated multiagent systems is still open. In this context, this paper shows how the TOTA middleware can be effectively exploited to support a variety of stigmergy-based coordination activities. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on a simple API for injecting tuple-based information in a network. have it propagate and/or evaporate accordingly to application-specific policies, and have it locally sensed by application agents. Application examples are presented to show that TOTA can promote a simple programming of a variety of different types of stigmergic interactions, in a variety of operational environments.
2005
- Self-Maintaining Overlay Data Structures for Autonomic Distributed Computing
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
In our research, we developed a general framework to model and implement overlay data structures in dynamic network environments. Overlay data structures can be defined by means of a couple (C,P). The content C can be an arbitrary data structure representing the information carried on by the data structure. The propagation rule P determines how the overlay data structure should be distributed and propagated across the network. This includes determining the "scope" of the overlay (i.e. the distance at which it should be propagated and possibly the spatial direction of propagation) and how such propagation can be affected by the presence or the absence of other data structures in the system. In addition, the propagation rules can determine how the content should change while it is propagated. Overlay data structure are not necessarily distributed replicas: by assuming different values in different nodes, they can be effectively used to build a distributed overlay data structure expressing some kind of contextual information. In addition, we realized highly scalable, autonomic maintenance mechanisms to let the overlay data structures preserve its intended distribution (C,P) despite network contingencies
2005
- Self-organizing spatial shapes in mobile particles: The TOTA approach
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Vasirani, M; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
We present a programming approach to let a multitude of simple mobile computational particles (i.e. sorts of tiny mobile robots) to selforganize their respective locations to assume a coherent global formation (i.e. shape). The problem has a variety of applications in mobile robotics, modular robots, sensor networks, and computational self-assembly. Here we show how the TOTA (Tuples On The Air) middleware can be effectively exploited to enable self-organization of spatial shapes in mobile particles with minimal capabilities. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, spread across the network, to drive particles' movements and activities. Several experiments are reported showing the effectiveness of the approach.
2005
- Spatial computing: An emerging paradigm for autonomic computing and communication
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Emerging distributed computing scenarios call for novel autonomic approaches to distributed systems development and management. In this position paper we analyze the distinguishing characteristics of those scenarios, discuss the inadequacy of traditional paradigms, and elaborate on primary role of space in modern distributed computing. In particular, we show that spatial abstractions promise to be basic necessary ingredients for a novel spatial computing paradigm, acting as a unifying framework for autonomic computing and communication. On this base, we propose a preliminary spatial computing stack to frame the key concepts and mechanisms of spatial computing. Eventually, we try to sketch a research agenda in the area.
2005
- Spatial computing: The TOTA approach
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Spatial abstractions promise to be basic necessary ingredients for a novel spatial computing approach to distributed systems development and management, suitable to tackle the complexity of modem distributed computing scenarios and promoting self-organization and self-adaptation. In this paper, we analyze the key concepts underlying spatial computing and show how they can be organized around a sort of spatial computing stack, in which a variety of apparently very diverse mechanisms and approaches can be properly framed. Following, we present our current research work on the TOTA middleware as a representative example of a general-purpose approach to spatial computing. In particular, we discuss how TOTA can be exploited to support the development and execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive spatial computing applications.
2005
- Spray Computers: Explorations in Self-Organization
[Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Gleizes, M; Mamei, Marco; Tolksdorf, R.
abstract
We envision a future in which clouds of microcomputerscan be sprayed in an environment to provide, byspontaneously networking with each other, an endlesslyrange of futuristic applications. However, beside thevision, spraying may also act as a powerful metaphorfor a range of other scenarios that are already underformation, from ad-hoc networks of embedded andmobile devices to worldwide distributed computing.After having detailed the different spray computersscenarios and their applications, this paper discussesthe issues related to the design and development ofspray computer applications, issues which call for novelautonomic approaches exploiting self-organization asfirst-class tools. Finally, this paper presents the keyresearch efforts being taken in the area and attempt atdefining a rough research agenda.
