Luca VassioPolitecnico di Torino | polito · DAUIN - Department of Control and Computer Engineering
Luca Vassio
Assistant Professor Computer Engineering - PhD Telecommunication Engineering - MSc Mathematical Engineering
About
65
Publications
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428
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
November 2014 - September 2017
Publications
Publications (65)
Modeling social interactions and their impact on opinion dynamics has attracted growing interest in recent decades, fuelled by the mounting popularity of online social networks (OSNs). On online social platforms, a few individuals, commonly referred to as \textit{influencers}, produce the majority of content consumed by users. However, classic opin...
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on graph-structured data across numerous domains. Their underlying ability to represent nodes as summaries of their vicinities has proven effective for homophilous graphs in particular, in which same-type nodes tend to connect. On heterophilous graphs, in which different-type nodes a...
In this paper, we analyse the impact of system design options with different demand intensities for electric vehicle free-floating car sharing systems (EV-FFCS). We consider three different cities for which we collected rental data from a car sharing system. Using these data, we build demand and supply models of an EV-FFCS. We evaluate the performa...
Payment platforms have significantly evolved in recent years to keep pace with the proliferation of online and cashless payments. These platforms are increasingly aligned with online social networks, allowing users to interact with each other and transfer small amounts of money in a Peer-to-Peer fashion. This poses new challenges for analysing paym...
Collective user behavior in social media applications often drives several important online and offline phenomena linked to the spread of opinions and information. Several studies have focused on the analysis of such phenomena using networks to model user interactions , represented by edges. However, only a fraction of edges contribute to the actua...
To protect user privacy, legislators have regulated the use of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users’ consent before collecting data. As a result, websites started showing more and more consent management modules – i.e., Consent Banners – the visitors have to interact with to access the website content. Since these banners chang...
A relevant fraction of human interactions occurs on online social networks. In this context, the freshness of content plays an important role, with content popularity rapidly vanishing over time. We therefore investigate how influencers’ generated content (i.e., posts) attracts interactions, measured by the number of likes or reactions. We analyse...
We are pleased towelcome you to the 3rd InternationalWorkshop on AI in Networks and Distributed Systems (WAIN). The workshop aims to present high-quality researches leveraging machine learning and data analysis solutions to take full advantage of network systems and infrastructures. In detail, this year WAIN presents innovations for data center sch...
The web ecosystem is based on a market where stakeholders collect and sell personal data, but nowadays users expect stronger guarantees of transparency and privacy. With the PIMCity personal information management system (PIMS) development kit, we provide an open-source development kit for building PIMSs to foster the development of open and user-c...
Cloud gaming is a class of services that promises to revolutionize the videogame market. It allows the user to play a videogame with essential equipment while using a remote server for the actual execution. The multimedia content is streamed through the network from the server to the user. Hence, this service requires low latency and a large bandwi...
Anomaly detection aims at finding unexpected patterns in data. It has been used in several problems in computer networks, from the detection of port scans and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to the monitoring of time series collected from Internet monitoring systems. Data-driven approaches and machine learning have seen widespread appl...
Instagram has been increasingly used as a source of information especially among the youth. As a result, political figures now leverage the platform to spread opinions and political agenda. We here analyze online discussions on Instagram, notably in political topics, from a network perspective. Specifically, we investigate the emergence of communit...
Large fleets of industrial and construction vehicles require periodic maintenance activities. Scheduling these operations is potentially challenging because the optimal timeline depends on the vehicle characteristics and usage. This paper studies a real industrial case study, where a company providing telematics services supports fleet managers in...
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules -- i.e., Privacy Banners -- the visitors have to interact with to access the website content. They challenge the...
Instagram has been increasingly used as a source of information especially among the youth. As a result, political figures now leverage the platform to spread opinions and political agenda. We here analyze online discussions on Instagram, notably in political topics, from a network perspective. Specifically, we investigate the emergence of communit...
With the advent of big data and the birth of the data markets that sell personal information, individuals' privacy is of utmost importance. The classical response is anonymization, i.e., sanitizing the information that can directly or indirectly allow users' re-identification. The most popular solution in the literature is the k-anonymity. However,...
