Livio Pompianu

• PhD
• Assistant professor (RTDa) at University of Cagliari

Besides recording transfers of currency, the Bitcoin blockchain is being used to save metadata — i.e. arbitrary pieces of data which do not affect transfers of bitcoins. This can be done by using different techniques, and for different purposes. For instance, a growing number of protocols embed metadata in the blockchain to certify and transfer the...

Since the inception of Bitcoin in 2009, the market of cryptocurrencies has grown beyond the initial expectations, as witnessed by the thousands of tokenised assets available on the market, whose daily trades exceed dozens of USD billions. The pseudonymity features of cryptocurrencies have attracted the attention of cybercriminals, who exploit them...

Monitoring applications are increasingly important to enable predictive maintenance and real-time anomaly detection in industrial and civil safety-critical infrastructures. Typical monitoring pipelines consist of a sensor network that collects and streams IoT data toward a cloud infrastructure that provides storage, visualisation and data analytic...

Workplace safety is a prominent concern, motivating researchers across diverse disciplines to investigate valuable ways to address its challenges. However, creating an efficient system to address this issue remains a significant challenge. Since many accidents happen due to improper usage or complete removal of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE),...

The scientific advances of recent years have made available to anyone affordable hardware devices capable of doing something unthinkable until a few years ago, the reading of brain waves. It means that through small wearable devices it is possible to perform an Electroencephalography (EEG), albeit with less potential than those offered by high-cost...

Minority languages are vital to preserving cultural heritage, yet they face growing risks of extinction due to limited digital resources and the dominance of artificial intelligence models trained on high-resource languages. This white paper proposes a framework to generate linguistic tools for low-resource languages, focusing on data creation to s...

Today's computer system security is critical at every operational level and device, as the compromise of a single element can propagate through connected other network elements, causing unpredictable and dangerous effects. To face unauthorized access and evolving malicious strategies, researchers have intensified efforts to develop effective Intrus...

Biometric systems leveraging ElectroEncephaloGram (EEG) data for user authentication present significant potential in diverse contexts, especially in Smart City ecosystems where secure access to sensitive data is crucial (e.g., healthcare systems, intelligent transportation, smart grids, public safety, and citizen services). However, the complexity...

The exponential growth of unstructured documents generated daily underscores the urgent need to develop technologies to structure information effectively. Traditional Information Extraction (IE) models permit transforming textual data to structured formats (e.g., semantic triplets), enabling efficient searches and uncovering hidden data insights. H...

The development of user identity verification approaches using biometric systems based on EEG data holds significant promise across various domains. However, the inherent complexity and variability of this data make designing reliable solutions challenging. In response to these challenges, this work introduces a Normalized Neural Network Ensemble (...

The growing availability of low-cost devices able of performing an Electroencephalography (EEG) has opened stimulating scenarios in the security field, where such data could be exploited as a biometric approach for user identification. However, a series of problems, first of all, the difficulty of obtaining unique and stable EEG patterns over time,...

The ever-increasing use of services based on computer networks, even in crucial areas unthinkable until a few years ago, has made the security of these networks a crucial element for anyone, also in consideration of the increasingly sophisticated techniques and strategies available to attackers. In this context, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) p...

The ever-increasing use of services based on computer networks, even in crucial areas unthinkable until a few years ago, has made the security of these networks a crucial element for anyone, also in consideration of the increasingly sophisticated techniques and strategies available to attackers. In this context, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) p...

In the current digitalization era, capturing and effectively representing knowledge is crucial in most real-world scenarios. In this context, knowledge graphs represent a potent tool for retrieving and organizing a vast amount of information in a properly interconnected and interpretable structure. However, their generation is still challenging and...

The rating of users requesting financial services is a growing task, especially in this historical period of the COVID-19 pandemic characterized by a dramatic increase in online activities, mainly related to e-commerce. This kind of assessment is a task manually performed in the past that today needs to be carried out by automatic credit scoring sy...

The relatively recent introduction on the market of low-cost devices able to perform an Electroencephalography (EEG) has opened a stimulating research scenario that involves a large number of researchers previously excluded due to the high costs of such hardware. In this regard, one of the most stimulating research fields is focused on the use of s...

The relatively recent introduction on the market of low-cost devices able to perform an Electroencephalography (EEG) has opened a stimulating research scenario that involves a large number of researchers previously excluded due to the high costs of such hardware. In this regard, one of the most stimulating research fields is focused on the use of s...

The rating of users requesting financial services is a growing task, especially in this historical period of the COVID-19 pandemic characterized by a dramatic increase in online activities, mainly related to e-commerce. This kind of assessment is a task manually performed in the past that today needs to be carried out by automatic credit scoring sy...

