Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein

University of Urbino | UNIURB · Department of Pure and Applied Sciences

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a well-established paradigm that leverages mobile devices’ ubiquitous nature and processing capabilities for large-scale data collection to monitor phenomena of common interest. Crowd-powered data collection is significantly faster and more cost-effective than traditional methods. However, it poses challenges in assessi...

During the height of the CoViD-19 pandemic in 2020 and early 2021, schools throughout Europe have been closed for several months, leaving teachers with the responsibility of providing distance learning through video conferencing and remote-presence systems, while parents were scrambling for appropriate tools and support. School outings have also su...

Interactive fiction, the narration paradigm that allows players or readers to directly affect the branching of a story, has been the focus both of a popular genre of books (so-called GameBooks or Choose Your Own Adventure books) and of narrative experiences delivered through interactive computer programs, which includes but is not limited to many p...

Assessment of balance by means of posturographic analysis is frequently used in the clinical practice for evaluating the risk of falls or as an indicator of balance-related disorders. The development of automatic, affordable and accurate systems for gauging balance capabilities in the elderly is deemed a crucial step towards the adoption of prevent...

The COVID-19 crisis represents the most dangerous threat to public health since the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1918. So far, the disease due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been countered with extreme measures at national level that attempt to suppress epidemic growth. However, these approaches require quick adoption and enforcement in order to effecti...

This paper discusses the potential for player-data interaction enabled through the medium of gameplay that is procedurally generated using crowd-sourced data. A mobile game, which is called 'Balance Trucks' procedurally generates levels containing terrains derived from data collected through the SmartRoadSense (SRS) application. SRS allows data on...

Computational thinking and coding-based problem solving are increasingly seen as crucial cross-disciplinary skills and an important part of a well-rounded education. Coding games and problem solving exercises have been growing in popularity. Many large-scale initiatives have been launched in order to bring these initiatives into classrooms, from pr...

Readily available and affordable consumer-grade electronics, with ever-increasing sensing, computing, and communication capabilities, have provided the ground for distributed computation and data collection systems. Crowd-sensing applications rely on volunteers providing access to their personal devices—a category encompassing smartphones, wearable...

This paper examines the opportunities and the economic benefits of exploiting publicly-sourced datasets of road surface quality. Crowdsourcing and crowdsensing initiatives channel the participation of engaged citizens into communities that contribute towards a shared goal. In providing people with the tools needed to positively impact society, crow...

Conversational interfaces and chatbots have a long history, but have only recently been hyped as a disruptive technology ready to replace mobile apps and Web sites. Many online messaging platforms have introduced support to third-party chatbots, which can be procedurally programmed, but usually rely on a retrieval-based specification language (such...

Within the field of procedural content generation (PCG) research, the use of crowd-sensing data has, until now, primarily been used as a means of collecting information and generating feedback relating to player experience within games, and game aesthetics. However, crowd-sensing data can offer much more, supplying a seemingly untapped font of info...

Crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are social innovation paradigms that, through the participation of active citizens, allow communities to contribute to a shared goal and provide people with tools with the capacity to positively impacting society. Mobile crowdsensing in particular takes advantage of pervasive mobile devices with on-board sensors to en...

In this paper, we describe an online multi-player game that challenges players with abstract coding puzzles that are tied to a geo-graphical location. The proposed system transposes the classical scheme of “treasure hunt” games into a mixed-reality game, where players must physically move in order to advance in the game, while at the same time inte...

Recent initiatives promoting code literacy have often focused on engaging children, of various ages, with several kinds of games or game-like tools based on programming concepts. Many of these coding games have adopted grid movement mechanics that can be traced back to the Logo programming language and its memorable turtle. The same grid movement p...

Coding games, both computer-based and "unplugged" ones, have been increasingly used over the past years to promote code literacy and to bring basic programming concepts to the larger public, in particular to children in preschool , elementary, and middle school ages. Chatbots on instant messaging (IM) platforms provide a modern and friction-free in...

