Emiliano Tramontana

University of Catania | UNICT · Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMI)

Social network systems are constantly fed with text messages. While this enables rapid communication and global awareness, some messages could be aptly made to hurt or mislead. Automatically identifying meaningful parts of a sentence, such as, e.g., positive or negative sentiments in a phrase, would give valuable support for automatically flagging...

The increased penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) in electricity markets has given rise to a new category of energy players, called Aggregators, whose role is to ensure fair remuneration for energy supplied by DERs, and support the smooth feeding of the intermittent energy produced into the distribution network. This paper presents a...

Sequential programs can benefit from parallel execution to improve their performance. When developing a parallel application, several techniques are employed to achieve the desired behavior: identifying parts that can run in parallel, synchronizing access to shared data, tuning performance, etc. Admittedly, manually transforming a sequential applic...

Ethereum network has introduced an important innovation to blockchain technology that has deeply changed the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies: Turing-complete smart contracts. Thanks to smart contracts it is possible to mint fungible and non-fungible tokens, manage decentralized organizations and offer services such as digital identity, ad...

Embedded systems including IoT devices are designed for specialized functions; thus, changes in functions are not considered following their release. For this reason, changing functions to satisfy the requirements of IoT systems is difficult. In this study, we focus on updating existing embedded systems without modifying them. We investigate the de...

Throughout the various containment phases of a pandemic, such as Covid-19, digital tools and services prove to be essential measures to counteract its disrupting effects in social and working interactions. Within this scope, Nausica@DApp, the comprehensive solution proposed in this paper, is capable of facilitating a manageable co-existence of the...

Java, starting from version 8, adopted the functional paradigm, comprising lambda expressions, streams, functional interfaces, etc. This paper proposes an approach to automatically refactor for loops to streams. In our approach, code implementing for loops is checked against a set of preconditions and matched to proposed templates associating a for...

Generally, assistant agents have been employed to recommend users some goods or services they could be interested in. Moreover, thanks to devices recording user geographical positions, recommendation systems have been developed to propose places to visit. This paper proposes an approach for making an estimate of bikes available at bike stations, he...

The uncontrolled expansion of urban areas is one of the main factors that reduce the liveability of cities. In recent years, to contrast urban sprawl, several nations have promoted policies aimed at developing urban green spaces. The importance of green oases within cities had already been highlighted, in 1977, by the architect Christopher Alexande...

One of the most significant opportunities offered by the blockchain technology is to finally integrate the different processes in the healthcare ecosystem. Several companies are exploring the use of blockchain to manage digital medical data, and several solutions, leveraging the benefits of the blockchain, have been proposed for the implementation...

The availability of effective test suites is critical for the development and maintenance of reliable software systems. To increase test effectiveness, software developers tend to employ larger and larger test suites. The recent availability of software tools for automatic test generation makes building large test suites affordable, therefore contr...

Though people like to visit popular places, for health-related concerns and due to the recent restrictions adopted around the world, gatherings should be avoided. When planning a trip, one has to consider both attractiveness in terms of general interest for the destinations, and the density of people gathering there. In this work, we propose a reco...

When a person visits an unknown large city having multiple interesting locations, it is not so easy for him to find one location that is lively and convenient to visit in a given time-frame. To overcome such a problem, this paper proposes to make use of two technologies: smartphones, equipped with sensors for reading GPS coordinates; and multi-agen...

When a disastrous earthquake is about to occur in a specific territory, there are a series of anomalies that alter the pre-existing natural balances. Seismic swarms, ground deformation, bright flashes, emissions of various gas types (radon, CO2,..), changes in the composition and flow rate groundwater are just some physical-chemical perturbations i...

An effective test suite can be desirable for its ability to protect the code when introducing changes aiming at providing further functionalities, for refactoring, etc. An ample test suite, while taking considerable resources and time to execute, could be as effective as a smaller one having the same code coverage. This paper proposes an approach t...

Apps running on a smartphone have the possibility to gather data that can act as a fingerprint for their user. Such data comprise the ids of nearby WiFi networks, features of the device, etc., and they can be a precious asset for offering e.g. customised transportation means, news and ads, etc. Additionally, since WiFi network ids can be easily ass...

