Luigi Ceccaroni

Earthwatch · Innovation

Human activities continue to degrade oceanic, coastal and inland waters. The generational change in the role of society in actively looking after the health of water resources can be achieved through the expansion of ocean and water literacy in schools. The Network of European Blue Schools established under the EU4Ocean Coalition for Ocean Literacy...

Intelligence demonstrated by machines, known as artificial intelligence (AI), is widely applied across various scientific domains. Citizen science is no exception, and is increasingly being enhanced by the integration of AI (Ceccaroni et al., 2019). This essay examines the synergy of AI and citizen science to improve the productivity of science. It...

Human activities continue to degrade oceanic, coastal and inland waters. The generational change in the role of society in actively looking after the health of water resources can be achieved through the expansion of ocean and water literacy in schools. The Network of European Blue Schools established under the EU4Ocean Coalition for Ocean Literacy...

Citizen science has long been used as an approach across different disciplines, both in terms of the science produced and the democratisation of the process to involve all stakeholders that have a vested interest. However, whilst citizen science's potential to contribute towards such concerns is well documented, limitations exist when measuring the...

Citizen science has the potential to impact across a range of different domains, including the areas of science, the economy, the environment, governance and society. However, whilst the potential impact of citizen science is well documented, limitations exist when attempting to measure it in a quantifiable way. Whilst attempts have been made, ther...

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an important global framework which provides a shared vision for a more sustainable future for all people and the planet. In the last five years, citizen science as a discipline has paid increasing attention to the SDGs and the contributions that citizen science could make towards their a...

There is a growing acknowledgement that citizen observatories, and other forms of citizen-generated data, have a significant role in tracking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. This is evident in the increasing number of Sustainable Development Goals’ indicators for which such data are already being used and in the high-level recog...

There is a growing acknowledgement that citizen observatories, and other forms of citizengenerated data, have a significant role in tracking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. This is evident in the increasing number of Sustainable Development Goals’ indicators for which such data are already being used and in the high-level recogn...

Citizen science has the potential to impact across a range of different domains, including the areas of science, the economy, the environment, governance and society. However, whilst the potential impact of citizen science is well documented, limitations exist when attempting to measure it in a quantifiable way. Whilst attempts have been made, ther...

Over the past decade, citizen science has experienced growth and popularity as a scientific practice and as a new form of stakeholder engagement and public participation in science or in the generation of new knowledge. One of the key requirements for realising the potential of citizen science is evidence and demonstration of its impact and value....

Citizen science has expanded rapidly over the past decades. Yet, defining citizen science and its boundaries remained a challenge, and this is reflected in the literature—for example in the proliferation of typologies and definitions. There is a need for identifying areas of agreement and disagreement within the citizen science practitioners commun...

Over the past decade, citizen science has experienced growth and popularity as a scientific practice and as a new form of stakeholder engagement and public participation in science or in the generation of new knowledge. One of the key requirements for realising the potential of citizen science is evidence and demonstration of its impact and value....

Citizen science has the potential to impact across a range of different domains, including the areas of science, the economy, the environment, governance and society. However, whilst the potential impact of citizen science is well documented, limitations exist when attempting to measure it in a quantifiable way. Whilst attempts have been made, ther...

Tracking progress towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires high-quality, timely, and accessible data, often in areas where data are rarely available. Problems exist due to socioeconomic variations between countries and the qualitative nature of certain indicators in their definition. Citizen science has the potentia...

Citizen Science (CS) is a prominent field of application for Open Science (OS), and the two have strong synergies, such as: advocating for the data and metadata generated through science to be made publicly available [ 1 ]; supporting more equitable collaboration between different types of scientists and citizens; and facilitating knowledge transfe...

Citizen science broadly refers to the active engagement of the general public in scientific research tasks. Citizen science is a growing practice in which scientists and citizens collaborate to produce new knowledge for science and society. Although citizen science has been around for centuries, the term citizen science was coined in the 1990s and...

Interest in citizen science is growing, including from governments and research funders. This interest is often driven by a desire for positive environmental impact, and the expectation that citizen science can deliver it by engaging the public and simultaneously collecting environmental data. Yet, in practice, there is often a gap between expected...

This chapter considers the interface of citizen science, health, and environmental justice. We review citizen science research undertaken by civic educators, scientists, and communities that aims to broaden scientific knowledge and encourage democratic engagement and, more specifically, to address complex problems related to public health and the e...

Interest in the formal representation of citizen science comes from portals, platforms, and catalogues of citizen science projects; scientists using citizen science data for their research; and funding agencies and governments interested in the impact of citizen science initiatives. Having a common understanding and representation of citizen scienc...

Interest in the formal representation of citizen science comes from portals, platforms, and catalogues of citizen science projects; scientists using citizen science data for their research; and funding agencies and governments interested in the impact of citizen science initiatives. Having a common understanding and representation of citizen scienc...

Citizen science has expanded rapidly over the past decades. Yet, defining citizen science and its boundaries remained a challenge, and this is reflected in the literature - for example in the proliferation of typologies and definitions. There is a need for identifying areas of agreement and disagreement within the citizen science practitioners comm...

Successfully tracking progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires high-quality, timely and accessible data, often in areas where little data is currently available. Current baselines and indexes developed for the measurement of SDG progress rely on data from formal international and national bodies, resulting i...

Abstract—Forced spirometry testing is gradually becoming available across different healthcare tiers including primary care. It has been demonstrated in earlier work that commercially available spirometers are not fully able to assure the quality of individual spirometry manoeuvres. Thus a need to expand the availability of high quality spirometry...

