Maurizio Naldi - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Maurizio Naldi

Gomorrah is an Italian crime drama TV series that has been appreciated worldwide, being sold in 1... more Gomorrah is an Italian crime drama TV series that has been appreciated worldwide, being sold in 190 countries, despite its wide use of Neapolitan dialect, hardly understandable without the use of subtitles even for most Italians. Scholars immediately approached the study of this serial phenomenon, analysing it from different points of view, framing it within the broader context of studies on the new Italian television and its serial products. Our approach to Gomorrah, taking these elements into account, adds a new perspective that concerns character recognition, an emerging branch of research, to associate dialogues with characters and identify the verbal features of characters. We have then chosen Gomorrah as a challenging dataset to perform character recognition. We rely on the transcripts of the series after a pre-processing stage to standardize the lexicon despite the vagaries of dialect and remove stopwords. A machine learning approach, based on a selection of tools, is then employed to identify characters from the lexicon they employ. The problem is approached as a multi-class classification scheme. We compare several representations of texts, including the simple one-hot encoding and more advanced embedding techniques. The results are presented through a confusion matrix, which can also serve to identify similarities in the linguistic profiles of characters.

2022 IEEE 21st Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), Jun 14, 2022

International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction

2018 UKSim-AMSS 20th International Conference on Computer Modelling and Simulation (UKSim), 2018

Mergers between mobile network operators involve merging their respective networks. Though this m... more Mergers between mobile network operators involve merging their respective networks. Though this may represent a chance to optimize the network structure, merging may not represent the cost-optimal solution. In this paper, we compare two different evolution paths, where the networks to be merged are separately upgraded to cover the whole traffic demand or a single network is optimized as the result of the merger (Build vs Merge). Our preliminary analyses show that the Merge approach may lead to 50% higher costs, due in particular to the high costs borne to switch off redundant access points. Any Build vs Merge decision should therefore consider the sunk costs due to the inherited networks, as well as the possible benefits associated to a merger.

2020 43rd International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP), 2020

Price setting is a major issue for 5G network operators. Network sharing allows virtual operators... more Price setting is a major issue for 5G network operators. Network sharing allows virtual operators (the renters) to offer end customers their services and compete with the network infrastructure owner. A Cournot game model is adopted here to analyse that competition under a flat rate pricing scheme. The optimal price is shown to be a weighted average of the customer’s willingness to pay and the operators’ costs. While the infrastructure owner can exploit the renting fee paid by virtual operators to reduce their market share, great attention has to be paid to costs, since they contribute significantly to shrink profit margins for both owner and renters.

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Automated character identification in movies and TV series has been typically carried out through... more Automated character identification in movies and TV series has been typically carried out through face detection in video and the association of faces with characters’ names extracted from dialogues or cast lists. We propose a deep learning architecture to identify characters based on subtitles only, precisely through the lexicon those characters employ. The identification task is formalized as a multi-class classification task. We apply our technique to the complete set of episodes in the Gomorrah TV series and achieve an average identification accuracy beyond 94 per cent on the full set of characters.

Risks

Correlation in cyber risk represents an additional source of concern for utility and industrial i... more Correlation in cyber risk represents an additional source of concern for utility and industrial infrastructures, where risks may be introduced by connected systems. A major means of reducing risk is to transfer it through insurance. In this paper, we consider a company which has peripheral branches in addition to its headquarters, where risk correlation is present between all of its sites and insurance is adopted to hedge against economic losses. We employ the expected utility principle (which leads to the well-known mean variance premium formula) to derive the insurance premium under risk correlation under several risk scenarios. Under a first-order approximation, a quasi-linear relationship between the premium and the two major risk factors (the number of branches and the risk correlation coefficient) is determined.

2016 European Modelling Symposium (EMS)

Each company continually has to choose the projects in which to invest, among the numerous propos... more Each company continually has to choose the projects in which to invest, among the numerous proposals submitted by company departments. Just a few projects among those put forward for funding can be actually accepted, due to the unavoidable discrepancy between available money and required investments. Though overall profit maximization could appear as the natural allocation goal, it is to be considered that such an allocation may eventually produce a rather unbalanced distribution of the overall budget, where some departments get most of it and others get a very small slice or no money at all. In this paper, we examine how the search for fairness in budget allocation impacts the overall profit, to assess whether a greater degree of satisfaction among departments can be achieved while pursuing profit maximization at the same time. We adopt a constrained knapsack model and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) as a measure of fairness, and perform a MonteCarlo simulation to measure the extent of profit sacrifice in the quest for fairness. We find that just a small sacrifice in profit is often needed to achieve a balanced distribution of the overall budget.