The wide-spread availability of open WiFi networks on smart cities can be considered an advanced service for citizens. However, a device connecting to WiFi network access points gives away its location. On the one hand, the access point provider could collect and analyse the ids of connecting devices, and people choose whether to connect depending...

Geographical positions are widely employed in many applications, such as recommendation systems. The wide-spread use of mobile devices and location-based Internet services (e.g., Google Maps) gives the opportunity to collect user locations. Taking advantage of a multi-agent system, this work proposes an approach providing users with personalised re...

Generally, when an app runs on an Android device, users are asked to approve accesses to sensitive data or resources that require Android dangerous permissions. Otherwise, for other resources, requiring normal permissions, no approval is asked. Once access to resources has been gained, an app could send confidential data outside of the device, with...

Graph pattern matching is a powerful mechanism for searching on network data. Most of the graph pattern matching tools available are based on subgraph isomorphism, i.e. finding a one-to-one correspondence between nodes of a query graph and nodes of a target graph. Often this approach is not flexible enough, since it does not allow the query to repr...

This paper proposes an approach that identifies the flows of people from collected GPS data. This in turn enables us to compute significant parameters, such as people average speed, amount of travelling people, etc. A proper solution for data filtering and analysis has been implemented and tested against real data, which reduces as much as possible...

Smart cities providing connectivity to users and other advanced services can be leveraged to improve public transport services. This paper proposes a solution that lets citizens request a public vehicle to perform additional stops off the main route, hence achieving a customisation of the transport operator services to better assist users. A cloud...

In energy generation systems including a photovoltaic park, fluctuations are the norm: both production and demand levels can vary on hourly basis. Hence, energy management and dispatching systems have to cope with the possibility of inadequate production while satisfying as much as possible user demands. We put forward a management solution that mo...

Integrated generation systems are increasingly considered suitable to supply remote areas, less developed countries, and small isolated communities with power. The energy management investigated in this paper concerns a smart grid encompassing a photovoltaic park. We propose a novel cloud-distributed solution to determine the best energy dispatch,...

To ensure quality of code in large software systems, refactoring operations are the norm. With this goal in mind, it is helpful to direct preventive maintenance of large object-oriented legacy systems towards the more advanced aspect-oriented paradigm. However, manually identifying crosscutting concerns, candidate to be rendered as aspects, in larg...

Creation of the layout for a board given to a player is usually achieved by means of complex algorithm that is detailing position of walls, passages, etc. We propose a novel solution based on bio-inspired algorithms adapted to easily create and then reorganize layouts of board games. The resulting layout presents a maze that is being automatically...

Multimedia systems often use various detection methods to track relevant objects in images and video frames. The tracking scheme is often based on capturing of significant points in the object, which are used by implemented methods to extract the shape, dimensions, etc. and then further process these information. In recent years many advances in Co...

Smart cities will provide enhanced monitoring of crucial infrastructure resources, connectivity to users and advanced information services. Thanks to gathered data the quality of traditional services and infrastructures will be improved, and further services can emerge, such as novel urban transportation services. This paper devises a solution that...

Named entity recognition aims at locating elements in a given text and classifying them according to pre-defined categories, such as the names of persons, organisations, locations, quantities, etc. This paper proposes an approach to recognise the location names by extracting them from unstructured Italian language texts. We put forward the use of t...

This paper proposes a cloud-oriented architecture for video analysis and motion detection. The core algorithm as been based on a typical computational intelligence method called Firefly Algorithm jointly with a Sobel filter in order to reduce the analysis complexity and the required computational effort. The developed system is completely self suff...

The investigation of solar-like oscillations for probing star interiors has enjoyed a tremendous growth in the last decade. Once observations are over, the most notable difficulties in properly identifying the true oscillation frequencies of stars are due to the gaps in the observation time-series and the intrinsic stellar granulation noise. This p...

