Gustavo Marfia

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• Phd, Computer Science, UCLA
• Professor (Full) at University of Bologna

In recent years, Diffusion Models have become the new state-of-the-art in deep generative modeling, ending the long-time dominance of Generative Adversarial Networks. Inspired by the Regularization by Denoising principle, we introduce an approach that integrates a Latent Diffusion Model, trained for the denoising task, into a variational framework...

Conversational Virtual Agents (CVAs) offer a promising approach for enhancing user task performance in Mixed Reality (MR) environments. This paper explores the integration of a CVA into an MR application designed to assist in solving a 2D physical puzzle, offering enhanced spatial cognitive capabilities. Using the CVA classification architecture an...

Educational practices are increasingly experimenting with eXtended Reality (XR) paradigms to offer novel opportunities for boundaryless learning experiences with real-time interactions in immersive environments. Digital Twins (DT) are also gaining traction in this field to facilitate personalized learning experiences. However, a still unexplored sp...

The cultural heritage of theatrical dance involves diverse sources requiring complex multi-modal approaches. Since manual analysis methods are labor-intensive and so limited to few data samples, we here discuss the use of the DanXe framework, which combines different AI paradigms for comprehensive dance material analysis and visualization. However,...

Educational practices are increasingly experimenting with eXtended Reality (XR) paradigms to offer novel opportunities for boundaryless learning experiences with real-time interactions in immersive environments. Digital Twins (DT) are also gaining traction in this field to facilitate personalized learning experiences. However, a still unexplored sp...

Conversational Virtual Agents (CVA) have great potential to assist users in their task performance. Whether these agents need to be embodied or not was the main research question of the present pilot study. To answer this question, we designed and developed a Mixed Reality (MR) application for solving a physical puzzle while interacting with a CVA....

Fostering creativity is paramount for cultivating innovative minds capable of addressing complex challenges. Modern technologies like eXtended Reality (XR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) may nurture grounds supporting creative thinking by providing immersive and manipulable environments. An open research question is how such technologies may best...

Fostering creativity is paramount for cultivating innovative minds capable of addressing complex challenges. Modern technologies like eXtended Reality (XR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) may nurture grounds supporting creative thinking by providing immersive and manipulable environments. An open research question is how such technologies may best...

Augmented reality (AR) is changing the field of university teaching, including teaching human anatomy, which is one of the fundamental areas in medical education. Within this process, in the academic years 2021–22 and 2022–23 at the International School of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Bologna, a teaching laboratory was activated using...

Motivated by the need to leverage technologies to enhance the preservation, accessibility, quantitative data analysis, and valorization of Dance Heritage, this work introduces DanXe, a framework based on Artificial Intelligence and Extended Reality for the digitization, automatic analysis, and immersive manipulations of tangible and intangible cult...

The expanding realm of eXtended Reality (XR) has witnessed a surge in 3D experiences across diverse domains, undergoing significant transformations to define novel experiences. However, such experiences are often built from scratch, as there is a lack of tools that support augmenting existing non-immersive interfaces, like Desktop games and simulat...

Extended Reality (XR) paradigms have found applications in different areas, with vast adoption in both education and industry. Those flourished since XR enables spatial 3D object manipulation, and annotations, which have proven to be crucial for enhancing learning and task execution efficacy. In developing such experiences, inde-pendence towards th...

The expanding realm of eXtended Reality (XR) has witnessed a surge in 3D experiences across diverse domains, undergoing significant transformations to define novel experiences. However, such experiences are often built from scratch, as there is a lack of tools that support augmenting existing non-immersive interfaces, like Desktop games and simulat...

Figure 1: WiXaRd is a networked WebXR platform that provides a modular interface designed for use across the XR spectrum and 2D displays, allowing users to visualize and manipulate 3D environments, while providing access to external 3D databases and a Remote Rendering service. ABSTRACT eXtended Reality (XR) paradigms have found applications in diff...

Augmented Reality (AR) has gained interest in various domains, including entertainment, education, and healthcare. At the crossroads of entertainment and healthcare, users involved in physical workouts may benefit from AR systems to visualize and interact with real-world blended information. On this line, we here introduce M-AGEW (Magic AuGmentEd W...

The presentation of Unity-VRlines, a modular VR Flight Simulation System developed based on the Unity game engine and the SteamVR SDK at the IFIP ICEC conference. Unlike similar works, Unity-VRlines provides an immersive open-source experience for both flight simulations and plane cockpit control which also includes the chance to adapt a novel 3D...

