Aldo F Dragoni | Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy (original) (raw)

Papers by Aldo F Dragoni

2017 International Symposium ELMAR, 2017

This system adopts spherical photographs to map coastal areas and port entrances. It is an augmen... more This system adopts spherical photographs to map coastal areas and port entrances. It is an augmented reality (AR) application to be regarded as an aid in navigation during the night and/or in foggy weather conditions. Also, the system offers unique multimedia content which will be applied in other areas, such as monitoring illegal constructions along the coasts.

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, 2014

The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) domain is associated with a large number of stakeholders such a... more The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) domain is associated with a large number of stakeholders such as patients, their relatives, caregivers and physicians. This variety introduces a great heterogeneity in system requirements, which sometimes results in conflicting needs that must be considered when developing effective AAL systems. In this work we adopt a Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) approach to map out needs and requirements for the AAL domain. Following the requirements mapping, we also propose a preliminary architecture for a home care system (named e-Ward) to assist patients in their domestic environment as if they are in a hospital room.

The ability to respond sensibly to changing and conflicting beliefs is an integral part of intell... more The ability to respond sensibly to changing and conflicting beliefs is an integral part of intelligent agency. To this end, we outline the design and implementation of a Distributed Assumption-based Truth Maintenance System (DATMS) appropriate for controlling cooperative problem solving in a dynamic real world multi-agent community. Our DATMS works on the principle of local coherence which means that different agents can have different perspectives on the same fact provided that these stances are appropriately ...

The Western World has almost completed the transition toward the Digital Television (DTV), and in... more The Western World has almost completed the transition toward the Digital Television (DTV), and in particu-
lar toward the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT). In every home there is at least one decoder for the DTT.
Some of them have a modem, to connect to a telephonic return line, and a Smart Card reader, both required
by the “Pay TV” channels. Since those readers are compatible with the Governmental Smart Cards, a new
access for the masses to secure and confidential digital services is nowadays available in our Information
Society. “T-Government” defines the set of services provided by Governments or private entities via DTT.
“Multimedia Home Platform” is the standard for DTT applications. A Local Health will be no more justified
for offering services only through the Web disregarding both the broadcast and the return channels of the
DTT since by doing so it would contribute to deepen the “digital divide” between skilled (young) people and
unskilled (elder) people. The author defines a scenario for providing such T-Health Services both for patients
(T-monitoring health parameters) and healthy citizens. These latter will have a bunch of services over DTT,
not only informative or interactive applications on the Set top Box, but also transactional services through the
secure return channel. However, much effort has to be spent to guarantee the usability of that new interface
which is quite different from that of a Web application. The author designed, tested and redesigned a suite of
DTT applications as a “proof of concept” to show the potential of this new platform for health information
services. DTT may represent a real contribution to bring social healthcare and wellness

The body of beliefs (facts and rules) accumulated in the course of time by a knowledge-based syst... more The body of beliefs (facts and rules) accumulated in the course of time by a knowledge-based system interacting with a complex and dynamic world is destined to evolve. Some of the newcoming pieces of information integrate and corroborate the previously held corpus of sentences about the world, but others might cause serious conflicts with the established knowledge. In this case, the eventual acquisition of the new evidence should be accompanied by a partial or total reduction of the credibility of the conflicting pieces of knowledge. If the system's collection of beliefs is not a flat set of facts but contains rules, finding such conflicts and determining all the sentences involved in the contradictions can be hard because knowledge is only partially explicit. Since the seminal, influential and philosophical work of Alchourrn, Grdenfors and Makinson

The paper presents a vision of how Social Networking for the NetMedicine could replace old classi... more The paper presents a vision of how
Social Networking for the NetMedicine could
replace old classical TeleMedicine applications.
It discusses the possible impact of Internet
Communities over the tele-referencing, tele-
reporting till tele-diagnosis presenting a simple
software case implemented in a University Lab.

The GSM voice channel is the world's most widely used mobile communication network. Unfortunately... more The GSM voice channel is the world's most widely used mobile communication network. Unfortunately these networks are affected by serious vulnerability from hardware-based attacks and communications can be easy to intercept. This paper describes a prototype implementation of a device which enables secure data and voice transmission over GSM voice channel network. The proposed system is supposed to interact with every cell phone or mobile device connected to the GSM network, differentiating itself from the best-known crypto-phone category. In the following, we will highlight the particular modulation strategy used to generate a specific wave-form that allows the receiver to correctly decipher data with a very low BER. In conclusion, this work aims to define the principles to model a secure infrastructure over a GSM network

