Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In recent years the research area of social mobile and networking technologies has made rapid progress, due to the increasing development of new mobile technologies and the widespread usage of the Internet as a new platform for social interactions.

Social applications of mobile and networking technologies serve groups of people in shared activities, in particular geographically dispersed groups who are collaborating on some task in a shared context. An important characteristic of those social applications is the continuous interaction between people and technology to achieve a common purpose. Again social applications tend to be large-scale and complex, involving difficult social and policy issues such as those related to privacy and security access.

The Wireless Rope is a framework to study the notion of social context and the detection of social situations by Bluetooth proximity detection with consumer devices and its effects on group dynamics. Users can interact through a GUI with members of an existing group or form a new group. Connection information is collected by stationary tracking devices and a connection map of all participants can be obtained via the web. Besides interaction with familiar persons, the Wireless Rope also includes strange persons to provide a rich representation of the surrounding social situation. This paper seeks to substantiate the notion of by an exploratory analysis of interpersonal proximity data collected during a computer conference. Two feature functions are presented that indicate typical situations in this setting.

This paper describes a framework to enable implicit interaction between mobile users in order to establish and maintain social networks according to the preferences and needs of each individual. A user model is proposed which can be constructed by the user and appended with information regarding the user’s privacy preferences. Design choices and tool support regarding the framework are discussed.

Trust is a promising research topic for social networks, since it is a basic component of our real-world social life. Yet, the transfer of the multi-facetted concept of trust to virtual social networks is an open challenge. In this paper we provide a survey and classification of established and upcoming trust systems, focusing on trust models. We introduce a set of criteria as basis of our analysis and show strengths and short-comings of the different approaches.

The diffusion of mobile devices and the development of their services and applications are connected with the possibility to communicate anytime and anywhere according to a natural approach, which combines different modalities (speech, sketch, etc.). A natural communication approach, such as sketch-based interaction, frequently produces ambiguities. Ambiguities can arise in sketch recognition process by the gap between the user’s intention and the system interpretation.

This paper presents a classification of meaningful ambiguities in sketch-based interaction and discusses methods to solve them taking into account of the spatial and temporal information that characterise the drawing process. The proposed solution methods use both sketch-based approaches and/or integrated approaches with other modalities. They are classified in: prevention, a-posteriori and approximation methods.

We discuss an approach for modeling human activities in complex real environments, considering the delivery of services as a function of the semantic features of the environment and of the interaction between the users and their social networks. We propose an architecture supporting such a model, and discuss a case study about cooperative learning in a cultural heritage site.

This paper proposes a holistic approach to enhance human knowledge in distributed and strictly linked contexts. Current semantic web technologies focus their attention only on the machine side of the interaction process. Our approach considers both the human and the machine working together to accomplish a task, stressing the importance of adapting data, tools and interactions to the different skills, contexts and tasks of the users. Multimodal interactive systems based on Semantic Web technologies support the sharing of knowledge among co-workers in different real networked environments. We present a scenario in the building sector, in which mobile systems are needed to reduce loosing of information on technical drawings from the building yard to the office. The paper presents a specification method and its link to semantic web technologies to satisfy the emerging requirements.

In the past several years, the World Wide Web has experienced a new era, in which user communities are greatly involved and digital content explodes via the Internet. Community information systems have been highlighted with the emerging term “Social Software”. In this paper, we explore the impact of social software on the community of cultural heritage management. Furthermore, mobile and ubiquitous technologies have provided capabilities for more sophisticated approach to cultural heritage management. We analyze these features of mobile information systems for cultural communities. We also present a mobile community framework with mobile Web Services to enable professionals to collect, manage and retrieve cultural heritage information in wide user communities.

The penetration of mobile device in western countries is still increasing. The Italian case is really surprising: every single Italian has more than one mobile terminal. Thus, considering this large potential audience, there is real need for innovation and new services. In this context, usable multimodal services could have an unexpected impact on social behaviour. Nevertheless, the research community should be able to propose a framework for building generic multi-modal services, covering all their lifecycle. We are currently defining an architecture for building coordinated simultaneous multimodal applications trying to use as much as possible open source software: our goal is to define a set of tools for enabling a rapid deployment of a generic multimodal service. In our opinion, a platform based on open source software could meet the expectations of a large numbers of service developers. A special effort for enabling a mass diffusion of mobile multimodal services should be focused on the client side, where the situation is still evolving.

Mobile users require location based, situation aware services, especially when healthcare is involved. Within “Nomadic Media” an Eureka-ITEA International projects, Ontology based semantic web service discovery and orchestration have been studied and applied to provide mobile users with innovative healthcare services.

The designed system identifies, orchestrates and customises the services, according to the health status of the user and his usage location, usage conditions and environmental situations.

The paper will describe the developed technologies and the implemented services.

Similar approach was followed in PIPS: “Personalised Information Platform for Life & Health Services”. However in PIPS more emphasis has been applied in the definition and the development of Use Cases and service definition and development for Patients and Citizen.