This tutorial will provide participants with an overview of how academia and industry are applying Metaverse-related technologies to the entertainment sector, with an emphasis on fashion. Fashion, in fact, appears as an interesting use case, as it integrates: (a) entertainment and storytelling aspects, (b) creativity, (c) industrial production, and...

Computer-aided flight simulation systems (CAFSS) make it possible to simulate flying an airplane using software and hardware. These simulations range from simple programs to intricate, full-motion simulators that often integrate physical feedback and visual clues to create realistic and affordable entertainment and pilot training. Nowadays, eXtende...

The Metaverse era is rapidly shaping novel and effective tools particularly useful in the entertainment and creative industry. A fundamental role is played by modern generative deep learning models, that can be used to provide varied and high-quality multimedia content, considerably lowering costs while increasing production efficiency. The goodnes...

An invisible layer of knowledge is progressively growing with the emergence of situated visualizations and reality-based information retrieval systems. In essence, digital content will overlap with real-world entities, eventually providing insights into the surrounding environment and useful information for the user. The implementation of such a vi...

Extended Reality (XR) has gained significant attention, offering novel pathways for learning based on the sharing of 3D content. Nevertheless, additional efforts should be spent to understand the advantages set forth by Cross-Reality (CR) scenarios, for example including Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) experiences in the context of re...

To study the evolution of specific cultures and times different kinds of pictures could be adopted. Family album photos may reveal socio-historical insights regarding those specific cultures and times. Along this path, this work addresses the problem of automatically dating an image by resorting to the analysis of an analog family album photo datas...

This work shows the preliminary results of a pioneering project aimed at comparing the aesthetic experience of a musical concert experienced in different contexts for which the audience's perceived presence is modulated in a continuum ranging from a live concert to a music video, passing through immersive artificial environments. In contrast to pr...

Ordinary life without uncertainty is unimaginable. Uncertainty is experienced daily almost by everybody in tasks such as choosing, and solving problems, and mostly it appears in the context of interpersonal communications. Past research highlights that perceived uncertainty of information in a communication system has high effects on the quality of...

The article presents the results of a quasi-experiment that intends to start the investigation of the effectiveness and efficiency of using immersive virtual reality (IVR) during teaching activity. Thirty-four 9th grade students from a high school in Northern Italy were involved. The data was collected through questionnaires, assessment tests and v...

Long document summarization poses obstacles to current generative transformer-based models because of the broad context to process and understand. Indeed, detecting long-range dependencies is still challenging for today’s state-of-the-art solutions, usually requiring model expansion at the cost of an unsustainable demand for computing and memory ca...

Admittedly, eXtend Reality (XR) technologies may play a key role in the digital transformation sparked by the Industry 4.0 initiative. Within the virtuality continuum, Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR, MR) emerge as disruptive technologies as they can improve industrial processes while maximizing worker efficiency and mobility by providing virtual e...

Presentation made for the paper "AnnHoloTator: A Mixed Reality Collaborative Platform for Manufacturing Work Instruction Interaction"

Two common difficulties which people face in their daily lives are managing effective communication with others and dealing with what makes them feel uncertain. Past research highlights that the result of not being able to handle these difficulties influences people’s performance in the task at hand substantially, especially in the context of a soc...

Background The advancements of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, and the Internet of Things paved the path to the emergence and use of Digital Twins (DTs) as technologies to "twin" the life of a physical entity in different fields, ranging from industry to healthcare. At the same time, the advent of eXtended Reality (XR) in industrial an...

Overlaying rendered virtual annotations on top of the camera view of the real world requires intensive use of computer vision paradigms for object recognition and tracking. This involves computationally intensive tasks and the availability of large-scale databases of reference images. In some domains, a lack of reference images may be particularly...

To flexibly regulate their behavior, children’s ability to inhibit prepotent responses arises from cognitive and motor mechanisms that have an intertwined developmental trajectory. Subtle differences in planning and control can contribute to impulsive behaviors, which are common in Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and difficult t...

Family album photo collections may reveal historical insights regarding specific cultures and times. In most cases, such photos are scattered among private homes and only available on paper or photographic film, thus making their analysis very cumbersome. Their study may also become difficult because of the number of photos that such collections co...

We here verify whether a quantitative approach, i.e., a deep learning-based one, may be used to synthesize a model apt to perform specific qualitative analyses. To this aim, we leverage a previous contribution, where we approached the concrete problem of implementing a socio-historical classification toolchain for a collection of vernacular photos....

To flexibly regulate their behavior, children’s ability to inhibit prepotent responses arises from cognitive and motor mechanisms that have an intertwined developmental trajectory. Subtle differences in planning and control can contribute to impulsive behaviors, which are common in Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and difficult t...