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

arXiv (Cornell University), Jan 24, 2019

Four packages in R are analyzed to carry out sentiment analysis. All packages allow to define cus... more Four packages in R are analyzed to carry out sentiment analysis. All packages allow to define custom dictionaries. Just one-SentimentRproperly accounts for the presence of negators.

FedCSIS 2011-3rd International Symposium on Services Science,, Settembre, Stettino, (Poland),, 2011

2018 UKSim-AMSS 20th International Conference on Computer Modelling and Simulation (UKSim), 2018

The availability of cloud storage is a key performance parameter. Though its measurement is inclu... more The availability of cloud storage is a key performance parameter. Though its measurement is included in any cloud monitoring system, the statistical accuracy of such measurements is often neglected. Such measurements may therefore be useless in SLA-related disputed between cloud providers and customers. In this paper Bootstrap Averaging (Bagging) is employed to assess the statistical accuracy when we measure the availability and the number of outages over a single period of time. The distribution and the confidence intervals are reported for a set of major cloud providers, using datasets built from customer reports. By using proper confidence intervals, the compliance of cloud providers with respect to target availability and outage figures can be checked.

2017 European Modelling Symposium (EMS), 2017

In a group of individuals aiming for a collective decision, that decision is influenced by indivi... more In a group of individuals aiming for a collective decision, that decision is influenced by individual competences, but these are in turn subject to a reciprocal influence. Such an influence may lead to less competent agents exerting an unduly influence, a phenomenon known as equality bias. In this paper an agent-based model is proposed to investigate the evolution of competences under such a reciprocal influence. Through MonteCarlo simulation it is shown that: a) the average competence at steady state diminishes as the degree of interaction among the agents and/or the number of agents grow, both in the case of just positive influence (more competent agents increasing the competence of less competent one) and when both positive and negative influences are present; b) the convergence towards a steady state value is slow and characterized by oscillations.

2017 14th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC), 2017

A brokering platform distributing the data collected by a set of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) ... more A brokering platform distributing the data collected by a set of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to end customers is considered, where WSNs receive a payment from the broker proportional to the amount of data they provide and pay the network provider a flat fee, while end customers pay a flat fee to access those data. In the case where the broker can set both prices, the optimal pricing strategy, maximizing the broker's profit, is analysed as to its outcomes for all the stakeholders. The attractiveness for end customers is evaluated through the overall amount of data on offer and the service penetration rate (which is quite low for a typical context). The service penetration rate among WSNs (which is instead quite high), as well as their profit, are considered as the variables measuring the platform's success among WSNs. Additionally, the network fee is absorbed by the broker, with a negligible impact on the broker's profit and even a positive impact on the average WSN's profit. Finally, the overall sensing data rate and its impact on the platform's profit are also assessed.

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 2020

By Asian digital economy, we refer to high-tech developments, business and social transformations... more By Asian digital economy, we refer to high-tech developments, business and social transformations, and information-driven changes in the region's growth. We discuss its background and foundations, significance in Asia and contribution to removal of historical barriers in traditional business. We assess how new value chains are transforming country-level involvement in worldwide manufacturing and note "smiling curve theory" predictions about the global value chain in Asia for high-tech firms and their economies. The takeaway is that the digital economy in Asian nations involves revamping business processes through technology innovation, government policies for growth, and digital entrepreneurship. We analyze the "digital economy and society index", and attributes of nations, societies and economies, as a basis for framing our ideas. We consider research directions prompted by data analytics and AI, the platform economy, digital trade, fintech innovation, and societal and economic sustainability. We further highlight new issues in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no one Asia. Economies are vastly different between Japan, Korea versus China, Indonesia, and India. One of the common myths is people think that developing Asia is behind in digital, and I think it's, in fact, the other way around. … The poor legacy in these developing Asian markets, whether it is IT or digital penetration, or the traditional retail and banking infrastructure, often means that digital is a great opportunity for the country to leapfrog. The most interesting digital market in Asia is actually not the likes of Korea and Japan, but is more China, Indonesia, and India. These are the markets that are really pushing the boundary and innovating the most (Lau et al., 2016).