Quando nel 2012 la Televisione Analogica terminerà le trasmissioni ed i decoders del Digitale Ter... more Quando nel 2012 la Televisione Analogica terminerà le trasmissioni ed i decoders del Digitale Terrestre (DT)
saranno nelle case di tutti gli Italiani, gli Enti Pubblici non saranno più giustificati nel fornire informazioni e
servizi solo su Internet. Anche le Aziende Sanitarie dovranno contribuire a ridurre questo “digital divide”
portando sul DT le più importanti informazioni e servizi cogenti erogati attualmente tramite Internet. La
“Multimedia Home Platform” del DT ha però caratteristiche protocollari e strutturali diverse, per cui è
importante capire fin da ora come potranno essere trasportati contenuti dall'ambiente PC allo scenario
televisivo, in cui la capacità d'interazione è ridotta dai limiti imposti dal telecomando. La presenza del
“canale di ritorno” consentirà al cittadino di inviare richieste di servizi all'Azienda e ricevere risposte
personali, garantendo quindi la specificità interattiva e la riservatezza

L'espressione “Revisione delle Conoscenze” indica il riassetto di un insieme di formule di un opp... more L'espressione “Revisione delle Conoscenze” indica il riassetto di un
insieme di formule di un opportuno linguaggio formale a seguito dell'arrivo di
nuove formule contraddicenti parte di quelle già presenti. Carlos Alchourrón
contribuì a suscitare l’interesse per questo argomento che ha poi ricevuto
l’attenzione di molti ricercatori in vari sottocampi dell'Intelligenza Artificiale e
dell'Informatica. L’articolo propone una breve panoramica su alcuni recenti
sviluppi in questo composito argomento, con particolare riferimento a metodi
che potrebbero avere una ricaduta applicativa nel campo della logica deontica.

Explanation is relevant for legal narratives in many a way. Of these, there is a category at the... more Explanation is relevant for legal narratives in many a way. Of
these, there is a category at the intersection with exoneration; as the
latter (\not guilty") is the complement of a guilty verdict, it would
appear to be the case it's all about whatever leads to judicial decision-
making. Yet, pleading innocent, or to a lesser o ense, may happen
even informally, out of the justice system, or then prior to or during
interrogation by a police investigation team. ALIBI (Sec. 3) ALIBI
impersonates somebody accused who produces an exonerating account.
The prototype focuses on one \player". The JAMA model (Sec. 4) is
concerned with the public (even cultural) perception of the workings of
justice in a given instance, the example being a murder case that didn't
go to court. There are several players to be accounted for, yet the multi-
agency of the multitude is treated rather monolithically in the model,
which again stands for just one cognitive agent. Intermediate between
one agent and a multitude of agents is the case of a deliberating panel,
such as a jury whose members gradually make up their mind when
confronted with the delivery of the evidence, and then by negotiating
the verdict among them; Section 2 is concerned with modelling this.

Ontology revision is the process of managing an ontology when a new axiom or fact would render it... more Ontology revision is the process of managing an ontology
when a new axiom or fact would render it inconsistent. So far, the AGM
approach to belief revision has been adapted to work with ontologies.
However, when multiple sources are contributing uncertain knowledge
about a static domain, an approach that doesn’t give priority to incoming
information and allows to recover previously discarded axioms is more
suited.
We describe an ontology revision framework that links symbolic and
numerical techniques to allow the consistent evolution of an ontology
from the contributions of multiple potentially unreliable sources.

We are developing a framework to acquire knowledge from a peer-to-peer network and to evolve it m... more We are developing a framework to acquire knowledge from a peer-to-peer network and to evolve it maintaining local coherence and recoverability of previously acquired data. In this context, we give trust to informations and informa-tion sources in a novel way. Informations acquired from the web is given a truth value, based on previous valuations. Each peer deal with them using a fuzzy extension of RDF semantics, apply extra entailment rules derived from an on-tology, and deal with inconsistencies using belief-revision techniques. The result is a set of consistent and logically closed data that can be visualized and annotated by human users. The knowledge shared with other peers has trust metadata on them. Trust values comes both from belief revision pro-cess outputs and from user annotations

A system of Multiple Neural Networks has been proposed to solve the face recognition problem. Our... more A system of Multiple Neural Networks has been proposed to solve the face recognition problem. Our idea is that a set of expert networks specialized to recognize specific parts of face are better than a single network. This is because a single network could no longer be able to correctly recognize the subject when some characteristics partially change. For this purpose we assume that each network has a reliability factor defined as the probability that the network is giving the desired output. In case of conflicts between the outputs of the networks the reliability factor can be dynamically re-evaluated on the base of the Bayes Rule. The new reliabilities will be used to establish who is the subject. Moreover the network disagreed with the group and specialized to recognize the changed characteristic of the subject will be retrained and then forced to correctly recognize the subject. Then the system is subjected to continuous learning.

