Daniele Miorandi

U-Hopper srl · R&D&I

Mood inference with mobile sensing data has been studied in ubicomp literature over the last decade. This inference enables context-aware and personalized user experiences in general mobile apps and valuable feedback and interventions in mobile health apps. However, even though model generalization issues have been highlighted in many studies, the...

Container technology has become a very popular choice for easing and managing the deployment of cloud applications and services. Container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes can automate to a large extent the deployment , scaling, and operations for containers across clusters of nodes, reducing human errors and saving cost and time. Designed...

Security and privacy of information transmitted among the devices involved in an Internet of Things (IoT) network represent relevant issues in IoT contexts. Guaranteeing effective control and supervising access permissions to IoT applications is a complex task, mainly due to resources' heterogeneity and scalability requirements. The design and deve...

Concurrently with the strong decline in installed PV system prices, the margin for operation and maintenance (O&M) operators has decreased, as O&M costs are commonly budgeted as a fixed percentage of installed system costs. Hence, there is a need to improve the efficiency of O&M operations. In the PV4.0 project, we are aiming to improve O&M efficie...

Internet application users are increasingly concerned about the way applications handle their personal data. However, manually checking whether applications actually respect the claims made in their privacy policy is both error-prone and time-consuming. This paper claims that the privacy compliance of applications hosted in cloud or fog computing p...

Container migration is an essential functionality in large-scale geo-distributed platforms such as fog computing infrastructures. Contrary to migration within a single data center, long-distance migration requires that the container's disk state should be migrated together with the container itself. However, this state may be arbitrarily large, so...

This paper introduces a data model for representing humans-chatbots interactions. Despite there are many models that allow representing the usage and the behaviour of bots, a service that can store information from any conversational agent regardless the architecture is still missing. With this work, we introduce a general-purpose data model to sto...

Fog computing is an emerging paradigm in the Internet of Things (IoT) space, consisting of a middle computation layer, sitting between IoT devices and Cloud servers. Fog computing provides additional computing, storage, and networking resources in close proximity to where data is being generated and/or consumed. As the Fog layer has direct access t...

In the digital age, where the Internet connects things across the globe and individuals are constantly online, data security and privacy are becoming key drivers (and barriers) of change for adoption of innovative solutions. Traditional approaches, whereby communication links are secured by means of encryption, and access control is run in a static...

IoT provides services by connecting smart devices to the Internet, and exploiting data generated by said devices to enable value-added services to individuals and businesses. In such cases, if data is exposed, tampered or lost, the service would not behave correctly. In this article, we discuss data security in IoT applications across five dimensio...

IoT provides services by connecting smart devices to the Internet, and exploiting data generated by said devices to enable value-added services to individuals and businesses. In such cases, if data is exposed, tampered or lost, the service would not behave correctly. In this article, we discuss data security in IoT applications across five dimensio...

Letting both data producers and data consumers be aware of the levels of security and privacy guaranteed within an IoT-based system represents an important goal to be pursued. In fact, the presence of multiple and heterogeneous data sources, as well as wireless communication standards, increases the risk of violation in IoT scenarios. Besides contr...

Online user profiling is a very active research field, catalyzing great interest by both scientists and practitioners. In this paper, in particular, we look at approaches able to mine social media activities of users to create a rich user profile. We look at the case in which the profiling is meant to characterize the user's interests along a set o...

Denial of Service (DoS) attack represents until now a relevant problem in Internet-based contexts. In fact, it is both difficult to recognize and to counteract. Along with the adoption and diffusion of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such an issue has become more urgent to solve, due to the presence of heterogeneous data sources and to the w...

Both people and organization are widely accepting and adopting the functionalities offered by the smart home or smart building applications. This is due to the many advantages, in easing users’ every-day life and work, provided by the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and devices, equipped with sensors, cameras, or actuators, and able...

The diffusion of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies enables the provision of advanced and valuable services, but also raises several challenges. First of all, the increasing number of heterogeneous interconnected devices creates scalability and interoperability issues and thus a flexible middleware platform is needed to manage all the sources to...