Although one of the most popular practices in photography since the end of the 19th century, an increase in scholarly interest in family photo albums dates back to the early 1980s. Such collections of photos may reveal sociological and historical insights regarding specific cultures and times. They are, however, in most cases scattered among privat...

Digital Twin (DT) models mirror the life of physical entities and are adopted to optimize several industrial processes. Although well-established in the industrial fields, one of the most exciting examples of where DTs may be employed is in the MetaVerse, with Human Digital Twins (HDTs). We present a preliminary study that examines the efficacy of...

The opportunity to foresee how a physical system might work in advance, resorting to its digital model, explains the general attractiveness of digital twins. The use of digital twins, especially in the manufacturing context, encourages the investigation of the benefits they may bring in many circumstances, ranging from medical to commercial applica...

The ongoing development of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies is supporting a rapid increase of their performances along with a progressive decrease of their costs, making them more and more attractive for a large class of consumers. As a result, their widespread use is expected within the next few years. This may foster new opportunities for e-com...

While human culture evolves, human heritage remains frozen in time, engraved in material culture as a testament to the past. Among such materials, pictures amount to a prominent example, as they yield information and clues about what happened in the past. In fact, pictures from the past represent a unique chance to revive old memories about affecti...

The advancements in terms of networking, image resolution, computer vision (CV) and mobile cloud computing performances are transforming Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) into a technology which may be put to good use in a variety of everyday contexts. To make this point, we here consider an artisanal craft rooted back into the past, key locksmithing,...

The present work explores the distinctive contribution of motor planning and control to human reaching movements. In particular, the movements were triggered by the selection of a prepotent response (Dominant) or, instead, by the inhibition of the prepotent response, which required the selection of an alternative one (Non-dominant). To this end, we...

With the development of learning algorithms, the constantly increasing computing power and the available amount of multimedia data, the adoption rate of data science techniques is steadily growing. Machine and deep learning algorithms are already used in a wide variety of ways to solve domain-specific problems. However, the potential of such method...

Following the leap set by the introduction of digital photography and spread of social media, the custom of creating and nourishing a family photo album is steadily declining. The feeling of waving goodbye to an old technology may hence explain why collectors and museums are increasingly searching for such type of photographs. In such scenario, a b...

The present work explores the distinctive contribution of motor planning and control to human reaching movements. In particular, the movements were triggered by the selection of a prepotent response (Dominant) or, instead, by the inhibition of the prepotent response, that required the selection of an alternative one (Non-dominant). To this aim, we...

Although one of the most popular practices in photography since the end of the 19th century, an increase in scholarly interest in family photo albums dates back to the early 1980s. Such collections of photos may reveal sociological and historical insights regarding specific cultures and times. They are, however, in most cases scattered among privat...

Data science has become more and more powerful as the development of algorithms and computing power has made huge progresses. Researchers have used machine learning and deep learning algorithms in order to solve hard problems in a variety of domains. Nevertheless, data science will only show its true potential the moment that all categories of inte...

In this work, resorting to a literature review, we walk through the points of contact between two apparently far and distinct disciplines, computer science and aesthetics, with the aim of showing how one may instead provide theoretical grounding and new exciting research problems to the other and vice versa. Computer science, in fact, has evolved f...

The full release and circulation of excavation results often takes decades, thus slowing down progress in archaeology to a degree not in keeping with other scientific fields. The nonconformity of released data for digital processing also requires vast and costly data input and adaptation. Archaeology should face the cognitive challenges posed by di...

In this work we provide the probabilistic analysis of the energy consumed by installed mobile apps when uploading data to the cloud based on the occurrence of random events during a given time interval. A polynomial algorithm to calculate the probability distribution of the energy they consume is here obtained. The validity of our approach is corro...

Abstract A number of works have addressed the question of assessing the status and the 2 4 quality of the environment through the lens of Online Social Networks (OSNs). These contributions fall in the area of human-centric sensing, area specialized in using what people spontaneously say on social media to detect the occurrence of given events. Rese...

Background: Data concerning patients originates from a variety of sources on social media. Objective: The aim of this study was to show how methodologies borrowed from different areas including computer science, econometrics, statistics, data mining, and sociology may be used to analyze Facebook data to investigate the patients' perspectives on...

A common ground for many small businesses which are based and operate in Europe, capable today of standing against the waves of the globalization and the online economy, is the added value given by: (a) the quality of their services/products, and, (b) the trust they receive from their customers. Interestingly, such businesses are capable, in many c...

