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

It’s been many years since media began talking about the wonders of the IoT scenario, where a smart fridge checks the milk expiration date and automatically compiles the shopping list, but in the real life how many people have this smart fridge in the kitchen? Yet the interest around the IoT scenario is growing every day, so in this paper we try to figure out if IoT is science fiction or a real revolution. In particular, we describe in simple terms the IoT scenario, what can be done with current technologies, what are the main obstacles that limit the success and the wide use of IoT and we highlight directions that can make IoT a true reality.

IoT: Science Fiction or Real Revolution?

The usage of sensors is emerging in the nowadays scenario where safety related applications are more and more used. These applications have timing constraints that need to be met by the control system. Thus, guaranteeing timeliness properties is considered a key challenge for research on wireless sensor networks. Among the different components that need to address this problem, we focus on the communication sub-system and, in particular, on the MAC protocols that handles transmissions. To provide timeliness behavior, the employed MAC protocol has to provide a time-bounded service. The contribution of this paper is to investigate the performance of two wireless MAC protocols that can be employed in wireless sensor networks: IEEE 802.11e and WRT-Ring. The former is part of the well know IEEE 802.11 standard, whereas the latter has characteristics that well fit the requirements of wireless sensor networks. Results show that two protocols have similar performances for networks with limited devices and/or traffic, whereas when devices and/or traffic increases, WRT-Ring has to be preferred.

Real-Time Traffic in Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks

A tool to provide an idea of the content of a given video is becoming a need in the current Web scenario, where the presence of videos is increasing day after day. Dynamic summarization techniques can be used to this aim as they set up a video abstract, by selecting and sequencing short video clips extracted from the original video. Needless to say, the selection process is critical. In this paper we focus our attention on clustering algorithms to provide such selection and we investigate the effects of their employment in the Web scenario. Clustering algorithms are very effective in producing static video summary, but few works consider them for video abstract production. For this reason, we set up an experimental scenario where we investigate their performance considering different categories of video, different abstract lengths and different low-level video analysis. Results show that clustering techniques can be useful only for some categories of videos and only if the selection process is based on video scene characteristics. Furthermore, the investigation also shows that to provide a customized service (user can freely decide the abstract time length), only fast clustering algorithm should be used.

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On Using Clustering Algorithms to Produce Video Abstracts for the Web Scenario

Simple and easy-to-play casual games are flooding the mobile gaming market and are best-sellers on the mobile game charts of several cellphone network operators. Most of the titles are mobile versions of videogames developed in the '80s and '90s, which were also very simple and easy-to-play. In this article we focus on adventure and movie games, a genre simple, easy-to-play, and very popular in the past. We propose a software architecture to easily produce full-motion adventure games for the mobile scenario, and thus potentially transform any modern cellphone into an adventure game console. The games are portable and protected against un-authorized usage. The feasibility of our approach is shown through a prototype player and an evaluation that shows the suitability of the proposed approach for the mobile scenario. The simplicity of our approach along with the ubiquity of modern cell-phones may bring new life to adventure games, which can also become an exciting genre for the current mobile gaming scenario.

An architecture to easily produce adventure and movie games for the mobile scenario

The advent of digital devices with innovative features has changed the world of home video entertainment. Nowadays we have access to devices that store several hours of video material, skip commercials, and even pause the play out of a live event. Despite these innovative features, modern digital devices access to recorded material in a way very similar to old analog VCRs. In this paper we propose Fast Play, a mechanism that uses simple low-level audio and video analysis to provide a novel feature in digital video devices. This novel feature is a hybrid between the classic Play service and the Fast-Forward service, and aims at playing out videos in a time-reduced manner, by maintaining the time evolving nature of the original video, and by providing videos with completely intelligible audio. An experimental assessment shows that Fast Play produces videos that are informative, enjoyable, largely reduced, and also shows that users really appreciate the Fast Play feature as it produces a pleasant surrogate of the original video.

Marco Furini

Papers

IoT: Science Fiction or Real Revolution?

Real-Time Traffic in Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks

On Using Clustering Algorithms to Produce Video Abstracts for the Web Scenario

An architecture to easily produce adventure and movie games for the mobile scenario

Fast play: a novel feature for digital consumer video devices