Security and privacy represent critical issues for a wide adoption of IoT technologies both by industries and people in their every-day life. Besides, the complexity of an IoT system’s management resides in the presence of heterogeneous devices, which communicate by means of different protocols and provide information belonging to various applicati...

One of the hottest topics in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain relates to the ability of enabling computation and storage at the edges of the network. This is becoming a key feature in order to ensure the ability of managing in a scalable way service requests with low response times. This means being able to acquire, store, and process IoT-genera...

Automated and smart meters are devices that are able to monitor the energy consumption of electricity consumers in near real-time. They are considered key technological enablers of the smart grid, as the real-time consumption data that they can collect could enable new sophisticated billing schemes, could facilitate more efficient power distributio...

Hybrid Diversity-aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDACAS) are a new generation of socio-technical systems where both human and machine peers collectively participate in complex cognitive and physical tasks. These systems are characterized by the fundamental properties of hybridity and collectiveness, hiding from users the complexities associated...

Security threats may hinder the large scale adoption of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Besides efforts have already been made in the direction of data integrity preservation, confidentiality and privacy, several issues are still open. The existing solutions are mainly based on encryption techniques, but no attention is actually...

Optimal stochastic control of delay tolerant networks is studied in this paper. First, the structure of optimal two-hop forwarding policies is derived. In order to be implemented, such policies require knowledge of certain global system parameters such as the number of mobiles or the rate of contacts between mobiles. But, such parameters could be u...

In this paper we tackle several questions arising in the context of online content diffusion. In particular, we analyse the reason why some videos become viral, how popularity of a tagged video evolves over time and if there exist recurrent patterns in the dynamics of content popularity. Indeed, while the ultimate question is if it is even possible...

The increasing diffusion of services enabled by Internet of Things (IoT) technologies raises several risks associated to security and data quality. Together with the high number of heterogeneous interconnected devices, this creates scalability issues, thereby calling for a flexible middleware platform able to deal with both security threats and dat...

The satisfaction of security and data quality requirements plays a fundamental role in the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario. Such a dynamic environment requires the adoption of heterogeneous technologies to provide customized services in various application domains and both security threats and data quality issues need to be addresses in order to...

Emerging smart grids have promising potentials to make energy management more efficient than currently possible in today's power grids. Integration of small scale renewables, distributed charging of electrical vehicles and virtual power stations are some of the technological innovations made possible by smart grids. Besides these technological aspe...

Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized, at the system level, by high diversity with respect to enabling technologies and supported services. IoT also assumes to deal with a huge amount of heterogeneous data generated by devices, transmitted by the underpinning infrastructure and processed to support value-added services. In order to provide user...

The book focuses on Social Collective Intelligence, a term used to denote a class of socio-technical systems that combine, in a coordinated way, the strengths of humans, machines and collectives in terms of competences, knowledge and problem solving capabilities with the communication, computing and storage capabilities of advanced ICT. Social Coll...

Social collective intelligence is an emerging area at the intersection of collective intelligence and social informatics, where social processes between humans are being leveraged and enhanced, by means of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to solve challenging problems using the contributions of human collectives. Rather th...

Worldwide, societies are seeing rapid change in modes of social interaction and organization. These new interaction modes are predicated on emerging forms of information infrastructure together with rapidly evolving devices, systems, and applications that are ever more deeply interwoven with our social fabric [1].

In this chapter we present and discuss twelve ‘big questions’ for research on social collective intelligence. Such research questions represent as many scientific challenges that the relevant research communities should tackle in order to move the understanding and engineering of social collective intelligence systems to the next level.

In this chapter we advocate the use of a research methodology, that we term ‘the lean research’, for research and innovation projects in the field of Social Collective Intelligence. Motivated by the unique features of Social Collective Intelligence setting, in particular its people-centric nature and its multidisciplinary character, we propose a se...

Understanding the dynamics of on-line content popularity is an active research field with application in sectors as diverse as media advertising, content replication and caching and on-line marketing. In most cases, scientists have focused on user-generated contents, which are freely accessible through different on-line services. Among such service...

