Vincenzo Loia

University of Salermo (Italy)

Enhancing City-scale Decision Support Processes with Situational Awareness and Computational Intelligence.

A smart city can be understood as an high-tech intensive and advanced city that connects people, information and city elements using new technologies, with the aim of creating a sustainable, greener city, competitive and innovative commerce, and an increased life quality. Such connections are possible only if the big volumes of data coming from several city pillars (i.e., Water Management, Energy, Traffic, Public Safety, Buildings) can be fruitfully processed in order to elicit correlations. The “five pillars” smart city model has been provided by IBM that defines a smarter city as one that makes optimal use of all the interconnected information available today to better understand and control its operations and optimize the use of limited resources. Data provided by these pillars are “big data” satisfying the four V’s characteristics: Volume, Variety, Velocity and Veracity. In this context, we propose a Situation Awareness (SA) methodology to define systems able to handle such data in order to support City-scale Decision Support Processes. Endsley provided a more formal definition that considers SA as a three-phase process: perception of the elements of an environment in a given time interval, comprehension of the aforementioned elements and projection of their states into the next future. More in details, from a computational viewpoint, SA aims at formalizing and deducing situations (occurring in the real world) by processing, fusing and abstracting context. Given the nature of big data, a SA approach is fundamental to avoid information overload, handle the complexity and heterogeneity of data and focus on the right information at the right time, taking care also of human operators’ mental models and changing goals. The SA approach needs to be populated with computational intelligence techniques able to gather, pre-process, aggregate and filter data coming from sensors (both physical - coming from sensing devices - and virtual - coming from social networks), to annotate and integrate them with metadata, to sustain conceptualization and abstraction processes for semantic analysis, to formally represent and visualize extracted actionable knowledge.

Bio: Vincenzo Loia (SM'08) received the master's degree in Computer Science fron the University of Salermo(Italy) in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Paris VI(France), in 1989. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at the University of Salerno, where he is currently the head of the Department of Management and Innovation Systems. He was the Principal Investigator in a number of industrial research and development projects and in academic research projects. He has authored over 350 original research papers in international journals, book chapters, and in international conference proceedings. He has edited four research books about agent technology, Internet, and soft computing methodologies. His current research interests include merging soft computing and agent technology to design technologically complex environments, with particular interest in Web Intelligence applications. Dr. Loia is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Soft Computing, and an Editor-in-Chief of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, both published from Springer-Verlag. He serves as an Associate Editor in several international journals, such as the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS, the IEEE TRANSACTION ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COGNITIVE AND DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS. He holds several roles in the IEEE Society in particular for Computational Intelligence Society (Chair of Emergent Technologies Technical Committee, IEEE CIS European Representative, Vice-Chair of Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee). Website: ( http://www.unisa.it/docenti/vincenzoloia/en/index).

Xavier Alaman

University Autónoma of Madrid (Spain)

Living in real and virtual worlds

The first objective of this talk is to discuss (and defend) the following ideas:

• The interleaving of the real world with virtual worlds has been happening for centuries, and in fact is the mark of “civilization”.
• This process has been enormously accelerated thanks to the Information and Communication Technologies.
• In the near future many (if not all) areas of the human live will be profoundly changed by the blending of the real and the virtual world into a unique structure.

The second objective of this talk is to inspire you to become an active actor in this process of building the stage for the human race in this century: the (virtual/real) world.

Bio: Xavier Alamán received the PhD degree in Computer Science from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1993), the MSc. degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA- 1990), the Ingeniero degree in Computer Science from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (1987), and the Licenciado degree in Physics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1985). He has served as the Dean of the School of Engineering, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, from 2000 to 2004, where he holds a tenured position of Associate Professor since 1998. Previously he was an IBM researcher for 7 years. He is head of a research group on User Interaction composed of more than 20 researchers. His research interests include Ambient Intelligence, Virtual Worlds and Mixed Reality. He has been principal investigator in several R&D projects in these areas and contributed with more than 150 publications in international journals, book chapters, and in international conference proceedings. Website:(http://arantxa.ii.uam.es/~xalaman/).