Marco Furini

Bio: Marco Furini is an academic researcher from University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. The author has contributed to research in topics: Social media & The Internet. The author has an hindex of 20, co-authored 100 publications receiving 3493 citations. Previous affiliations of Marco Furini include University of Eastern Piedmont & University of Bologna.

ONELab: Online Education with Minimal Human Supervision

Abstract: Many educational institutes are recording classroom lessons to improve the students' learning process. Unfortunately, a simple recording does not necessarily imply benefits. Indeed, when producing video lectures, there are different challenges that must be faced: production costs, accessibility, usability, video indexing, just to name a few. In this paper, we share our experience building ONELab, a system designed to capture, record, edit and stream video lectures. ONELab was designed to be scalable and to have low-cost implementation and maintenance. The system has been used in the 2017-18 Academic Year to manage the 49 courses offered by the five degrees available at our Department. In numbers, it supported 1,054 freshman students and produced 1,376 video lectures (for a total of 2,064 hours). The usage analysis showed that students appreciated the system and a comparative analysis between students who used the system and students who did not use the system, showed that the former passed more exams (+97.8%), had better grades (+8%) and acquired more credits (+105%).

SIWeb: understanding the Interests of the Society through Web data Analysis

Abstract: The high availability of user-generated contents in the Web scenario represents a tremendous asset for understanding various social phenomena. Methods and commercial products that exploit the widespread use of the Web as a way of conveying personal opinions have been proposed, but a critical thinking is that these approaches may produce a partial, or distorted, understanding of the society, because most of them focus on definite scenarios, use specific platforms, base their analysis on the sole magnitude of data, or treat the different Web resources with the same importance. In this paper, we present SIWeb (Social Interests through Web Analysis), a novel mechanism designed to measure the interest the society has on a topic (e.g., a real world phenomenon, an event, a person, a thing). SIWeb is general purpose (it can be applied to any decision making process), cross platforms (it uses the entire Webspace, from social media to websites, from tags to reviews), and time effective (it measures the time correlation between the Web resources). It uses fractal analysis to detect the temporal relations behind all the Web resources (e.g., Web pages, RSS, newsgroups, etc.) that talk about a topic and combines this number with the temporal relations to give an insight of the the interest the society has about a topic. The evaluation of the proposal shows that SIWeb might be helpful in decision making processes as it reflects the interests the society has on a specific topic.

Automatic and User-Tailored Playlist Sequencing

Abstract: Social technologies have revolutionized the world of music and playlists have become the new radios. However, the production of playlists has been mainly focused on identifying the songs that the listener might like, disregarding the songs sequencing process. In this paper, we propose a highly user-oriented sequencing method. The idea is to use the user's listening history to identify a possible sequencing criterion used by the user when playing out songs. The proposed method is then evaluated with real users and results showed the importance of personalization in the playlist sequencing process. Although the study is still in its early stage, results are promising and, in the future, we plan to personalize the sequencing process even more.

Method for analyzing web space data

Abstract: A method for analyzing data from the web that determine the importance that a chosen subject has in society, e.g., subject matter relating a concert, a scientific discovery, a football match, a person, a corporation, a brand, or a car, and analyze such data that can represent the entire society better than the known techniques. The method according to the invention can avoid malicious alterations and is able to measure and detect the temporal relations among all the web resources that talk about a particular topic or subject matter.

Analysis of MetaRing: a Real-Time Protocol for Metropolitan Area Network

Abstract: This paper focuses on access protocols for supporting real-time communications in a distributed system; specifically, we analyze the MetaRing protocol. MetaRing is a protocol, designed and prototyped to handle, in a local or metropolitan area environment, both periodic traffic with real-time constraints (synchronous traffic) and bursty data traffic with no delay constraints (asynchronous traffic). We show that, in the original proposal of the MetaRing protocol, the deadlines of real-time messages are not always satisfied. Through a performance study, we solve this problem modifying MetaRing. The properties of the modified version are fully proved. These properties allow the development of a synchronous bandwidth allocation scheme. With this allocation scheme, the modified version of MetaRing, is able to support distributed real-time applications.

I and i

Abstract: 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 …

How to… home page

Abstract: 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.

Intelligent distributed surveillance systems: a review

Abstract: 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.