Gomorrah is an Italian crime drama TV series that has been appreciated worldwide, being sold in 1... more Gomorrah is an Italian crime drama TV series that has been appreciated worldwide, being sold in 190 countries, despite its wide use of Neapolitan dialect, hardly understandable without the use of subtitles even for most Italians. Scholars immediately approached the study of this serial phenomenon, analysing it from different points of view, framing it within the broader context of studies on the new Italian television and its serial products. Our approach to Gomorrah, taking these elements into account, adds a new perspective that concerns character recognition, an emerging branch of research, to associate dialogues with characters and identify the verbal features of characters. We have then chosen Gomorrah as a challenging dataset to perform character recognition. We rely on the transcripts of the series after a pre-processing stage to standardize the lexicon despite the vagaries of dialect and remove stopwords. A machine learning approach, based on a selection of tools, is then employed to identify characters from the lexicon they employ. The problem is approached as a multi-class classification scheme. We compare several representations of texts, including the simple one-hot encoding and more advanced embedding techniques. The results are presented through a confusion matrix, which can also serve to identify similarities in the linguistic profiles of characters.

2022 IEEE 21st Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), Jun 14, 2022

International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction

2018 UKSim-AMSS 20th International Conference on Computer Modelling and Simulation (UKSim), 2018

Mergers between mobile network operators involve merging their respective networks. Though this m... more Mergers between mobile network operators involve merging their respective networks. Though this may represent a chance to optimize the network structure, merging may not represent the cost-optimal solution. In this paper, we compare two different evolution paths, where the networks to be merged are separately upgraded to cover the whole traffic demand or a single network is optimized as the result of the merger (Build vs Merge). Our preliminary analyses show that the Merge approach may lead to 50% higher costs, due in particular to the high costs borne to switch off redundant access points. Any Build vs Merge decision should therefore consider the sunk costs due to the inherited networks, as well as the possible benefits associated to a merger.

2020 43rd International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP), 2020

Price setting is a major issue for 5G network operators. Network sharing allows virtual operators... more Price setting is a major issue for 5G network operators. Network sharing allows virtual operators (the renters) to offer end customers their services and compete with the network infrastructure owner. A Cournot game model is adopted here to analyse that competition under a flat rate pricing scheme. The optimal price is shown to be a weighted average of the customer’s willingness to pay and the operators’ costs. While the infrastructure owner can exploit the renting fee paid by virtual operators to reduce their market share, great attention has to be paid to costs, since they contribute significantly to shrink profit margins for both owner and renters.

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Automated character identification in movies and TV series has been typically carried out through... more Automated character identification in movies and TV series has been typically carried out through face detection in video and the association of faces with characters’ names extracted from dialogues or cast lists. We propose a deep learning architecture to identify characters based on subtitles only, precisely through the lexicon those characters employ. The identification task is formalized as a multi-class classification task. We apply our technique to the complete set of episodes in the Gomorrah TV series and achieve an average identification accuracy beyond 94 per cent on the full set of characters.

Risks

Correlation in cyber risk represents an additional source of concern for utility and industrial i... more Correlation in cyber risk represents an additional source of concern for utility and industrial infrastructures, where risks may be introduced by connected systems. A major means of reducing risk is to transfer it through insurance. In this paper, we consider a company which has peripheral branches in addition to its headquarters, where risk correlation is present between all of its sites and insurance is adopted to hedge against economic losses. We employ the expected utility principle (which leads to the well-known mean variance premium formula) to derive the insurance premium under risk correlation under several risk scenarios. Under a first-order approximation, a quasi-linear relationship between the premium and the two major risk factors (the number of branches and the risk correlation coefficient) is determined.

2016 European Modelling Symposium (EMS)

Each company continually has to choose the projects in which to invest, among the numerous propos... more Each company continually has to choose the projects in which to invest, among the numerous proposals submitted by company departments. Just a few projects among those put forward for funding can be actually accepted, due to the unavoidable discrepancy between available money and required investments. Though overall profit maximization could appear as the natural allocation goal, it is to be considered that such an allocation may eventually produce a rather unbalanced distribution of the overall budget, where some departments get most of it and others get a very small slice or no money at all. In this paper, we examine how the search for fairness in budget allocation impacts the overall profit, to assess whether a greater degree of satisfaction among departments can be achieved while pursuing profit maximization at the same time. We adopt a constrained knapsack model and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) as a measure of fairness, and perform a MonteCarlo simulation to measure the extent of profit sacrifice in the quest for fairness. We find that just a small sacrifice in profit is often needed to achieve a balanced distribution of the overall budget.

