Alessandro Antonio Nacci

Modern Building Management Systems (BMSs) provide limited amount of control to its occupants, and typically allow only the facility manager to set the building policies. BuildingRules let occupants to customise their office spaces using trigger-action programming. Occupants can set rules that actuate building system such as lights, heating, applian...

In the last years, the concept of smart buildings has been proposed and proved to be an effective solution to tackle the problem of reducing the power consumption of complex (both residential and commercial) buildings, while providing the users with a very high level of comfort. In this context, knowing the exact position of users inside the buildi...

Mobile devices have become the main interaction mean between users and the surrounding environment. An indirect measure of this trend is the increasing amount of security threats against mobile devices, which in turn created a demand for protection tools. Protection tools, unfortunately, add an additional burden for the smartphone's battery power,...

The automatic generation of hardware implementations for a given algorithm is generally a difficult task, especially when data dependencies span across multiple iterations such as in iterative stencil loops (ISLs). In this paper, we introduce an automatic design flow to extract parallelism from an ISL algorithm and perform a design space exploratio...

Modern Building Management Systems (BMSs) have been designed to automate the behavior of complex buildings, but unfortunately they do not allow occupants to customize it according to their preferences, and only the facility manager is in charge of setting the building policies. To overcome this limitation, we present BuildingRules, a trigger-action...

Over the last years, many smart buildings applications, such as indoor localization or safety systems, have been subject of intense research. Smart environments usually rely on several hardware nodes equipped with sensors, actuators and communication functionalities. The high level of heterogeneity and the lack of standardization across technologie...

A large number of algorithms for multidimensional signals processing and scientific computation come in the form of iterative stencil loops (ISLs), whose data dependencies span across multiple iterations. Because of their complex inner structure, automatic hardware acceleration of such algorithms is traditionally considered as a difficult task. In...

Many Smart Building systems, such as indoor localization or occupancy monitoring sys- tems, require the installation of several transmitting and receiving nodes. The quantity and the positioning of these devices heavily affects the accuracy and the total cost of the system, but tools to automate the nodes configuration currently lack. We propose an...

UPDATED---July 14, 2016. Many Smart Building systems, such as indoor localization or occupancy monitoring systems, require the installation of several transmitting and receiving nodes. The quantity and the positioning of these devices heavily affects the accuracy and the total cost of the system, but tools to automate the nodes configuration curren...

In the last years, many research projects have focused on the design of complex Building Management Systems (BMSes) aiming at materializing the Smart Buildings vision. Unfortunately, multi-user management is not totally supported in modern BMSes, multi-tenant implications have not been adequately investigated and also some other issues remain unsol...

n the last years, many works have proposedBuilding Management Systems (BMS) or other tools that allowedto actually exploit the smart buildings infrastructures. Suchnew systems allow users to define their own policies (generallyin the shape of rules exploiting logic formulas) to programthe building behavior. Multi-user managements is not totallysupp...

Safety has always been a main concern in complex buildings: automated solutions to respond to crisis events lim- iting damages and victims have been researched and adopted in commercial and private buildings since late 19th century. However, the methods available have some limitations: for ex- ample the impossibility to promptly detect false alarms...

mart buildings are essential for future smart grids. We propose a general method and algorithms to integrate residential smart buildings with smart grids. Such integration has to deal with the ability for the smart building to forecast its energy consumption; the proposed method is able to learn the building occupants habits and to use such informa...

In the last decade we have witnessed the birth and dramatic growth of mobile devices, from cellular- to smart- phones. Despite the huge amount of information achievable from an always-connected reality, researchers that work in the mobile devices field fight against the impossibility to explore, inspect and test their work on such a vast set of pos...

Resources such as quantities of transistors and memory, the level of integration and the speed of components have increased dramatically over the years. Even though the technologies have improved, we continue to apply outdated approaches to our use of these resources. Key computer science abstractions have not changed since the 1960’s. Therefore th...

Modern Building Management Systems (BMSs) provide limited amount of control to its occupants, and typically allow only the facility manager to set the building policies. BuildingRules let occupants to customise their office spaces using trigger-action programming. In order to accomplish this task, BuildingRules automatically detects conflicts among...

In the context of mobile devices, the thermal prob- lem is an emerging one, as it affects the user experience and involves factors that are both internal and external with respect to the device. In this paper, we present an evaluation of these factors, that consists of two parts. The first one is the analysis of thermal interactions between the int...