We present an architecture that provides semantic Web annotations of sound clips described by MP... more We present an architecture that provides semantic Web annotations of sound clips described by MPEG-7 audio descriptions. The great flexibility of the MPEG-7 standard makes especially difficult to compare descriptions coming from heterogeneous sources. To cope with this, the architecture would first obtain "normalized" versions of the audio descriptions using different adaptation techniques. Once in a "normalized" format, descriptions can be then projected into uniform and semantically relevant vector spaces, ready to be processed by a variety of well known computational intelligence techniques. As higher semantic results are then available, these can be exported as interoperable (RDF) annotations about the resource that was originally fed into the system. As novel aspect, through the use and interchange of MPEG-7 descriptions, the framework allows building applications (e.g. classificators) which can provide annotations on distributed audio resource sets.

A knowledge management system is more than an archive of textual docu- ments; it provides context... more A knowledge management system is more than an archive of textual docu-
ments; it provides context information, allowing to know which documents
where used by people with a common goal. In the hypothesis that a set of
textual documents with a common context can be assimilated to the long
term memory of a human expert executor, we can use on them mining
techniques inspired by the mechanic of human comprehension in expert
domains. Text mining techniques for KM task can use a model of the
long-term memory to extract meaningful keywords from the documents.
The model acts as a dynamic and non-stationary dimensionality reduction
strategy, allowing the clustering of context documents according to key-
word presence, the classification of external documents according to local
criteria, and a better understanding of document content and relatedness.

Testing is a key step in software development cycle. Error and bug fixing costs can significantly... more Testing is a key step in software development cycle. Error and bug fixing costs can significantly affect
development costs without a full and comprehensive test on the system.
First efforts to introduce real-time features in the Linux kernel are now more than ten years old.
Nevertheless, no comprehensive testsuites is able to assess the functionality or the conformance to the
real-time operating systems standards of the Linux kernel and of real-time nanokernels that rely on it.
In this paper we propose Lachesis, an automated testsuite derived from the LTP (Linux Test Project)
real-time tests. Lachesis is designed with portability and extensibility as main goals, and it can be used
to test Linux, PREEMPT RT, RTAI and Xenomai real-time features and performances. It provides some
tests for SCHED DEADLINE patch, too. Lachesis is now under active development, and more tests are
planned to be added in the near future.

There are different proposals to extend RDF model theory allowing a treatment of uncertainty with... more There are different proposals to extend RDF model theory allowing a treatment of uncertainty within the language. This works proposes a unified approach for RDF graph and statement labeling. This approach is more general than fuzzy and temporal labels and can be used to label RDF graphs with membership degrees, timestamps, or with a combination of labelings. Starting from a definition of labeled sets and labeled logic, we define labeled RDF and labeled RDF Schema. A partial ordering among labels allows qualitative treatment of uncertainty

The healthcare domain is wide and characterized by system and data herogeneity. To achieve high q... more The healthcare domain is wide and characterized by system and data herogeneity. To achieve high quality and efficiency standards, interoperability between different information systems is strongly required.
The aim of this paper is to propose an agent oriented architecture to address this kind of issues, which is compliant with the European Union (EU) guidelines and with requirements issued by the italian Ministry of Health. To validate and to show the capabilities of our system, we developed on such architecture a typical emergency-response scenario, where a first aid medical staff urgently needs to retrieve, through mobile devices, the Patient Summary (PS) of a citizen, which is part of his Electronic Health Record (EHR)

Belief revision is the process of rearranging a knowledge base to preserve global consistency whi... more Belief revision is the process of rearranging a knowledge base to preserve global consistency while accomodating incoming information. Early approaches to belief revision used symbolic model-theoretic, considering the problem as one of changing a logical theory. More recent approaches have adopted qualitative syntactic methods, taking them into the area of "truth maintenance systems", and numerical mathematical methods, thus moving into the mainstream literature of uncertainty management. Multi-agent systems, in which information may come from a variety of human or artificial sources with different degrees of reliability, seem to be a natural domain for belief revision. The aim of this paper is to give a synoptic perspective of this composite subject from the clear air of the high theoretical peaks down to the muddy plain of practical algorithms

2017 International Symposium ELMAR, 2017

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, 2014

2017 IEEE 15th International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN), 2017

The complexity of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) poses new challenges in their design, model check... more The complexity of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) poses new challenges in their design, model checking and maintenance. The hardware and software designers are in search, more than ever, for simple and interoperable approaches that render the complexity of CPSs a treatable matter. In this work, database language is suggested as an enabling technology and a lean technique to the purpose. An example with best available embedded database technology is conducted by means of a deployment test on tiny embedded electronics.