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

Learning is considered one of the most important activities for the human being, and many educational institutes are trying to improve the engagement with students through the availability of video lectures. However, the access to video material is not easy as one may think. For millions of people with some form of disabilities the simple act of browsing a video lecture archive represents an insuperable burden. Motivated by the need to improve accessibility to video lecture materials, in this paper we present VLP, which stands for Video Lecture Playlist. The idea is to use low-level audio/video features, video segmentation and OCR analysis to “understand” the content of the video lectures. In this way, students can search for specific topic through keywords and the system browses the entire video lecture archive to find all the pieces of video lectures that cover the searched topic. These pieces are then provided through a playlist, so that a single search and a single playout return a complete view of how the searched topic is covered within the entire archive. A developed prototype shows the feasibility of the approach and results obtained from a survey highlight that students would like to browse video lecture archives with keywords and playlists.

Topic-based playlist to improve video lecture accessibility

Hashtags are increasingly used to promote, foster and group conversations around specific topics. For example, the entertainment industry widely uses hashtags to increase interest around their products. In this paper, we analyze whether hashtags are effective in a niche scenario like the art exhibitions. The obtained results show very different behaviors and confused strategies: from museums that do not consider hashtags at all, to museums that create official hastags, but hardly mention them; from museums that create multiple hashtags for the same exhibition, to those that are very confused about hashtag usage. Furthermore, we discovered an interesting case, where a smart usage of hashtags stimulated the interest around art. Finally, we highlight few practical guidelines with behaviors to follow and to avoid; the guidelines might help promoting art exhibitions.

The Use of Hashtags in the Promotion of Art Exhibitions

The spoken language is the most natural interface for a human being and, thanks to the scientific-technological advances made in recent decades, nowadays we have voice assistance devices to interact with a machine through the use of natural language. Vocal user interfaces (VUI) are now included in many technological devices, such as desktop and laptop computers, smartphones and tablets, navigators, and home speakers, being welcomed by the market. The use of voice assistants can also be interesting and strategic in educational contexts and in public environments. This paper presents a case study based on the design, development, and assessment of a prototype devoted to assist students' during their daily activities in a smart campus context.

Conversational Interfaces for a Smart Campus: A Case Study

Social media are nowadays used by people to talk about any kind of topic, either private or not, and among others health problems. Concerning health, on social media one can find large communities discussing about chronic diseases. Here people look for advise, information, support, and so on. In this paper we take into consideration the Italian Twitter community interested in diabetes, a chronic blood disease. Our aim is to understand which are the main conversation topics in this community. Thus, we analyzed about 9K tweets written in Italian that contained the world {\em diabete} (diabetes) and performed both a hashtag analysis and a lexicon analysis, the latter by means of ad-hoc dictionaries. Results show that this is a calm community interested into several distinct topics (e.g., disease related information gathering, recipes for diabetes patients, fundraising campaigns), none of which is really predominant over the others.

Diabetes: What Are Italian Twitter Users Talking About?

Nowadays, the term “student” embraces people with different needs and lifestyles (e.g., people with part-time or full-time jobs, people with some forms of disabilities, etc.) and, in the attempt to reach out to these students, many educational institutes are recording and releasing classroom lessons. In this paper, we share our experience building ONELab, a system designed to capture, record, edit and stream video lectures. ONELab was designed to provide flexibility to educational contents (i.e., no time and geographical constraints) and to improve the students’ learning process. Moreover, the system had to be scalable and cost-effective. The system has been used in the 2017-18 Academic Year to manage the 49 courses offered by the five-degree programs available at our Department. In numbers, it supported 1,251 students and produced 1,376 video lectures (for a total of 2,064 hours). The usage analysis showed that students want to adapt the learning process to their lifestyle and showed that students who used ONELab acquired more credits (+119%) and had better grades (+9.4%) than those who did not use the system.

Marco Furini

Papers

Topic-based playlist to improve video lecture accessibility

The Use of Hashtags in the Promotion of Art Exhibitions

Conversational Interfaces for a Smart Campus: A Case Study

Diabetes: What Are Italian Twitter Users Talking About?

An Online Education System to Produce and Distribute Video Lectures