There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Home PURPOSE OF THE CENTER: To develop the center to address state-of-the-art research, create innovating educational programs, and support technology transfers using commercially viable results to assist the Army Research Laboratory to develop the next generation Future Combat System in the telecommunications sector that assures prevention of perceived threats, and Non Line of Sight/Beyond Line of Sight lethal support.

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Digital processing of speech signals

This survey describes the current state-of-the-art in the development of automated visual surveillance systems so as to provide researchers in the field with a summary of progress achieved to date and to identify areas where further research is needed. The ability to recognise objects and humans, to describe their actions and interactions from information acquired by sensors is essential for automated visual surveillance. The increasing need for intelligent visual surveillance in commercial, law enforcement and military applications makes automated visual surveillance systems one of the main current application domains in computer vision. The emphasis of this review is on discussion of the creation of intelligent distributed automated surveillance systems. The survey concludes with a discussion of possible future directions.

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Intelligent distributed surveillance systems: a review

VSUMM: A mechanism designed to produce static video summaries and a novel evaluation method

A growing number of museums has started using social networks as different forms of engagement that can act outside museum architectural bounds. Specifically, museum leaders are praising Twitter as a necessary tool to any online programming or presence in museums today. Nevertheless, using Twitter in a satisfactory way so to increase museums' influence is not an easy task and there has been a gap between its usage and the possibilities it represents. In this paper, we propose an easily understandable framework to analyze the key content factors in museum conversations, including novel formulas for the evaluation of tweets and Twitter accounts influence. We apply the framework to a dataset of 100,000 messages related to 26 museum accounts to understand which museum is more influential in writing tweets, and which features have more impact on the influence of a tweet. Finally, we propose 5 key steps that museums can perform in order to write more influential tweets.

5 Steps to Make Art Museums Tweet Influentially

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed every aspect of our professional and private life. It forced us to stay at home and it gave unprecedented power to technology. In this paper we focus on the emerging technology of smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo Plus, Google Home, etc.) and, through a developed questionnaire, we investigate how people use these devices. In particular, we analyze whether the human behavior has been affected by availability of these smart speaker. Results showed that the usage of these devices did not increase during lockdown, but it highlighted the presence of some privacy issues that might represent a burden to the diffusion of this type of technology.

On the Usage of Smart Speakers During the Covid-19 Coronavirus Lockdown

"Covid-19 is a virus developed to rule the world" is just one of the many fake-news published on the Web. In this pandemic period, the Web is flooded with real news, allegedly true or blatantly false. To understand how fake news is affecting the Covid-19 perception, we selected 40 news (either true or fake) related to the origin, diffusion, treatment and effects of Covid-19 and we asked 293 volunteers to express their opinion on the truthfulness of the news. Then, we propose an Awareness index to compute knowledge degree of the volunteers. The results highlight a large ignorance on medical news, ignorance that goes beyond educational background. The study highlights the need for Health Institution to enter social media platforms in order to clearly explain what is true and what is false on Covid-19.

/pdf/untangling-between-fake-news-and-truth-in-social-media-to-3ka84anh7a.pdf

Untangling between fake-news and truth in social media to understand the Covid-19 Coronavirus

The wide availability of video lectures within digital archives is causing significant problems to video providers. Indeed, students search for very specific contents and the few minutes of video lecture that cover the required topic have to be found in an archive composed of thousands of hours of videos. Therefore, the indexing of video material is becoming a critical process. Unfortunately, most of the systems return a list of full-length video lectures, and force students to use VCR-like functions in order to find what they are looking for. This approach is not adequate. Furthermore, the indexing process never considers the quality of the lecture (e.g., “interesting”, “meaningless”, etc.). A recent approach proposed to improve the indexing process by using social tagging. To be effective, this approach requires having a considerable number of tags. In this paper, we propose TagLecture, a Game With A Purpose that introduces game elements into the indexing process in order to involve students in the indexing process of video lectures. Through an experimental investigation we highlight that the gamification of the video indexing process is well accepted by students: more than 80% of participants liked the idea of using quality-based tags to classify video lectures, and more than half of them liked the idea of a game where students challenge each other to tag pieces of video lectures.

TagLecture: The gamification of video lecture indexing through quality-based tags

The high availability of video streams is making necessary mechanisms for indexing such contents in the Web world. In this paper we focus on news programs and we propose a mechanism that integrates low and high level video features to provide a high level semantic description. A color/luminance analysis is coupled with audio analysis to provide a better identification of all the video segments that compose the video stream. Each video segment is subject to speech detection and is described through MPEG7 so that the resulting metadata description can be used to index the video stream. An experimental evaluation shows the benefits of integrating audio and video analysis.

Marco Furini

Papers

5 Steps to Make Art Museums Tweet Influentially

On the Usage of Smart Speakers During the Covid-19 Coronavirus Lockdown

Untangling between fake-news and truth in social media to understand the Covid-19 Coronavirus

TagLecture: The gamification of video lecture indexing through quality-based tags

An audio/video analysis mechanism for web indexing