2004
- Co-Fields: A Physically Inspired Approach to Motion Coordination
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract
This work focuses on the problem of coordinating the movements of autonomous agents in a distributed environment. The term agent can refer not only to software components but also to any autonomous real-world entity with computing and networking capability, such as a PDA, a robot, or a modern car. The goals of these coordinated movements can include letting the agents meet somewhere, distribute themselves according to specific spatial patterns, or simply move in the environment without interfering with each other. To achieve this goal, we take inspiration from the physical world-that is, from the way particles in the universe move and globally self-organize according to the contextual information represented by fields.
2004
- Creating Overlay Data Structures with the TOTA Middleware to Support Content-based Routing in Mobile P2P Networks
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco
abstract
Content-based routing is a very useful and efficient interaction mechanism in a wide range of peer-to-peer network scenarios. Here we show how the TOTA ("Tuples On The Air") middleware can be effectively exploited to build and maintain those overlay data structures involved in content-based routing in mobile peer-to-peer networks.
2004
- Engineering Amorphous Computing Systems
[Capitolo/Saggio]
R., Nagpal; Mamei, Marco
abstract
How does one engineer robust collective behavior from the local interactions of immense numbers of unreliable parts? On the one hand, emerging technologies like MEMS are making it possible to assemble systems that incorporate myriad of information-processing units at almost no cost: smart materials, self-assembling structures, vast sensor networks. On the other hand, the plummeting cost of ad-hoc wireless communication is realizing the idea of pervasive computing: the creation of environments saturated with wireless computing devices collectively providing services anytime and everywhere. We discuss organizing principles and programming methodologies for controlling such amorphous systems, by combining robust algorithms inspired by nature with computer science techniques for controlling complexity.
2004
- Experiments of morphogenesis in swarms of simple mobile robots
[Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; M., Vasirani; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
In this paper, we focus on the problem of having a multitude of very simple mobile robots self-organize their relative positions so as to obtain a variety of spatial configurations. The problem has a variety of applications in mobile robotics, modular robots, sensor networks, and computational self-assembly. The approach we investigate in this paper attempts at minimizing the local capability of robots and at verifying how and to what extent a variety of global shapes can be obtained by exploiting simple self-organizing algorithms and emergent behaviors. Several experiments are reported showing the effectiveness of the approach.
2004
- Field-based Motion Coordination In Quake 3 Arena
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Quake 3 Arena (Q3A) belongs to the kind of firstperson
shooter computer games. The player controls a
character (bot) fighting against other artificial bot agents.
The aim of this paper is to present an approach to the
problem of coordinating the movements of a set of Q3A
bots. The goals of bots’ coordinated movements can be
various: letting them to meet somewhere, distribute
accordingly to specific spatial patterns, surround an
enemy, or simply move in the environment without
interfering with each other.
To achieve our goal, we take inspiration from the
physical world, i.e., from the way particles in our
universe move and globally self-organize accordingly to
that contextual information which is represented by
gravitational and electro-magnetic fields. In our
approach, contextual information is expressed in the
form of Co-Fields: distributed data structures
implementing the field concept. Each agent of the system
can generate and propagate across the Q3A environment
specific distributed data structures, conveying
application-specific information. Agents can locally
perceive these data structures and move e.g. following
the fields’ gradient.
2004
- Location-based and content-based information access in mobile peer-to-peer computing: The TOTA approach
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Mobile peer-to-peer computing calls for suitable middleware and programming models to provide dynamic access to information and resources in dynamic network environments. In particular, location-based access and content-based access to information appear two very useful mechanisms. Here we present how both these two kinds of information access can be realized via TOTA (Tuples On The Air), a novel middleware that relies on spatially distributed tuples for supporting uncoupled and adaptive interactions between application agents. The TOTA middleware takes care of both propagating tuples across a network on the basis of application-specific rules and of adaptively re-shaping the resulting distributed structures accordingly to changes in the network structures. In particular, the effectiveness of our model will be tested in providing means for both location-based and content-based access to information.