This paper completes an analysis started a few years ago which has exploited Facebook as a tool suitable for collecting and analyzing Crohn’s disease patients’ reactions to the Infliximab treatment. We here finish off such work by comparing the satisfaction recorded with the use of sentiment analysis techniques as provided by intelligent tools for...

Despite the introduction of novel energy harvesting technologies, the lifetime of a sensor platform remains one of its most important performance metrics. Performance, however, may also be assessed in terms of the fraction of events which may successfully/unsuccessfully be detected and reported within a time interval of interest, i.e., mission time...

Back pain and upper extremities injuries due to overexertion account for over twenty percent of leave days from work in the US. This explains why a vast amount of initiatives have been, to this date, carried out aiming at reducing the occurrence of such type of injuries. However, although such type of lesions are among the most studied in occupatio...

In this work we model and provide the means to extend the lifetime of a barrier coverage sensor network deployed for target detection. We consider a scenario where sensors are randomly dropped on a bidimensional field in order to detect target traversals which occur in a stochastic way within a critical mission time. Once a target enters a sensor’s...

Research efforts, in the area of virtual reality, have mostly concentrated on the design and implementation of devices supporting user presence in immersive environments. Much can be done, however, to further improve the experience of wearing a head mounted display, in order to forget being at home while playing a computer game or navigating a virt...

This work extends the state of the art in the modeling of the lifetime of a sensor network. This is performed concentrating on the peculiarities exhibited by a specific, but realistic scenario, surveillance sensor networks, sensor networks in charge of reporting the passage of targets across an area of interest. Focusing on surveillance sensor netw...

Transportation policy and planning strategies, as well as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), can all play important roles in decreasing pollution levels and their negative effects. Interestingly, limited effort has been devoted to exploring the potential of social network analysis in such context. Social networks provide direct feedback from...

While Twitter and other Online Social Networks (OSNs) or microblogs are considered as a source of information for breaking news or uproarious and unexpected events, they could also be exploited as a dense world-wide sensors network for physical measurements. The corpus of geotagged posts from OSNs includes people’s feedbacks about a wide range of t...

Online medical information prosumerism is supported by search engines, web sites, forums and social networks, all tools which provide a timely browsing of the big data of medical information. Reliable medical ecosystems require an assessment of such data, to control its quality from both clinical and patient standpoints. In addition, independent of...

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have practical applications in various fields. DTNs have been studied in-depth by many researchers and multiple high quality survey papers have been produced which analyzes DTN features, taxonomies, and applications. In recent years, interest in DTN research has rekindled as there are several emerging network-based ap...

Mobile devices and web pages increasingly set not only the direction, but also the pace taken in many everyday life activities. In essence, the lives of many people today follow algorithmic paths, provided by navigation units and by social recommendation systems. Although this improves the efficiency and functionality of many tasks, this process ma...

Anonymity, speed and big data are all ingredients at the basis of an intense online medical information prosumerism supported by search-engines, websites, forums and social networks. Fostering reliable medical ecosystems requires an exploitation of such data, controlling quality and delineating user behaviors. This strongly emerges with chronic pat...

Mobile communication devices are expected to overtake traditional desktop PCs and become the dominant point of entry to the Internet. This technology shift has boosted user demand for multimedia applications and services which are now typically accessed through the wireless interface. Users expect to be always connected and able to run a variety of...

The widespread adoption of mobile technology has opened the door to a new era for the public health sector. The ability to collect, share and access community health related data are key factors that have made mobile health an appealing addon to medicine practitioners and researchers. Mobile sensing and wireless communications can be exploited to c...

While fully understood, the opportunities posed to the consumer market by mobile computing platforms have been so far mainly exploited with smartphones and a few other gadgets. This is true for both the exchange of data and personal communication purposes, but also for sensing operations. Efficient sensing operations, however, may not always be per...

The exponential growth of audiovisual and textual data is aggressively leading to the creation of tools and systems capable of selecting and recognizing given patterns of information. Such urge is at the basis of the development of machine learning techniques, techniques that are today employed to analyze all kinds of information. Computer gaming i...

Museums and similar institutions are historically locations where content is typically only intellectually appreciated following linear visiting patterns. No interactions, in fact, are typically implemented and no possible choice is drawn in front of a visitor regarding the exhibits that will be shown. In addition, exhibition experiences are typica...

We present a REST approach to build Health services on the Web. Our proposal originates by the necessity of evolving the current regional health service to accommodate emerging needs that are too complex to accomplish with the current system. The original system extends on the regional scale of Emilia-Romagna, and it is one of the most advanced in...