Over the course of the last years, a growing number of Mobile Crowd-Sensing (MCS) applications have been developed to exploit the broad availability of sensor-equipped mobile devices for large scale monitoring and data gathering tasks. MCS systems often pursue goals oriented towards the common good, intrinsically generating social value through the...

Larger smartphones have become increasingly commonplace, sometimes blurring the boundaries between phones and tablets. Most UI guidelines and usability studies are rarely updated and are still based on smaller screens or one-handed operations, which can be tiresome on large devices that may require different, or even two-handed postures. Past usabi...

This work documents the recent rise in popularity of messaging bots: chatterbot-like agents with simple, textual interfaces that allow users to access information, make use of services, or provide entertainment through online messaging platforms. Conversational interfaces have been often studied in their many facets, including natural language proc...

Chatterbots, or bots, have recently enjoyed a dramatic comeback: these automated agents, communicating with users through the exchange of simple text messages, have overtaken most online messaging platforms and are increasingly used to provide means to access information or to make use of services. Because of the pervasive popularity of messaging p...

The recent spread of coding literacy initiatives, such as Hour of Code, Europe Code Week, or Africa Code Week, have underlined the growing importance and interest for computational thinking, often channeled through the use of innovative teaching tools, which foster creativity, collaboration, and interactivity. Learning coding notions is generally...

The importance of coding as an instrument to develop computational thinking has motivated the proliferation of worldwide coding literacy campaigns, including Hour of Code, Europe Code Week, and Africa Code Week, endorsed by tech companies, governative organizations, and influential personalities. The success of these campaigns has been bolstered b...

Mobile devices present several features which make them attractive as enabling technology for crowdsensing systems. In particular, their spectrum of sensing capabilities, together with consolidated diffusion and ease of use contribute to an increasing adoption in different mobility-based sensing scenarios. On the other hand, the availability of mas...

Monitoring of road surface conditions is a critical activity in transport infrastructure management. Many research solutions have been proposed in order to automatically control and check the quality of road surfaces. Most of them make use of expensive sensors embedded in vehicles or mainly focus on detection of specific anomalies during monitoring...

SmartRoadSense aims to evaluate the status of the road surface condition using a smartphone. To this purpose, a low-cost collaborative system is developed. The proposed approach introduces a thoroughly integrated system suitable for monitoring applications in a scalable, crowdsourcing collaborative setting.

The functioning of mobile networks, and especially mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), is based on the assumption that a subset of the nodes that compose the network are able and willing to cooperate, for instance forwarding packets on the behalf of others. In particular, in user-centric networks based on local-loop forwarding, where resources might b...

Multimedia contents delivered over residential and mobile IP networks are among the main driving forces of the Internet. The pervasiveness of connected devices capable of receiving and decoding multimedia streams has induced a change in the market of set-top boxes from dedicated proprietary appliances to software modules running on top of off-the-s...

The widespread diffusion of connected devices capable of receiving and decoding multimedia streams is in-ducing a change in the market of set-top boxes from dedicated proprietary appliances to software modules running on top of off-the-shelf devices. In spite of the large number of devices we use every day, smart phones are the favourite answer to...

Internet traffic trends and forecasts clearly show that audio-video streaming is a killer application for next generation networks. Providing multicast support within operators' managed networks is mandatory to sustain the exponential growth of demand for multimedia contents without saturating the bandwidth available in core, backhauling, and acces...

IP Television (IPTV) is commonly considered to be the killer application for next-generation networks (NGNs). There is, however, a chicken and egg situation between the deployment of broadband access networks and the diffusion of high quality multimedia services, such as high definition television, which actually impairs the development of NGNs. As...

Energy harvesting technologies make it possible to exploit environmental power to realize autonomous wireless sensor networks with unlimited lifetime. However, the actual autonomy of a wireless network depends on the energetic sustainability of its workload that depends, on its turn, on the algorithms adopted to route packets from the sensor nodes...