2004
- Pattern Formation in Mobile Computational Particles with Minimal Capabilities
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Vasirani; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Over the next decades, MEMS and nano-sensors will be
everywhere. In this perspective, we envision the possibility
of exploiting these technologies to build sorts of multicellular
computational organisms, made up of millions of
interacting autonomous computational particles, capable of
assembling and dynamically re-assembling themselves into
a variety of complex shapes (as the T1000 robot in the
Terminator 2 movie). From a software perspective, the
critical task is to identify appropriate (self)organization
principles and programming methodologies for controlling
the overall behavior of such complex systems. In particular,
our goal is to study how and to which extent a group of
mobile autonomous particles with the only capability of
locally interacting with wireless links can be programmed to
coordinate their respective movements to create variety of
global shapes.
2004
- Programming Pervasive and Mobile Computing Applications with the TOTA Middleware
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Pervasive computing calls for suitable middleware and
programming models to deal with large software
systems dived in dynamic mobile network environments.
Here we present the programming model of TOTA
(“Tuples On The Air”), a novel middleware for
supporting adaptive context-aware activities in
pervasive computing scenarios. The key idea in TOTA
is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, propagated
across a network on the basis of application-specific
rules, for both representing contextual information and
supporting uncoupled interactions between application
components. As shown with the help of a case study
scenario, TOTA promotes a simple programming model
and can effectively facilitate access to distributed
information, navigation in complex networks, and
achievement of complex coordination tasks in a fully
distributed and adaptive way.
2004
- Self-Maintained Distributed Tuples for Field-based Coordination in Dynamic Networks
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Field-based coordination is a very promising approach for a wide
range of application scenarios in modern dynamic networks. To
implement such an approach, one can rely on distributed tuples
injected in a network and propagated to form a distributed data
structure to be sensed by application agents. However, to gain the
full benefits from such a coordination approach, it is important to
enable the distributed tuples to preserve their structures despite
the dynamics of the network. In this paper, we show how a variety
of self-maintained distributed tuple structures for field-based
coordination can be easily programmed in the TOTA middleware.
Several examples clarify the approach, and performance data is
presented to verify its effectiveness.
2004
- Self-organization in multi agent systems: A middleware approach
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Self-organization in multi agent systems requires two main building blocks: adaptive and uncoupled interaction mechanisms and context-awareness. Here we show how the middleware TOTA (Tuples On The Air) supports self-organization by providing effective abstractions for the above two building-blocks. TOTA relies on spatially distributed tuples for both supporting adaptive and uncoupled interactions between agents, and context-awareness. Agents can inject these tuples in the network, to make available some kind of contextual information and to interact with other agents. Tuples are propagated by the middleware, on the basis of application specific patterns, defining sorts of computational fields, and their intended shape is maintained despite network dynamics, such as topological reconfigurations. Agents can locally sense these fields and rely on them for both acquiring contextual information and carrying on distributed self-organizing coordination activities. Several application examples in different scenarios show the effectiveness of our approach.
2004
- Spray Computers Frontiers of Self-Organization for Pervasive Computing
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; M., Gleizes; Mamei, Marco; R., Tolksdorf
abstract
We envision a future in which clouds of microcomputers can be sprayed in an environment to provide, by spontaneously networking with each other, an endlessly range of futuristic applications. However, beside the vision, spraying may also act as a powerful metaphor for a range of other scenarios that are already under formation, from ad-hoc networks of embedded and mobile devices to worldwide distributed computing. After having detailed the different spray computers scenarios and their applications, this paper discusses the issues related to the design and development of spray computer applications, issues which call for novel approaches exploiting self-organization and emergent behaviors as first-class tools. Finally, this paper presents the key research efforts being taken in the area and attempt at defining a rough research agenda.
