Giuseppe Lo Re

Università degli Studi di Palermo | UNIPA · Dipartimento di Ingegneria

Technological advancements in vehicular transportation systems have led to the growth of novel paradigms, in which vehicles and infrastructures collaborate to infer high-level knowledge about phenomena of interest. Vehicular Social Network (VSN) is one such paradigm in which vehicular network entities are considered as part of an Online Social Netw...

In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have radically changed the way people communicate. The most widely used platforms, such as Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram, claim more than one billion monthly active users each. Beyond these, news-oriented micro-blogging services, e.g., Twitter, are daily accessed by more than 120 million users shari...

Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs) is an emerging communication paradigm, derived by merging the concepts of Online Social Networks (OSNs) and Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Due to the lack of robust authentication mechanisms, social-based vehicular applications are vulnerable to numerous attacks including the generation of sybil entities in the...

Voting is one of the most important acts through which a community can make a collective decision. In recent years, many works have focused on improving traditional voting mechanisms and, as a result, a wide range of electronic voting (e-Voting) systems have been proposed. Even though some approaches have achieved a proper level of usability, the m...

Multi-agent distributed systems are characterized by autonomous entities that interact with each other to provide, and/or request, different kinds of services. In several contexts, especially when a reward is offered according to the quality of service, individual agents (or coordinated groups) may act in a selfish way. To prevent such behaviours,...

Populations documenting to date low incidence rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection are immunologically susceptible and at high exposure risk of new COVID-19 outbreaks during phase 3 of the pandemic. Following the experience documented by other countries with regard to the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) to counteract the current pandemic...

We propose a methodology to verify applications developed following programming patterns inspired by natural language that interact with physical environments and run on resource-constrained interconnected devices. Natural language patterns allow for the reduction of intermediate abstraction layers to map physical domain concepts into executable co...

Abstract The possibility of performing complex data analysis through sets of cooperating personal smart devices has recently encouraged the definition of new distributed computing paradigms. The general idea behind these approaches is to move early analysis towards the edge of the network, while relying on other intermediate (fog) or remote (cloud)...

In recent years, the widespread diffusion of pervasive sensing devices and the increasing need for reducing energy consumption have encouraged research in the energy-aware management of smart environments. Following this direction, this paper proposes a hybrid intelligent system which exploits a fog-based architecture to achieve energy efficiency i...

Distributed environments consist of a huge number of entities that cooperate to achieve complex goals. When interactions occur between unknown parties, intelligent techniques for estimating agent reputations are required. Reputation management systems (RMS's) allow agents to perform such estimation in a cooperative way. In particular, distributed R...

Simplifying programming, deployment, and configuration of heterogeneous networked IoT devices requires networking, hardware, representation of knowledge and concepts, design and programming skills. In fact, IoT applications are mostly built by adopting different existing paradigms and technologies on a case-by-case basis. As a result, programming t...

The diffusion of heterogeneous smart devices capable of capturing and analysing data about users, and/or the environment, has encouraged the growth of novel sensing methodologies. One of the most attractive scenarios in which such devices, such as smartphones, tablet computers, or activity trackers, can be exploited to infer relevant information is...

Thanks to the collective action of participating smartphone users, mobile crowdsensing allows data collection at a scale and pace that was once impossible. The biggest challenge to overcome in mobile crowdsensing is that participants may exhibit malicious or unreliable behavior, thus compromising the accuracy of the data collection process. Therefo...

Mobile crowdsensing harnesses the sensing power of modern smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. In a mobile crowdsensing system, it is paramount to incentivize smartphone users to provide sensing services in a timely and reliable manner. Given sensed information is often valid for a limited period...

The gap between informal functional specifications and the resulting implementation in the chosen programming language is notably a source of errors in embedded systems design. In this paper, we discuss a methodology and a software platform aimed at coping with this issue in programming resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Network nodes. Whereas th...

Mobile crowdsensing harnesses the sensing power of modern smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. In a mobile crowdsensing system, it is paramount to incentivize smartphone users to provide sensing services in a timely and reliable manner. Given sensed information is often valid for a limited period...

Mobile crowdsensing allows data collection at a scale and pace that was once impossible. One of the biggest challenges in mobile crowdsensing is that participants may exhibit malicious or unreliable behavior. Therefore, it becomes imperative to design algorithms to accurately classify between reliable and unreliable sensing reports. To this end, we...

In this article, we present Distributed Computing for Constrained Devices (DC4CD), a novel software architecture that supports symbolic distributed computing on wireless sensor networks. DC4CD integrates the functionalities of a high-level symbolic interpreter, a compiler, and an operating system, and includes networking abstractions to exchange hi...

In recent years, the percentage of the population owning a smartphone has increased significantly. These devices provide the user with more and more functions, so that anyone is encouraged to carry one during the day, implicitly producing that can be analysed to infer knowledge of the user’s context. In this work we present a novel framework for Hu...

In the near future, the world’s population will be characterized by an increasing average age, and consequently, the number of people requiring for a special household assistance will dramatically rise. In this scenario, smart homes will significantly help users to increase their quality of life, while maintaining a great level of autonomy. This pa...

Multi-sensor data fusion is extensively used to merge data collected by heterogeneous sensors deployed in smart environments. However, data coming from sensors are often noisy and inaccurate, and thus probabilistic techniques, such as Dynamic Bayesian Networks, are often adopted to explicitly model the noise and uncertainty of data. This work propo...