Building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are considered to be the main target for energy reduction due to their significant contribution to commercial buildings’ energy consumption. Knowing a building’s occupancy plays a crucial role in implementing demand-response HVAC. In this paper we propose a new solution based on the...

The performance and the efficiency of recent computing platforms have been deeply influenced by the widespread adoption of hardware accelerators, such as graphics processing units (GPUs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are often employed to support the tasks of general-purpose processors (GPPs). One of the main advantages of these...

In the last years, the concept of smart buildings has been proposed and proved to be an effective solution to tackle the problem of reducing the power consumption of complex (both residential and commercial) buildings, while providing the users with a very high level of comfort. In this context, knowing the exact position of users inside the buildi...

Thermostats allow people to set the temperature they desire, even if personal thermal comfort perception is tied to a number of external stimuli [9]. Here we investigate dependability of peoples thermal comfort, from the multisensory features of environment (light colors). We want to prototype a systems that influence peoples thermal comfort throug...

Mobile devices take an important part in everyday life. They are now cheaper and widespread, but still a lot of time is spent by the users to configure them: users adapt to their own device, not vice versa. Can our smartphones do something smarter? In this work, we propose a framework to support the development of context aware applications for And...

Smart spaces are environments such as apartments, offices, museums, hospitals, schools, malls, university campuses, and outdoor areas that are enabled for the cooperation of objects (e.g., sensors, devices, appliances) and systems that have the capability to self-organize themselves, based on given policies. Since they can be used for an efficient...

Smart buildings have been proposed as the solution for the creation of comfortable and energy-efficient living and working spaces. In the last few years, the energy-efficiency aspect is becoming more and more important and as first, a big effort has been put on the optimization of commercial buildings, since they contribute to the 70% of the total...

Although the reliability and robustness of the AES protocol have been deeply proved through the years, recent research results and technology advancements are rising serious concerns about its solidity in the (quite near) future. In this context, we are proposing an extension of the AES algorithm in order to support longer encryption keys (thus inc...

The e�cient energy management of build- ings is nowadays a crucial point to move toward a sustain- able planet. Unfortunately, the design of smart buildings able to optimize their energy consumption is a quite com- plex task. Since this exploration cannot be performed on the field, simulation methodologies are usually adopted to study the behavior...

Although the reliability and robustness of the AES protocol have been deeply proved through the years, recent research results and technology advancements are rising serious concerns about its solidity in the (quite near) future. In fact, smarter brute force attacks and new computing systems are expected to drastically decrease the security of the...

Nowadays, mobile devices are becoming more flexible and rich in functionalities. As already presented in [6] those devices are highly influenced by constraints, mainly regarding power management. In fact, mobile batteries are limited in time and there are no efficient methods able to manage power consumption. Even knowing the device Time To Live (T...

Mobile devices, due to their wide distribution and to their increasing smartness and availability of computational power, can become the interaction point between users and their surrounding environments. However, current mobile devices OSes lack of the ability to anticipate and overcome internal and external changes. Integrating mechanisms of self...

The constantly growing complexity of heterogeneous systems requires effective methods for supporting the designer both during the development of the application and the imple mentation of the architecture. Unfortunately, existing tools still require that the designer develops large parts by hand, especially when hardware accelerators and partial dy...

Dataflow applications have proven to be well-suited for hardware implementation due to their intrinsic pipelined nature. Furthermore a wide range of algorithms, ranging from image analysis to map-reduce tasks, can be expressed using this paradigm. At the same time Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) start to be employed as hardware accelerators a...

Due to their wide distribution and their growth in functionalities, mobile devices are the interaction point between users and the surrounding environment. Nevertheless, their resources are limited and variable over time, both in terms of performance and power. Especially when dealing with power consumption, mobile devices cannot disregard the envi...

Traditionally, parallel implementations of multimedia algorithms are carried out manually, since the automation of this task is very difficult due to the complex dependencies that generally exist between different elements of the data set. Moreover, there is a wide family of iterative multimedia algorithms that cannot be executed with satisfactory...

The determination of the optical flow is a central problem in image processing, as it allows to describe how an image changes over time by means of a numerical vector field. The estimation of the optical flow is however a very complex problem, which has been faced using many different mathematical approaches. A large body of work has been recently...