2004
- Spray computers: Frontiers of self-organization
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; Gleizes, M. -P.; Mamei, M.; Tolksdorf, R.
abstract
The two different approaches to self-organization in spray-computers are discussed. Direct engineering approaches to self-organization aim at defining distributed algorithm to lead a system to a final coherent global state. The method enables engineers to achieve a specific robust self-organized behavior. The reverse engineering approaches to self-configuration aim at achieving complex coordinated behaviors in spray computers by recreating the conditions enabling complex coordinated behaviors. The approach allows to rely on the results from other disciplines to explore a variety of complex coordiantion phenomena to be exploited in spary computers.
2004
- Spray computers: Frontiers of self-organization for pervasive computing
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; M., Gleizes; Mamei, Marco; R., Tolksdorf
abstract
We envision a future in which clouds of microcomputers can be sprayed in an environment to provide, by spontaneously networking with each other, an endlessly range of futuristic applications. However, beside the vision, spraying may also act as a powerful metaphor for scenarios such as ad-hoc networks and P2P computing. In this paper we: detail the different spray computers scenarios and their applications; discuss the issues related to the design and development of spray computer applications, calling for novel approaches exploiting self-organization and emergent behaviors as first-class tools; present the key research efforts being taken in the area; try to define a research agenda.
2004
- Theory and Practice of Field-based Motion Coordination in Multiagent Systems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Enabling and managing coordination activities between autonomous, possibly mobile, computing
entities in dynamic computing scenarios challenges traditional approaches to distributed
application development and software engineering. This paper specically focuses on the problem
of motion coordination, and proposes eld-based coordination as a general framework to
model and engineer such coordinated behaviors. The key idea in eld-based coordination is to
have agents' movements driven by computational force elds, generated by the agents themselves
and/or by some infrastructure, and propagated across the environment. This paper shows
that eld-based approaches enable the denition of adaptive and effective motion coordination
schemes, which can be modeled and tested by making use of a dynamical systems formalism,
and which can be easily implemented either above existing middleware infrastructures or by
making use of novel middleware specically conceived for eld-based coordination.
2003
- A programmable event-based-middleware for pervasive mobile agent organizations
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Gazzotti, M.; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
This paper firstly introduces a conceptual framework for the effective design and development of distributed pervasive applications based on mobile agents. The framework, based on the definition of active organizational contexts, promotes an engineered and modular approach to application design by introducing the notion of active organizational contexts. Then, the paper describes the architecture and the implementation of a re-configurable event-based micro-kernel implementing active organizational context, suitable as a supporting middleware for pervasive applications based on mobile agents. An application example in the area of urban traffic control shows the effectiveness of the approach.
2003
- Co-fields: Towards a unifying approach to the engineering of swarm intelligent systems
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract
Swarm intelligent systems, in which the paths to problem solving emerge as the result of interactions between simple autonomous components (agents or ants) and between them and their environment, appear very promising to develop robust and flexible software application. However, the variety of swarm-based approaches that have been proposed so far still lacks a common modeling and engineering methodology. In the attempt to overcome this problem, this paper presents a general coordination methodology in which swarm's components are simply driven by abstract computational force fields (Co-Fields), generated either by agents, or by the environment. By having agents be driven in their activities by such fields, globally coordinated behaviors can naturally emerge. Although this model still does not offer a complete engineering methodology, it can provide a unifying abstraction for swarm intelligent systems and it can also be exploited to formalize these systems in terms of dynamical systems whose behavior can be described via differential equations. Several example of swarm systems modeled with Co-Fields are presented to support our thesis.
2003
- Developing Adaptive and Context-aware Applications in Dynamic Networks
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Suitable programming models and associated supporting infrastructures are required to deal with large software systems dived in complex and dynamic network environments. Here, with the aid of a case study scenario, we discuss the inadequacies of current approaches in dealing with such scenarios. Then we sketch the key characteristics of TOTA (Tuples On The Air), as a novel proposal to deal with the above inadequacies. TOTA relies on tuple-based information to be spatially diffused in the network and to be exploited by application agents so as to achieve context-awareness and consequently to effectively coordinate with each other despite the network dynamics.
