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

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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.

/pdf/intelligent-distributed-surveillance-systems-a-review-1jp146ld4r.pdf

Intelligent distributed surveillance systems: a review

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

Multimedia applications require the transmission of real- time streams over a network. These streams often exhibit variable band- width requirements, and require high bandwidth and guarantees from the network. This creates problems when such streams are delivered over the Internet. To solve these problems, recently, a small set of dierentiated services has been introduced. Among these, Premium Service is suitable for real-time transmissions. It uses a bandwidth allocation mechanism (BAM) based on the trac peak rate. Since the bandwidth requirement of a video stream can be quite variable, this can result in a high cost to the user and an inecient use of network bandwidth. In this paper we introduce a BAM that can increase bandwidth utilization and decrease the allocated bandwidth without aecting the QoS of the delivered real- time stream and without introducing any modication in the Premium Service. We also introduce several frame dropping mechanisms that fur- ther reduce bandwidth consumption subject to a QoS constraint when coupled with the above BAM. The proposed BAM and the heuristics algorithms are evaluated using Motion JPEG and MPEG videos and are shown to be eective in reducing bandwidth requirements.

Real-Time Trac Transmission over the Internet

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 period 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. To solve this problem, we propose a modified version of MetaRing, named MetaRing+. Through a performance study, the properties of MetaRing+ are deeply investigated.

MetaRing/sup +/: an enhancement of the MetaRing access protocol for supporting real-time applications

Design and Analysis of a Mechanism for Supporting Interactive Video Streaming Applications over the Internets.

Social media and personal health might be a dan-gerous combination: people are influenced by what they read online and don't pay attention to who wrote what they read. What happened during the COVID-19 pandemic? Who were the opinion leaders on social media? What were the conversations about? How did the health institutions communicate? To under-stand this, we focus on Twitter, and we analyze more than three million of Italian-written tweets posted from January 2020 to December 2021. We propose a method to identify opinion leaders and to analyze the content of the conversations. Results show that: (i) opinion leaders are linked to what they say and when they say it; (ii) politicians, newscast, and ordinary people accounts were able to become opinion leaders during the pandemic; (iii) conversations moved from a medical focus (at the beginning of the pandemic) to a social focus (in the last months of 2021); (iv) absence of health care institutions among opinion leaders. These results show that our approach might be useful for those who want to monitor the social scenario in terms of health (e.g., to identify as soon as possible accounts against or critical to medicine or to health authorities).

Opinion Leaders and Twitter: Metric Proposal and Psycholinguistic Analysis

People barely know what they eat and drink: product labels are written with small characters and with a difficult terminology. As a result, people spend too much time reading labels or avoid reading them at all. To connect food data with people we design of a food IoT (Internet of Things) scenario, where a smart cart tells us if the food product we are about to buy meet our preferences or not. In particular, we first perform a real-world study to understand consumers’ behavior while they shop; then we design a food IoT scenario and we use current technologies to investigate its feasibility. Results show that people would appreciate a tool able to help them connecting with food data and also show that current technologies are sufficient to create a food IoT scenario.

Marco Furini

Papers

Real-Time Trac Transmission over the Internet

MetaRing/sup +/: an enhancement of the MetaRing access protocol for supporting real-time applications

Design and Analysis of a Mechanism for Supporting Interactive Video Streaming Applications over the Internets.

Opinion Leaders and Twitter: Metric Proposal and Psycholinguistic Analysis

Smart Cart: When Food Enters the IoT Scenario