The COVID-19 pandemic is not only having a heavy impact on healthcare but also changing people's habits and the society we live in. Countries such as Italy have enforced a total lockdown lasting several months, with most of the population forced to remain at home. During this time, online social networks, more than ever, have represented an alterna...
We are pleased to welcome you to the 2nd Workshop on AI in Networks and Distributed Systems. This year we have expanded the scope of the workshop to include applications of Machine Learning and AI not merely in Networking, but also in Distributed Systems. The scale and complexity of today's networks and distributed systems make their design, analys...
Our life is getting filled by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These devices often rely on closed or poorly documented protocols, with unknown formats and semantics. Learning how to interact with such devices in an autonomous manner is key for interoperability and automatic verification of their capabilities. In this paper, we propose RL-IoT -- a...
The COVID-19 pandemic is not only having a heavy impact on healthcare but also changing people's habits and the society we live in. Countries such as Italy have enforced a total lockdown lasting several months, with most of the population forced to remain at home. During this time, online social networks, more than ever, have represented an alterna...
During the last decade, car sharing systems appeared in many cities and gained popularity. The research community has analyzed their current utilization trends in different contexts, their growth perspectives, and their gradual shift towards more sustainable technologies. Through the large and heterogeneous amount of car sharing usage data that is...
Pornography is massively available on the Internet, often free of charge. It represents a significant fraction of the overall Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption is useful to understand human behavior, and it is crucial for different disciplines, helping in sociological, statistic...
In this work, we tackle the problem of classifying websites domain names to a category, e.g., mapping bbc.com to the ”News and Media” class. Domain name classification is challenging due to the high number of class labels and the highly skewed class distributions. Differently from prior efforts that need to crawl and use the web pages’ actual conte...
Cloud gaming is a new class of services that promises to revolutionize the videogame market. It allows the user to play a videogame with basic equipment while using a remote server for the actual execution. The multimedia content is streamed through the network from the server to the user. This service requires low latency and a large bandwidth to...
Electric Free Floating Car Sharing systems offer a convenient and environmentally-friendly way to move in cities. However, their design and deployment is not a trivial task. In this work, we focus on fleet charging management, aiming at maximizing the number of trips of users, while minimizing the cost of relocating cars for charging. In particular...
Online Social Networks (OSNs) allow users to generate and consume content in an easy and personalized way. Among OSNs, Instagram has seen a surge in popularity, and political actors exploit it to reach people at scale, bypassing traditional media and often triggering harsh debates with and among followers. Uncovering the structural properties and d...
We consider an online advertisement system and focus on the impact of user interaction and response to targeted advertising campaigns. We analytically model the system dynamics accounting for the user behavior and devise strategies to maximize a relevant metric called click-through-intensity (CTI), defined as the number of clicks per time unit. Wit...
Free-Floating Car-Sharing (FFCS) services are a flexible alternative to car ownership. These transportation services show highly dynamic usage both over different hours of the day, and across different city areas. In this work, we study the problem of predicting FFCS demand patterns—a problem of great importance to the adequate provisioning of the...
Free Floating Car Sharing (FFCS) services are a flexible alternative to car ownership. These transportation services show highly dynamic usage both over different hours of the day, and across different city areas. In this work, we study the problem of predicting FFCS demand patterns -- a problem of great importance to an adequate provisioning of th...
The understanding of the mobility on urban spaces is useful for the creation of smarter and sustainable cities. However, getting data about urban mobility is challenging, since only a few companies have access to accurate and updated data, that is also privacy-sensitive.
In this work, we characterize three distinct car-sharing systems which operate...
The Web has a fundamental impact on our life, and its usage is quite dynamic and heterogeneous. Moreover, the Web, and in particular Online Social Networks allow people to communicate directly with the public, bypassing filters of traditional medias. Among the others, politicians and companies are exploiting this technologies to widen their influen...
Online Social Networks (OSNs) allow personalities and companies to communicate directly with the public, bypassing filters of traditional medias. As people rely on OSNs to stay up-to-date, the political debate has moved online too. We witness the sudden explosion of harsh political debates and the dissemination of rumours in OSNs. Identifying such...