2003
- Dissipative Cellular Automata as Minimalist Distributed Systems: A Study on Emergent Behaviors
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Roli, A.; Mamei, Marco
abstract
This paper describes the behavior observed in a class of cellular automata that we have defined as "dissipative", i.e., cellular automata for which the external environment can somehow inject "energy" to dynamically influence the evolution of the automata. In this class of cellular automata, we have observed that stable macro-level global structures emerge from local interactions among cells. Since dissipative cellular automata express characteristics strongly resembling those of open distributed systems, we expect that similar sorts of macro-level behaviors are likely to emerge in real world systems of the same nature and need to be studied, controlled, and possibly fruitfully exploited. A preliminary set of experiments reporting two ways of indirectly controlling the behavior of DCA are reported and discussed w.r.t. the possibility of applying similar sort of indirect control on open distributed systems.
2003
- Distributed Motion Coordination with Co-Fields: A Case Study in Urban Traffic Management
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract
Coordinating the activities of distributed autonomous entities challenges traditional approaches to distributed coordination and calls for new paradigms and supporting middleware. This paper focuses on the problem of orchestrating the movements of mobile autonomous agents in a large-scale distributed systems, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from physics. Our idea is to have the movements of agents driven by force fields, generated by the agents themselves and propagated via some infrastructure. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in the agent's movements can then emerge due to the interrelated effects of agents following the shape of the fields and dynamic fields re-shaping. The approach is presented and its effectiveness described with regard to a concrete case study in the area of urban traffic coordination.
2003
- Engineering mobility in large multi agent systems: A case study in urban traffic management
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Mahan, M.
abstract
The complexity raised in modem software systems seems to be no longer affordable in terms of the abstractions and methodologies promoted by traditional approaches to computer science and software engineering and radically new approaches are required. This paper focuses on the problem of engineering the motion coordination of a large-scale multi-agent system, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from the laws of physics. Our idea is to have the movements of agents driven by force fields, generated by the agents themselves and propagated via some infrastructure or by the agents in an ad-hoc way. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in the agent's movements can then emerge due to the interrelated effects of agents following the shape of the fields and dynamic fields re-shaping. The approach is presented and its effectiveness described with regard to a concrete case study in the area of urban traffic management.
2003
- Location-dependent services for mobile users
[Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Several approaches for the provisioning of servicesto mobile users aim at supporting service availability from anyplace and at any time. However, most scenarios also require theenforcement of context-awareness, to dynamically adapt servicesdepending on the context in which they are requested. In thispaper, we focus on the problem of adapting services dependingon the users’ location, whether physical (in space) or logical(within a specific distributed group/application). To this end, wepropose a framework to model users’ location via a multiplicityof local and active service contexts. First, service contextsrepresent the mean to access to services available within aphysical locality. This leads to an intrinsic dependency ofservice provisioning on the users’ physical location. Second, thebehavior of service contexts can be tuned depending on who isrequesting what service. This enables adapting services to thelogical location of users (e.g., a request can lead to differentbehaviors for users belonging to different groups/applications).The paper firstly describes the framework in general terms,showing how it can facilitate the design of distributedapplications involving mobile users as well as mobile agents.Then, it shows how the MARS coordination middleware,implementing service contexts in terms of programmable tuplespaces, can be used to develop and deploy applications andservices coherently with the above framework. A case study isintroduced and discussed through the paper to clarify ourapproach and to show its effectiveness.
2003
- Programming Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing Applications with TOTA Middleware.