Surface Plasmon Polaritons are collective oscillations of electrons occurring at the interface between a metal and a dielectric. The propagation phenomena in plasmonic nanostructures is not fully understood and the interdependence between propagation and metal thickness requires further investigation. We propose an ad-hoc neural network topology as...

Neural network architectures have been proven useful to model the intrinsic characteristics of photovoltaic cells. The possibility to get rid of an a priori model is one of the many advantages of such an approach as well as the resulting accuracy, robustness and speed. Neural networks have been used to model the characteristics of traditional silic...

Physical surveys in many fields use segmented detectors to sense some physical quantities. In many cases, physical phenomena produce raw data with a rate higher than that possible to identify interesting events and organize data when using a single host. This paper proposes a distributed and parallel processing system that greatly reduces the time...

BitTorrent splits the files that are shared on a P2P network into fragments and then spreads these by giving the highest priority to the rarest fragment. We propose a mathematical model that takes into account several factors such as the peer distance, communication delays, and file fragment availability in a future period also by using a neural ne...

In this paper is proposed, implemented and evaluated a novel radial basis probabilistic neural network (RBPNN) based classification algorithm for classification fruit surface defects in color and texture of a very important fruit as orange. The proposed algorithm takes orange images as inputs then the texture and gray features of defect area are ex...

Users engaging in online social networks provide sparse data about themselves, e.g. by participating in groups to discuss some topics, linking to each other, etc. Such sparse data can be carefully used to build both user and group profiles, automatically. We put forward a multi-agent system that collects and analyses data scattered on an online soc...

Advanced smart grids have several power sources that contribute with their own irregular dynamic to the power production, while load nodes have another dynamic. Several factors have to be considered when using the owned power sources for satisfying the demand, i.e., production rate, battery charge and status, variable cost of externally bought ener...

-This paper analyses the idea of applying Swarm Intelligence in the process of managing the entire 2D board game in a real-time environment. For the proposed solution Game Management System is used as a cloud resource with a dedicated intelligent control agent. The described approach has been analysed on the basis of board games like mazes. The mod...

In this paper, the idea of applying Computational Intelligence in the process of creation board games, in particular mazes, is presented. For two different algorithms the proposed idea has been examined. The results of the experiments are shown and discussed to present advantages and disadvantages.

Large software systems need to be modified to remain useful. Changes can be more easily performed when their design has been carefully documented. This paper presents an approach to quickly find design patterns that have been implemented into a software system. The devised solution greatly reduces the performed checks by organising the search for a...

This paper is to discuss a matter of ants swarm intelligence for 2D input images recognition systems. In the following sections we try to analyze possibility of using artificial ants colony algorithm to analyze input images. Experiments have been performed on a set of test images, to present and prove efficacy and precision of recognition.

This work presents a new adaptive technique for image compression based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNN). The technique can be employed both for lossless and lossy (higher) compression and has been devised in order to deal effectively with a large variety of images. Proposed solution performs wel...

Solving channel equalization problem in communication systems is based on adaptive filtering algorithms. Today, Mobile Agents (MAs) with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) can be also adopted for effective interference reduction in modern wireless communication systems (WCSs). In this paper MAs with RNNs are proposed as novel computing algorithms for...

Computer scientists and engineers work with increasing amounts of information. These data are used for knowledge retrieval, data management decision support and so on. Sorting algorithms are important procedures that if efficiently composed and implemented can increase speed of data processing and decision correctness. Many various sorting algorith...

Text attribution and classification, for both information retrieval and analysis, have become one of the main issues in the matter of security, trust and copyright preservation. This paper proposes an innovative approach for text classification using Chebyshev polynomials and holomorphic transforms of the coefficients space. The main advantage of t...

This paper proposes an image processing technique based on based on Firefly Algorithm and simplified sobel filter in order to assist recognition procedure for 2D images. Experiments have been performed with the proposed solution applied on an open set of test images. Research results are presented and discussed and show the efficiency of implemente...

This paper presents the application of some Computational Intelligence methods for obtaining a classifier analysing employees to form work groups. The proposed bio-inspired solution analyses employees using data gathered from their professional attitudes and skills, then suggests how to form groups of human resources within a company that can effec...