The Payments Systems Directive 2 (PSD2), recently issued by the European Union, allows the banks to share their customer data if they authorize the operation. On the one hand, this opportunity offers interesting perspectives to the financial operators, allowing them to evaluate the customers reliability (Credit Scoring) even in the absence of the c...

The Payments Systems Directive 2 (PSD2), recently issued by the European Union, allows the banks to share their customer data if they authorize the operation. On the one hand, this opportunity offers interesting perspectives to the financial operators, allowing them to evaluate the customers reliability (Credit Scoring) even in the absence of the c...

In recent decades, modern societies are experiencing an increasing adoption of interconnected smart devices. This revolution involves not only canonical devices such as smartphones and tablets, but also simple objects like light bulbs. Named the Internet of Things (IoT), this ever-growing scenario offers enormous opportunities in many areas of mode...

In recent years Smart Contracts and DApps are becoming increasingly important and widespread thanks to the properties of blockchain technology. In most cases DApps are business critical, and very strict security requirements should be assured. Developing safe and reliable Smart Contracts, however, is not a trivial task. Several researchers have stu...

Among the accessory applications of the blockchain, the idea of using it as an immutable register for tracking and certifying documents is recently gaining interest in research and industry. The problems of traceability, non-counterfeiting and unique usage of digital coupons fall within this area; many couponing platforms are hence exploring the po...

Among the accessory applications of the blockchain, the idea of using it as an immutable register for tracking and certifying documents is recently gaining interest in research and industry. The problems of traceability, non-counterfeiting and unique usage of digital coupons fall within this area; many couponing platforms are hence exploring the po...

The rise of blockchain technologies has given a boost to social good projects, which are trying to exploit various characteristic features of blockchains: the quick and inexpensive transfer of cryptocurrency, the transparency of transactions, the ability to tokenize any kind of assets, and the increase in trustworthiness due to decentralization. Ho...

The rise of blockchain technologies has given a boost to social good projects, which are trying to exploit various characteristic features of blockchains: the quick and inexpensive transfer of cryptocurrency, the transparency of transactions, the ability to tokenize any kind of assets, and the increase in trustworthiness due to decentralization. Ho...

BlockAPI is a data analytics framework, supporting Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum. It integrates relevant blockchain data with data from other sources, and organises them in a database. BlockAPI is released as an open-source Scala library.

Modern cryptocurrencies exploit decentralised blockchains to record a public and unalterable history of transactions. Besides transactions, further metadata is stored for different, and often undisclosed, purposes. Metadata is mostly generated by protocols and smart contracts, i.e. programs whose correct execution is automatically enforced without...

Contract-oriented programming is a software engineering paradigm which proposes the use of behavioural contracts to discipline the interaction among software components. In a distributed setting, the various components of an application may be developed and run by untrustworthy parties, which could opportunistically diverge from the expected behavi...

Modern cryptocurrencies exploit decentralised blockchains to record a public and unalterable history of transactions. Besides transactions, further information is stored for different, and often undisclosed, purposes, making the blockchains a rich and increasingly growing source of valuable information, in part of difficult interpretation. Many dat...

Slides paper ”A general framework for blockchain analytics”, presented by Livio Pompianu

Project page - A general framework for blockchain analytics

Link blockchain analytics framework sources

Slides paper ”An analysis of Bitcoin OP_RETURN metadata”, presented by Livio Pompianu

Slides paper ”An empirical analysis of smart contracts platforms, applications, and design patterns”, presented by Livio Pompianu

Smart contracts are computer programs that can be consistently executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the arbitration of a trusted authority. Because of their resilience to tampering, smart contracts are appealing in many scenarios, especially in those which require transfers of money to respect certain agreed rules (like in f...

The Bitcoin protocol allows to save arbitrary data on the blockchain through a special instruction of the scripting language, called OP_RETURN. A growing number of protocols exploit this feature to extend the range of applications of the Bitcoin blockchain beyond transfer of currency. A point of debate in the Bitcoin community is whether loading da...

Link OP_RETURN tool sources

Poster paper ”A contract-oriented middleware”

Developing distributed applications typically requires to integrate new code with legacy third-party services, e.g., e-commerce facilities, maps, etc. These services cannot always be assumed to smoothly collaborate with each other; rather, they live in a “wild” environment where they must compete for resources, and possibly diverge from the expecte...

We propose an extension of binary session types, to formalise timed communication protocols between two participants at the endpoints of a session. We introduce a decidable compliance relation, which generalises to the timed setting the usual progress-based notion of compliance between untimed session types. We then show a sound and complete techni...