Cloud computing is currently emerging as the de facto standard for Internet service provisioning. This uptake is motivated, among other aspects, by the significant reduction in energy consumption that can be achieved by centralizing, consolidating and optimizing large IT infrastructures. At the same time, however, users expect to access cloud servi...

Energy efficiency is acknowledged as a pivotal issue for a sustainable development of wireless networking technologies. Traditionally, most works in the area focused on the user equipment, where battery duration represents a key asset. However, as the smartphone and tablet revolution fuels a massive deployment of wireless networks, often in the for...

Smartphones and tablets are becoming the de facto standard devices for accessing Internet content and services. The debate on net neutrality, recognised as a key techno-social component of Internet governance, has focused so far on “wired” Internet. In this position paper we advocate the use of a crowdsensing approach, coupled with Open Data philos...

TinyBox is a mobile application for sharing contents within local social groups. TinyBox makes use of opportunistic communications, being able to exploit various connectivity options and to work in the absence of Internet connection. TinyBox allows users to easily create and manage shared repositories for multimedia contents, making use a rule engi...

Crowd-sensing is becoming a popular computing and sensing paradigm for enclosing humans in the sensing loop. The underlying idea is that people, together with their mobile device, can act as mobile and pervasive sensors, gathering information about the surrounding environment and potentially providing direct input. In this work we focus on how to e...

Ubiquity of internet-connected media- and sensor-equipped portable devices is enabling a new class of applications which exploit the power of crowds to perform sensing tasks in the real world. Such paradigm is referred as crowd-sensing, and lies at the intersection of crowd-sourcing and participatory sensing. This has a wide range of potential appl...

The energy system is undergoing a radical transformation. The coupling of the energy system with advanced information and communication technologies is making it possible to monitor and control in real-time generation, transport, distribution and consumption of energy. In this context, a key enabler is represented by smart meters, devices able to m...

The physical and virtual dimensions of life are becoming more and more deeply interwoven. Society is merging with technology, giving rise to a global socio-technical ecosystem. In a society comprising people and machines as actors we often see people-to-people interactions mediated by machine and machine-to-machine interaction mediated by people. T...

Opportunistic communication systems aim at producing and sharing digital resources by means of localized wireless data exchanges among mobile nodes. The design and evaluation of systems able to exploit this emerging communication paradigm is a challenging problem. This paper presents the authors’ experience in developing U-Hopper, a middleware runn...

Social scientists have observed that human behavior in society can often be modeled as corresponding to a threshold type policy. A new behavior would propagate by a procedure in which an individual adopts the new behavior if the fraction of his neighbors or friends having adopted the new behavior exceeds some threshold. In this paper we study the q...

The term “Internet-of-Things” is used as an umbrella keyword for covering various aspects related to the extension of the Internet and the Web into the physical realm, by means of the widespread deployment of spatially distributed devices with embedded identification, sensing and/or actuation capabilities. Internet-of-Things envisions a future in w...

Maximizing system throughput and bandwidth utilization while guaranteeing fairness among users is a core technical challenge in the design of next generation cellular networks. In this context, fractional frequency reuse (FFR) is a helpful tool if it is flexible in terms of resource and power allocation as well as scheduling. Complementary to this...

Improving the energy efficiency of the ICT sector is becoming an ambitious challenge for industries and research communities alike. Understanding how the energy is consumed in each part of an ICT system becomes fundamental in order to minimize the overall energy consumed by the system itself. In this paper, we propose an experimentally-driven appro...

SUPERHUB is a recently launched large-scale European effort aimed at enabling a new generation of eco-mobility services designed around and with the citizens. The SUPERHUB concept builds on the notion that citizens are not just mere users of mobility services, but represent an active component and a resource for policy-makers willing to improve sus...

Accurate measurement of energy consumption of practical wireless deployments is vital to the research community to develop pragmatic simulators and analytical models for the synthesis of new energy-aware and energy-efficient protocols and algorithms for wireless networks. However, there is considerable dearth in the availability of affordable and s...

