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

People watch TV with a second screen nearby and more than 30% of the time is used to perform social activities. This is why broadcasters are trying to exploit hashtags: they want people to talk about TV-shows in the social scenario. In this paper, we investigate how broadcasters use hashtags to promote their TV-shows. Indeed, we focus on 15 different TV-shows and we perform two different types of analyses: one investigates if broadcasters propose official hashtags and analyzes how these hashtags are promoted, the other investigates the characteristics of the Twitter conversations held around the considered TV-shows. Results show that broadcasters do not have a clear strategy in the social scenario: most of them do not exploit the synergy that can be created by linking the TV scenario to social and Web platforms. However, from the analysis of the Twitter conversations, we identified a successful case, whose analysis allowed us to outline some clear guidelines that broadcasters should employ when using hashtags to promote their TV-shows.

The Use of Hashtags in TV-Shows: Analysis and Guidelines

e-goisms: What Would the Web be Without the Others?

Real-time applications, such as process control signals and multimedia transmission, are being increasingly deployed in networks. These applications produce a type of traffic with stringent timing requirements whose transmission is critical as it has to be completed within its deadline. This can be performed only using protocols that support real-time traffic transmission. We propose a new real-time protocol, called RT-Ring, able to support transmission of both real-time and generic traffic over a ring network. RT-Ring provides both network guarantees and high network resource utilization, while ensuring compatibility with the emerging differentiated service architecture. Network guarantees are fully proved and high network utilization is highlighted by a comparison study with the FDDI protocol. This comparison shows that RT-Ring network capacities are greater than the corresponding FDDI capacities.

Design and analysis of RT-Ring: a protocol for supporting real-time communications

Multimedia contents are more and more present in our life and their presentation usually rests on a text-based description that defines rules and properties of such contents and is produced by markup description languages (e.g., XML, MPEG7-DDL and SMIL). Although effective, the criticism to such approach regards the length of the produced description, which is considered too verbose. As this may lead to performance problems for devices with limited resources, binary-based descriptions are being proposed. However, the simplicity of a text-based description cannot be underestimated and hence, the contribution of this paper is the proposal of a reduced, but extensible, markup Multimedia Contents Description Language (MCDL), which produces short text-based description of multimedia contents. MCDL is designed to organize and synchronize contents for the mobile music scenario and a comparison study with other languages shows that MCDL describes the same contents with a much shorter description.

MCDL: a reduced but extensible multimedia contents description language

Moving around a university campus may seem an activity of little importance: students are young, they walk and run without problems, with a simple glance they know where they are and where to go, they understand where a lesson is held, when a teacher is available or where to go when they are hungry. Activities that millions of students do every day. But what about students with some form of physical impairments? For them, moving around a university campus is a daily challenge. Can conversational interfaces improve the accessibility of a University campus? is the research question we address in this study. We involved students (with and without disabilities) in the development and evaluation of a skill for the Amazon Alexa platform. Results show that conversational interfaces are highly appreciated by most of the participants and confirm that such interfaces might improve the daily experience of users within a university campus.

Marco Furini

Papers

The Use of Hashtags in TV-Shows: Analysis and Guidelines

e-goisms: What Would the Web be Without the Others?

Design and analysis of RT-Ring: a protocol for supporting real-time communications

MCDL: a reduced but extensible multimedia contents description language

On using Conversational Interfaces to Improve the Accessibility of a University Campus