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract
Pervasive computing calls for suitable programmingmodels and associated supporting infrastructures todeal with large software systems dived in complex anddynamic network environments. Here, with the aid of acase study scenario, we discuss the inadequacies ofcurrent approaches in dealing with pervasivecomputing applications. Then we present TOTA (TuplesOn The Air): our proposal to solve the aboveinadequacies. TOTA relies on tuple-based informationto be spatially diffused in the network on the basis ofsome application-specific propagation rule, to beexploited by application agents to achieve contextawarenessand to effectively coordinate with each other.Finally related approaches in this area are presented.
2003
- Programming coordinated motion patterns with the TOTA middleware
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract
In this paper, we present TOTA (Tuples On The Air), a novel middleware to coordinate the movements of a large number of autonomous components (i.e. agents) in a ubiquitous computing scenario. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples for both representing contextual information and supporting uncoupled and adaptive interactions between application components. The TOTA middleware takes care both of propagating tuples across a network on the basis of application-specific rules and of adaptively re-shaping the resulting distributed structures accordingly to changes in the network structures. Application agents - via a simple API - can locally sense such distributed structures to achieve context-awareness and to effectively coordinate their movements.
2003
- Tuples On The Air: A Middleware for Context-Aware Computing in Dynamic Networks
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract
We present TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”), a novelmiddleware for supporting adaptive context-awareapplication in dynamic network scenarios. The key ideain TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples forboth representing contextual information andsupporting uncoupled and adaptive interactionsbetween application components. The middlewarepropagates tuples across a network on the basis ofapplication-specific patterns and adaptively re-shapesthe resulting distributed structures accordingly tochanges in the network scenario. Applicationcomponents can locally “sense” these structures andexploit them to acquire contextual information andcarry on complex coordination activities in an adaptiveway. Several examples show the effectiveness of theTOTA approach.
2003
- What can cellular automata tell us about behavior of large multi-agent systems?
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Mamei, Marco; A., Roli
abstract
This paper describes the behavior observed in a class of cellular automata that we have defined as dissipative, i.e., cellular automata for which the external environment can somehow inject energy to dynamically influence the evolution of the automata. In this class of cellular automata, we have observed that stable macro-level global structures emerge from local interactions among cells. Since dissipative cellular automata express characteristics strongly resembling those of open multi-agent systems, we expect that similar sorts of macro-level behaviors are likely to emerge in multiagent systems and need to be studied, controlled, and possibly fruitfully exploited. A preliminary set of experiments reporting two ways of indirectly controlling the behavior of dissipative cellular automata are reported and discussed w.r.t. the possibility of applying similar sort of indirect control on large multi-agent systems.
2002
- A Physically Grounded Approach to Coordinate Movements in a Team
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract
Focuses on the problem of coordinating the movements of a cooperative team in an environment, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from the laws of physics. The idea is to have the movements of team members driven by abstract force fields, generated by team members themselves and propagated via some embedded infrastructure. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in team members' movements emerges due to the interrelated effects of team members following the shape of the fields and of dynamic fields re-shaping. A case study in the area of warehouse management is introduced to exemplify the proposed approach.
2002
- The Cloak of Invisibility: Challenges and Applications
[Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Mamei, Marco
abstract
Is it possible to create a cloak of invisibility—a flexible artifact that canmake anything inside it invisible and preserve invisibility despite mobilityand deformation? Exploring the algorithmic and technologicalchallenges involved reveals tantalizing information.
2001
- Engineering infrastructures for mobile organizations
[Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract
Mobile application components can be effectively and uniformly modeled in terms of autonomous agents moving across different contexts during execution. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the definition of programmable organizational contexts, which can promote an engineered approach to application design and that, if is supported by a proper programmable coordination infrastructure, can make applications more modular and easy to maintain. On this base, the paper analyses several issues related to the implementation of programmable coordination infrastructures for mobility. In addition, the paper introduces a preliminary proposal for the modeling of programmable coordination infrastructures in terms of a general-purpose event-based infrastructure. Finally, the paper sketches open issues and promising research directions.