The signalling subsystem is the most expensive and complex element in cellular networks. Today's networks use signalling mechanisms whose design builds on more than 20 years of the operational expertise. Despite this, the signalling subsystem of all mobile network standards remains vulnerable to failures of equipment and to sharp increases in offer...

In the context of smart energy grids, demand-side management refers to the ability of dynamically controlling and scheduling energy-consuming tasks. In one potential deployment scenario, smart appliances are controlled by a local intelligent software agents, which implement a given optimization algorithm for scheduling such tasks. The higher the fr...

Chemical reaction–diffusion is a basic component of morphogenesis, and can be used to obtain interesting and unconventional self-organizing algorithms for swarms of autonomous agents, using natural or artificial chemistries. However, the performance of these algorithms in the face of disruptions has not been sufficiently studied. In this paper we e...

In this paper we present a stochastic model for molecular communication, which accounts for particle dynamics and noise. Differently from existing approaches, we consider that molecules carrying information may interact with the transmission medium. These interactions are modelled by means of absorption, duplication and spontaneous emission phenome...

As the number and capabilities of mobile devices is rapidly increasing, new challenges arise in the way services are currently designed. Users are seeking for more complex and advanced functionalities able to satisfy their increasing requirements. As a consequence, in ubiquitous environments, a different way to design services has to be introduced...

TCP congestion control has a critical impact on the Internet stability and performance. In relatively recent times, a number of novel TCP congestion control variants, such as TCP BIC, CUBIC and Compound, started to be deployed in modern operating systems. While risks and benefits of these recent developments are subject of debate, the research comm...

Opportunistic communication systems aim at producing and sharing digital resources by means of localized wireless data exchanges among mobile nodes. The design and evaluation of systems able to exploit this emerging communication paradigm is a challenging problem. This paper presents the authors' experience in developing U-Hopper, a middleware runn...

Multi-hop wireless networks are emerging as a viable alternative for building access networks in areas where conventional solutions (cellular, fiber) are neither feasible nor attractive from an economical standpoint. The management of such networks represents an overly complex task because of the time-varying nature of the radio channel, the mobili...

A customary solution to reduce the energy consumption of wireless communication devices is to periodically put the radio into low-power sleep mode. A relevant problem is to schedule the wake-up of nodes in such a way as to ensure proper coordination among devices, respecting delay constraints while still saving energy. In this paper, we introduce a...

We show how the TUNEGreen real-time energy consumption monitoring capabilities can be used to understand how and where power is consumed in a simple star-shaped network based on IEEE 802.11. Different traffic patterns will be generated in order to demonstrate the correlation between traffic and energy consumption.

Among the novel metrics used to study the relative importance of nodes in complex networks, k-core decomposition has found a number of applications in areas as diverse as sociology, proteinomics, graph visualization, and distributed system analysis and design. This paper proposes new distributed algorithms for the computation of the k-core decompos...

In this work, we introduce AiroLAB, a novel network virtualisation framework specifically tailored to multi-hop wireless networks. AiroLAB departs from conventional network virtualisation approaches by focusing on embedded, resource-constrained devices and by aiming at providing Wireless Internet Service Providers with an effective virtualisation m...

The design of efficient routing algorithms is an important issue in dense ad hoc wireless networks. Previous theoretical work has shown that benefits can be achieved through the creation of a set of data "highways" that carry packets across the network, from source(s) to sink(s). Current approaches to the design of these highways however require a-...

In this work, we introduce a framework for enabling the on-line evolution of network protocols. The proposed approach is based on the use of techniques and tools drawn from evolutionary computing research, and it enables embedding evolutionary features in the operation of network protocols. In this way, it becomes possible to build a system in whic...

Activator-inhibitor models have been widely used to explain several morphogenetic processes. They have also been used to engineer algorithms for computer graphics, distributed systems and networks. These models are known to be robust to perturbations such as the removal of peaks of chemicals. However little has been reported about their actual quan...