Knowledge extraction has traditionally represented one of the most interesting challenges in AI; in recent years, however, the availability of large collections of data has increased the awareness that “measuring” does not seamlessly translate into “understanding”, and that more data does not entail more knowledge. We propose here a formulation of...

The availability of increasingly larger and more complex datasets has boosted the demand for systems able to analyze them automatically. The design and implementation of effective systems requires coding knowledge about the application domain inside the system itself; however, the designer is expected to intuitively grasp the most relevant features...

Several distributed applications running over the Internet use Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) to guarantee reliable interactions among unknown agents. Because of the heterogeneity of the existing RMSs, their assessment in terms of correctness and resistance to security attacks is not a trivial task. This work addresses this issue by presentin...

In this short poster paper, we present an application for suggesting attractions to be visited by users, based on social signal processing techniques.

The growing popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs) has boosted research on cheaper and more pervasive localization systems, typically relying on such monitoring equipment as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which allow to re-use the same instrumentation both for monitoring and for localization without requiring lengthy off-line training. This...

In distributed environments, where interactions involve unknown entities, intelligent techniques for estimating agents’ reputation are required. Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) aim to detect malicious behaviors that may affect the integrity of the virtual community. However, these systems are highly dependent of the application domain they add...

The adoption of multi-sensor data fusion techniques is essential to effectively merge and analyze heterogeneous data collected by multiple sensors, pervasively deployed in a smart environment. Existing literature leverages contextual information in the fusion process, to increase the accuracy of inference and hence decision making in a dynamically...

The increasing adoption of wireless sensor networks as a flexible and inexpensive tool for the most diverse applications, ranging from environmental monitoring to home automation, has raised more and more attention to the issues related to the design of specifically customized security mechanisms. The scarcity of computational, storage, and bandwid...

Twitter is a popular social network which allows millions of users to share their opinions on what happens all over the world. In this work we present a system for real-time Twitter data analysis in order to follow popular events from the user’s perspective. The method we propose extends and improves the Soft Frequent Pattern Mining (SFPM) algorith...

Recent studies have shown that the total energy consumed by the Internet has followed an increasing trend over the years. A considerable part of this energy is wasted due to an inefficient utilization of edge devices, that is, Personal Computers (PCs) and other user equipment in homes and offices. PCs are often left on even when they are not used (...

While the vision of Internet of Things (IoT) is rather inspiring, its practical implementation remains challenging. Conventional programming approaches prove unsuitable to provide IoT resource constrained devices with the distributed processing capabilities required to implement intelligent, autonomic, and self-organizing behaviors. In our previous...

Over the last 40 years, automatic solutions to analyze text documents collection have been one of the most attractive challenges in the field of information retrieval. More recently, the focus has moved towards dynamic, distributed environments, where documents are continuously created by the users of a virtual community, i.e., the social network....

While the vision of Internet of Things (IoT) is rather inspiring, its practical implementation remains challenging. Conventional programming approaches prove unsuitable to provide IoT resource constrained devices with the distributed processing capabilities required to implement intelligent, autonomic, and self-organizing behaviors. In our previous...

Nowadays, the increasing global awareness of the importance of energy saving in everyday life acts as a stimulus to provide innovative ICT solutions for sustainability. In this scenario, the growing interest in smart homes has been driven both by socioeconomic and technological expectations. One of the key aspects of being smart is the efficiency o...

Programming Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a complex task for which existing approaches adopt rigid architectures that are only suitable for specific application fields. In previous papers we introduced a programming methodology and a lightweight middleware based on high-level programming and executable code exchange for distributed processing...

This paper proposes a new formalization for the differential cryptanalysis of DES (Data Encryption Standard) based on Bayesian Networks (BN), an artificial intelligence framework used for reasoning on data affected by uncertainty. Through the proposed approach it is possible to analyze DES from a novel point of view, thus paving the way for the dev...

The peculiar features of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) suggest to exploit the distributed computing paradigm to perform complex tasks in a collaborative manner, in order to overcome the constraints related to sensor nodes limited capabilities. In this context, we describe a lightweight middleware platform to support the development of distributed...

This paper proposes a mapping technique for automatically translating rules expressed in a format based on natural language, i.e. Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard, into production rules that can be executed by a computer (i.e. Rule engine). The proposed approach achieves a twofold purpose: on the one hand non IT s...

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems are constantly evolving and becoming ever more complex, so it is increasingly difficult to design and develop them successfully. Moreover, because of the complexity of an AmI system as a whole, it is not always easy for developers to predict its behavior in the event of unforeseen circumstances. A possible solutio...

The paradigm of pervasive computing is gaining more and more attention nowadays, thanks to the possibility of obtaining precise and continuous monitoring. Ease of deployment and adaptivity are typically implemented by adopting autonomous and cooperative sensory devices; however, for such systems to be of any practical use, reliability and fault tol...

In recent years, reduction of energy consumption in buildings has increasingly gained interest among researchers mainly due to practical reasons, such as economic advantages and long-term environmental sustainability. Many solutions have been proposed in the literature to address this important issue from complementary perspectives, which are often...

Nowadays, Internet users may experience some difficulty in finding the information they need from the huge multitude of existing web pages. A possible solution to this problem might lie in delegating some of the search tasks to machines, or in other words, in building a Semantic Web in which information could be processed automatically by intellige...

The definition of effective energy saving strategies capable of satisfying users' requirements for environmental wellness is a complex task that requires the definition of well-tuned optimization algorithms. Sensory information depends on the environments observed, hence themodel adopted to describe it should be adaptive and dynamic. This chapter p...