Paolo Sernani

Bio: Paolo Sernani is an academic researcher from Marche Polytechnic University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Multi-agent system & Computer science. The author has an hindex of 11, co-authored 46 publications receiving 430 citations.

Exploring the ambient assisted living domain: a systematic review

Abstract: Ambient assisted living (AAL) is focused on providing assistance to people primarily in their natural environment. Over the past decade, the AAL domain has evolved at a fast pace in various directions. The stakeholders of AAL are not only limited to patients, but also include their relatives, social services, health workers, and care agencies. In fact, AAL aims at increasing the life quality of patients, their relatives and the health care providers with a holistic approach. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the AAL domain, presenting a systematic analysis of over 10 years of relevant literature focusing on the stakeholders’ needs, bridging the gap of existing reviews which focused on technologies. The findings of this review clearly show that until now the AAL domain neglects the view of the entire AAL ecosystem. Furthermore, the proposed solutions seem to be tailored more on the basis of the available existing technologies, rather than supporting the various stakeholders’ needs. Another major lack that this review is pointing out is a missing adequate evaluation of the various solutions. Finally, it seems that, as the domain of AAL is pretty new, it is still in its incubation phase. Thus, this review calls for moving the AAL domain to a more mature phase with respect to the research approaches.

Violence Detection in Videos by Combining 3D Convolutional Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines

Abstract: Video-surveillance has always been a vital tool to enforce safety in both public and private environments. Even though (smart) cameras are nowadays relatively widespread and cheap, such monitoring ...

Smart home reasoning systems: a systematic literature review

Abstract: A smart home is a residence equipped with technologies that facilitate monitoring of residents, promote independence and increase the quality of life. In general, smart homes are used to control the operations of the home environment and, to automatically adapt it to its inhabitants’ needs. The smart home reasoning system (SHRS) is in charge of determining the automatic control and adaptation operations of the home system. Recently, there has been extensive research concerning different aspects of the SHRS. However, there is a clear lack of systematic investigation targeted at these systems. To close the gap, this paper explores the SHRS domain. For this reason, we applied the systematic literature review (SLR) method by conducting automatic and manual searches on six electronic databases, and in-depth analysis of 135 literature. From the SRL, this paper identifies about 43% of smart homes are designed to provide general home automation services. It also presents twelve major requirements of an SHRS. In addition, the study finds out that 55.5% of the research contributions in SHRS domain are conceptual and, 51.5% of them are based on symbolic artificial intelligence techniques. Further, it characterizes the usage and application trends of different reasoning techniques in smart home domain and, evaluates the major assumptions, strengths, and limitations of the proposed systems in the literature. Additionally, it discusses the challenges of reasoning in ambient assisted living environments. Finally, it underlines in the importance of utilizing hybrid reasoning approaches and the need to handle overlapping, simultaneous and conflicting multiple inhabitants’ activities and goals.

Multi-Agent Systems' Negotiation Protocols for Cyber-Physical Systems: Results from a Systematic Literature Review.

Abstract: Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) require a multitude of components interacting among themselves and with the users to perform automatic actions, usually under unpredictable or uncertain conditions. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have emerged over the years as one of the major technological paradigms regulating interactions and negotiations among autonomous entities running under heterogeneous conditions. As such, MAS have the potential to support CPS in implementing a highly reconfigurable distributed thinking. However, some gaps are still present between MAS’ features and the strict requirements of CPS. The most relevant is the lack of reliability, which is mainly due to specific features characterizing negotiation protocols. This paper presents a systematic literature review of MAS negotiation protocols aiming at providing a comprehensive overview of their strengths and limitations, examining both the assumptions and requirements set during their development. While this work confirms the potential of MAS in regulating the interactions among CPS components, the findings also highlight the absence of real-time compliance in current negotiation protocols. Strongly characterizing CPS, the capability to face strict time constraints could bridge the gap between MAS and CPS.

Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Abstract: (1963). Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Technometrics: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 128-130.

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction

Abstract: Please provide a short abstract of 100 to 250 words. The abstract should not contain any undefined abbreviations or unspecified references. Work planned but not completed should not appear in the abstract.

Reasoning with goal models

Abstract: Over the past decade, goal models have been used in Computer Science in order to represent software requirements, business objectives and design qualities. Such models extend traditional AI planning techniques for representing goals by allowing for partially defined and possibly inconsistent goals. This paper presents a formal framework for reasoning with such goal models. In particular, the paper proposes a qualitative and a numerical axiomatization for goal modeling primitives and introduces label propagation algorithms that are shown to be sound and complete with respect to their respective axiomatizations. In addition, the paper reports on preliminary experimental results on the propagation algorithms applied to a goal model for a US car manufacturer.

Explainable Agents and Robots: Results from a Systematic Literature Review

Abstract: Humans are increasingly relying on complex systems that heavily adopts Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. Such systems are employed in a growing number of domains, and making them explainable is an impelling priority. Recently, the domain of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) emerged with the aims of fostering transparency and trustworthiness. Several reviews have been conducted. Nevertheless, most of them deal with data-driven XAI to overcome the opaqueness of black-box algorithms. Contributions addressing goal-driven XAI (e.g., explainable agency for robots and agents) are still missing. This paper aims at filling this gap, proposing a Systematic Literature Review. The main findings are (i) a considerable portion of the papers propose conceptual studies, or lack evaluations or tackle relatively simple scenarios; (ii) almost all of the studied papers deal with robots/agents explaining their behaviors to the human users, and very few works addressed inter-robot (inter-agent) explainability. Finally, (iii) while providing explanations to non-expert users has been outlined as a necessity, only a few works addressed the issues of personalization and context-awareness.

Exploring the ambient assisted living domain: a systematic review

Abstract: Ambient assisted living (AAL) is focused on providing assistance to people primarily in their natural environment. Over the past decade, the AAL domain has evolved at a fast pace in various directions. The stakeholders of AAL are not only limited to patients, but also include their relatives, social services, health workers, and care agencies. In fact, AAL aims at increasing the life quality of patients, their relatives and the health care providers with a holistic approach. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the AAL domain, presenting a systematic analysis of over 10 years of relevant literature focusing on the stakeholders’ needs, bridging the gap of existing reviews which focused on technologies. The findings of this review clearly show that until now the AAL domain neglects the view of the entire AAL ecosystem. Furthermore, the proposed solutions seem to be tailored more on the basis of the available existing technologies, rather than supporting the various stakeholders’ needs. Another major lack that this review is pointing out is a missing adequate evaluation of the various solutions. Finally, it seems that, as the domain of AAL is pretty new, it is still in its incubation phase. Thus, this review calls for moving the AAL domain to a more mature phase with respect to the research approaches.