In this paper, we study the design of a free floating car sharing system based on electric vehicles. We rely on data about millions of rentals of a free floating car sharing operator based on internal combustion engine cars that we recorded in four cities. We characterize the nature of rentals, highlighting the non-stationary, and highly dynamic na...
Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological research. However, given the lack of public data, these works typically build on surveys, limited by differen...
Online Social Networks (OSNs) allow personalities and companies to communicate directly with the public, bypassing filters of traditional medias. As people rely on OSNs to stay up-to-date, the political debate has moved online too. We witness the sudden explosion of harsh political debates and the dissemination of rumours in OSNs. Identifying such...
Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological research. However, given the lack of public data, these works typically build on surveys, limited by differen...
In this work we consider the design of a Free Floating Car Sharing (FFCS) system based on Electric Vehicles. We face the problems of finding the optimal placement of charging stations, and the design of smart car return policies, i.e, how many and where to place charging stations, and whether to ask or not customers to return the car to a charging...
Understanding how people interact with the web is key for a variety of applications, e.g., from the design of effective web pages to the definition of successful online marketing campaigns. Browsing behavior has been traditionally represented and studied by means of clickstreams, i.e., graphs whose vertices are web pages, and edges are the paths fo...
Understanding how people interact with the web is key for a variety of applications, e.g., from the design of effective web pages to the definition of successful online marketing campaigns. Browsing behavior has been traditionally represented and studied by means of clickstreams, i.e., graphs whose vertices are web pages, and edges are the paths fo...
Encryption at the application layer is often promoted to protect privacy, i.e., to prevent someone in the network from observing users' communications. In this work we explore how to build a profile for a target user by observing only the names of the services contacted during browsing, names that are still not encrypted and easily accessible from...
In many technical fields, single-objective optimization procedures in continuous domains involve expensive numerical simulations. In this context, an improvement of the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, called the Artificial super-Bee enhanced Colony (AsBeC), is presented. AsBeC is designed to provide fast convergence speed, high solution accu...
Nowadays, the users’ browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes unconsciously his private information to an unknown third party entity, to a company that is unable to control its infor...
Multi-Disciplinary Optimization (MDO) is widely used to handle the advanced design in several engineering applications. Such applications are commonly simulation-based, in order to capture the physics of the phenomena under study. This framework demands fast optimization algorithms as well as trustworthy numerical analyses, and a synergic integrati...
Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely
private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for
legitimate or illegal goals.
The implications are serious, from a person who exposes his private
information to an unknown third party entity, without any knowledge, to a
company that is unable to control...
In this paper, we define a new measure of node centrality in social networks, the Harmonic Influence Centrality, which emerges naturally in the study of social influence over networks. Next, we introduce a distributed message passing algorithm to compute the Harmonic Influence Centrality of each node: its design is based on an intuitive analogy bet...
State-of-the-art aeronautic Low Pressure gas Turbines (LPTs) are already
characterized by high quality standards, thus they offer very narrow margins of
improvement. Typical design process starts with a Concept Design (CD) phase,
defined using mean-line 1D and other low-order tools, and evolves through a
Preliminary Design (PD) phase, which allows...
This paper proposes a new measure of node centrality in social networks, the
Harmonic Influence Centrality, which emerges naturally in the study of social
influence over networks. Using an intuitive analogy between social and
electrical networks, we introduce a distributed message passing algorithm to
compute the Harmonic Influence Centrality of ea...
Projects
Projects (2)
Personal Information Management Systems (PIMS) aim to give users back control over their data, while creating transparency in the market. However, so far, they have failed to reach business maturity and sizeable user bases. PIMCity offers tools to change this scenario.
We implement a PIMS development kit (PDK) to commoditize the complexity of creating PIMS. This lowers the barriers for companies and SME to enter the web data market.
We design and deploy novel mechanisms to increase users’ awareness We demonstrate the effectiveness of the above tools by engineering EasyPIMS, our fully-fledged PIMS.
We strongly believe that an open market for data will only flourish if we stop the arms race between users and services. For this, we involve advertisers and end-users in the whole process. PIMCity has all these players in our consortium, along with leading IT companies and data providers, renowned research centres and universities, and SMEs already in the market of PIMS.