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

arXiv (Cornell University), Jan 24, 2019

Four packages in R are analyzed to carry out sentiment analysis. All packages allow to define cus... more Four packages in R are analyzed to carry out sentiment analysis. All packages allow to define custom dictionaries. Just one-SentimentRproperly accounts for the presence of negators.

FedCSIS 2011-3rd International Symposium on Services Science,, Settembre, Stettino, (Poland),, 2011

2018 UKSim-AMSS 20th International Conference on Computer Modelling and Simulation (UKSim), 2018

The availability of cloud storage is a key performance parameter. Though its measurement is inclu... more The availability of cloud storage is a key performance parameter. Though its measurement is included in any cloud monitoring system, the statistical accuracy of such measurements is often neglected. Such measurements may therefore be useless in SLA-related disputed between cloud providers and customers. In this paper Bootstrap Averaging (Bagging) is employed to assess the statistical accuracy when we measure the availability and the number of outages over a single period of time. The distribution and the confidence intervals are reported for a set of major cloud providers, using datasets built from customer reports. By using proper confidence intervals, the compliance of cloud providers with respect to target availability and outage figures can be checked.

2017 European Modelling Symposium (EMS), 2017

In a group of individuals aiming for a collective decision, that decision is influenced by indivi... more In a group of individuals aiming for a collective decision, that decision is influenced by individual competences, but these are in turn subject to a reciprocal influence. Such an influence may lead to less competent agents exerting an unduly influence, a phenomenon known as equality bias. In this paper an agent-based model is proposed to investigate the evolution of competences under such a reciprocal influence. Through MonteCarlo simulation it is shown that: a) the average competence at steady state diminishes as the degree of interaction among the agents and/or the number of agents grow, both in the case of just positive influence (more competent agents increasing the competence of less competent one) and when both positive and negative influences are present; b) the convergence towards a steady state value is slow and characterized by oscillations.

2017 14th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC), 2017

A brokering platform distributing the data collected by a set of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) ... more A brokering platform distributing the data collected by a set of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to end customers is considered, where WSNs receive a payment from the broker proportional to the amount of data they provide and pay the network provider a flat fee, while end customers pay a flat fee to access those data. In the case where the broker can set both prices, the optimal pricing strategy, maximizing the broker's profit, is analysed as to its outcomes for all the stakeholders. The attractiveness for end customers is evaluated through the overall amount of data on offer and the service penetration rate (which is quite low for a typical context). The service penetration rate among WSNs (which is instead quite high), as well as their profit, are considered as the variables measuring the platform's success among WSNs. Additionally, the network fee is absorbed by the broker, with a negligible impact on the broker's profit and even a positive impact on the average WSN's profit. Finally, the overall sensing data rate and its impact on the platform's profit are also assessed.

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 2020

By Asian digital economy, we refer to high-tech developments, business and social transformations... more By Asian digital economy, we refer to high-tech developments, business and social transformations, and information-driven changes in the region's growth. We discuss its background and foundations, significance in Asia and contribution to removal of historical barriers in traditional business. We assess how new value chains are transforming country-level involvement in worldwide manufacturing and note "smiling curve theory" predictions about the global value chain in Asia for high-tech firms and their economies. The takeaway is that the digital economy in Asian nations involves revamping business processes through technology innovation, government policies for growth, and digital entrepreneurship. We analyze the "digital economy and society index", and attributes of nations, societies and economies, as a basis for framing our ideas. We consider research directions prompted by data analytics and AI, the platform economy, digital trade, fintech innovation, and societal and economic sustainability. We further highlight new issues in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no one Asia. Economies are vastly different between Japan, Korea versus China, Indonesia, and India. One of the common myths is people think that developing Asia is behind in digital, and I think it's, in fact, the other way around. … The poor legacy in these developing Asian markets, whether it is IT or digital penetration, or the traditional retail and banking infrastructure, often means that digital is a great opportunity for the country to leapfrog. The most interesting digital market in Asia is actually not the likes of Korea and Japan, but is more China, Indonesia, and India. These are the markets that are really pushing the boundary and innovating the most (Lau et al., 2016).