University of Trento

About: University of Trento is a education organization based out in Trento, Italy. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 10527 authors who have published 30978 publications receiving 896614 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitá degli Studi di Trento & Universita degli Studi di Trento.

On the Classification of Emotional Biosignals Evoked While Viewing Affective Pictures: An Integrated Data-Mining-Based Approach for Healthcare Applications

Abstract: Recent neuroscience findings demonstrate the fundamental role of emotion in the maintenance of physical and mental health. In the present study, a novel architecture is proposed for the robust discrimination of emotional physiological signals evoked upon viewing pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Biosignals are multichannel recordings from both the central and the autonomic nervous systems. Following the bidirectional emotion theory model, IAPS pictures are rated along two dimensions, namely, their valence and arousal. Following this model, biosignals in this paper are initially differentiated according to their valence dimension by means of a data mining approach, which is the C4.5 decision tree algorithm. Then, the valence and the gender information serve as an input to a Mahalanobis distance classifier, which dissects the data into high and low arousing. Results are described in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, thereby accounting for platform independency, easy interconnectivity, and information exchange. The average recognition (success) rate was 77.68% for the discrimination of four emotional states, differing both in their arousal and valence dimension. It is, therefore, envisaged that the proposed approach holds promise for the efficient discrimination of negative and positive emotions, and it is hereby discussed how future developments may be steered to serve for affective healthcare applications, such as the monitoring of the elderly or chronically ill people.

Simple and Minimum-Cost Satisfiability for Goal Models

Abstract: Goal models have been used in Computer Science in order to represent software requirements, business objectives and design qualities. In previous work we have presented a formal framework for reasoning with goal models, in a qualitative or quantitative way, and we have introduced an algorithm for forward propagating values through goal models. In this paper we focus on the qualitative framework and we propose a technique and an implemented tool for addressing two much more challenging problems: (1) find an initial assignment of labels to leaf goals which satisfies a desired final status of root goals by upward value propagation, while respecting some given constraints; and (2) find an minimum cost assignment of labels to leaf goals which satisfies root goals. The paper also presents preliminary experimental results on the performance of the tool using the goal graph generated by a case study involving the Public Transportation Service of Trentino (Italy).

Integration of Horizontally Transferred Genes into Regulatory Interaction Networks Takes Many Million Years

Abstract: Adaptation of bacteria to new or changing environments is often associated with the uptake of foreign genes through horizontal gene transfer However, it has remained unclear how (and how fast) new genes are integrated into their host's cellular networks Combining the regulatory and protein interaction networks of Escherichia coli with comparative genomics tools, we provide the first systematic analysis of this issue Genes transferred recently have fewer interaction partners compared to nontransferred genes in both regulatory and protein interaction networks Thus, horizontally transferred genes involved in complex regulatory and protein-protein interactions are rarely favored by selection Only few protein-protein interactions are gained after the initial integration of genes following the transfer event In contrast, transferred genes are gradually integrated into the regulatory network of their host over evolutionary time During adaptation to the host cellular environment, horizontally transferred genes recruit existing transcription factors of the host, reflected in the fast evolutionary rates of the cis-regulatory regions of transferred genes Further, genes resulting from increasingly ancient transfer events show increasing numbers of transcriptional regulators as well as improved coregulation with interacting proteins Fine-tuned integration of horizontally transferred genes into the regulatory network spans more than 8-22 million years and encompasses accelerated evolution of regulatory regions, stabilization of protein-protein interactions, and changes in codon usage

Computational personality recognition in social media

Abstract: A variety of approaches have been recently proposed to automatically infer users' personality from their user generated content in social media. Approaches differ in terms of the machine learning algorithms and the feature sets used, type of utilized footprint, and the social media environment used to collect the data. In this paper, we perform a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art computational personality recognition methods on a varied set of social media ground truth data from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We answer three questions: (1) Should personality prediction be treated as a multi-label prediction task (i.e., all personality traits of a given user are predicted at once), or should each trait be identified separately? (2) Which predictive features work well across different on-line environments? and (3) What is the decay in accuracy when porting models trained in one social media environment to another?

Awareness requirements for adaptive systems

Abstract: Recently, there has been a growing interest in self-adaptive systems Roadmap papers in this area point to feedback loops as a promising way of operationalizing adaptivity in such systems In this paper, we define a new type of requirement - called Awareness Requirement - that can refer to other requirements and their success/failures We propose a way to elicit and formalize such requirements and offer a requirements monitoring framework to support them