The European-Commission—funded project ‘Citclops’ (Citizens’ observatory for coast and ocean optical monitoring) developed methods, tools and sensors, which can be used by citizens to monitor natural waters, with a strong focus on long-term data series related to environmental sciences. The new sensors, based on optical technologies, respond to a n...

Members of the public are making substantial contributions to science as citizen scientists, and advances in technologies have enabled citizens to make even more substantial contributions. Technologies that allow computers and machines to function in an intelligent manner, often referred to as artificial intelligence (AI), are now being applied in...

The first goal of this chapter is to propose a slight re-framing of citizen science, which will contextualize the information presented in the rest of the book. The authors propose a perspective on and a definition for citizen science (which is alternative to the numerous previously documented definitions) as: “work undertaken by civic educators to...

Highlights • New technologies supporting data collection, data processing and visualisation, and the communication of ideas and results create a wide range of opportunities for participation in citizen science. • Technologies are especially beneficial for opening additional channels for public involvement in research, allowing participants to contr...

The functionality available on modern ‘smartphone’ mobile devices, along with mobile application software and access to the mobile web, have opened up a wide range of ways for volunteers to participate in environmental and biodiversity research by contributing wildlife and environmental observations, geospatial information, and other context-specif...

Earth-observation systems (satellites and in situ monitoring) are routinely used to collect information about water quality. Recently, smartphone-based tools and other citizen-science sensors have enabled citizens to also contribute to the collection of scientifically relevant data. This chapter describes a decision support system used to predict o...

Apps for mobile devices and web-based platforms are increasingly used in citizen science projects. While extensive research has been done in multiple areas of studies, from Human-Computer Interaction to public engagement in science, we are not aware of a collection of recommendations specific for citizen science that provides support and advice for...

Apps for mobile devices and web-based platforms are increasingly used in citizen science projects. While extensive research has been done in multiple areas of studies, from Human-Computer Interaction to public engagement in science, we are not aware of a collection of recommendations specific for citizen science that provides support and advice for...

Mobile apps and web-based platforms are increasingly used in citizen science projects. While extensive research has been done in multiple areas of studies, from Human-Computer Interaction to public engagement in science, we are not aware of a collection of recommendations specific for citizen science that provides support and advice for planning, d...

Much can be at stake depending on the choice of words used to describe citizen science, because terminology impacts how knowledge is developed. Citizen science is a quickly evolving field that is mobilizing people’s involvement in information development, social action and justice, and large-scale information gathering. Currently, a wide variety of...

Forced spirometry testing is gradually becoming available across different healthcare tiers including primary care. It has been demonstrated in earlier work that commercially available spirometers are not fully able to assure the quality of individual spirometry manoeuvres. Thus a need to expand the availability of high quality spirometry assessmen...

Much can be at stake depending on the choice of words used to describe citizen science, because terminology impacts how knowledge is developed. Citizen science is a quickly evolving field that is mobilizing people’s involvement in information development, social action and justice, and large-scale information gathering. Currently, a wide variety of...

The first goal of this chapter is to propose a slight re-framing of citizen science, which will contextualize the information presented in the rest of the book. The authors propose a perspective on and a definition for citizen science (which is alternative to the numerous previously documented definitions) as: “work undertaken by civic educators to...

The first goal of this chapter is to propose a slight re-framing of citizen science, which will contextualize the information presented in the rest of the book. The authors propose a perspective on and a definition for citizen science (which is alternative to the numerous previously documented definitions) as: “work undertaken by civic educators to...

Marine processes are observed with sensors from both the ground and space over large spatio-temporal scales. Citizen-based contributions can fill observational gaps and increase environmental stewardship amongst the public. For this purpose, tools and methods for citizen science need to (1) complement existing datasets; and (2) be affordable, while...

The objective of this research is to provide a standardized platform to monitor and predict indicators of people with traumatic brain injury using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, and analyze its potential benefits for people with disabilities, health centers and administrations. We developed a platform that a...

Context-aware recommender systems improve context-free recommenders by exploiting the knowledge of the contextual situation under which a user experienced and rated an item. They use data sets of contextually-tagged ratings to predict how the target user would evaluate (rate) an item in a given contextual situation, with the ultimate goal to recomm...

The use of information and communication technologies to manage chronic diseases allows the application of integrated care pathways, and the optimization and standardization of care processes. Decision support tools can assist in the adherence to best-practice medicine in critical decision points during the execution of a care pathway. The objectiv...

Decision making based on evidence other than human reasoning is becoming increasingly important in healthcare. Valuable evidence is in the form of treatment processes used by healthcare institutions and this paper presents a new framework for representing and modeling knowledge from these processes. Specifically, it presents the integration of data...

This research is concerned with the study of a new social-network platform, which (1) provides people with disabilities of neurological origin, their relatives, health professionals, therapists, carers and institutions with an interoperable platform that supports standard indicators, (2) promotes knowledge democratization and user empowerment, and...

Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) and Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), which capture life expectancy and quality of the remaining life-years, are applied in a new method to measure socioeconomic impacts related to health. A 7-step methodology estimating the impact of health interventions based on DALYs, QALYs and functioning changes is pre...

Currently, many different tools exist aimed at the simulation of models that represent the human physiology. These models and simulation tools are developed in specific languages, and models are interoperable with other models represented in the same or similar languages. In this paper, we present a new tool, which is developed to offer a common fr...

Context-Aware Recommender Systems locally adapt to a specific contextual situation the rating prediction computed by a traditional context-free recommender. In this paper we present a novel semantic pre-filtering approach that can be tuned to the optimal level of contextualization by aggregating contextual situations that are similar to the target...

Context-aware recommender systems aim at outperforming tradition-al context-free recommenders by exploiting information about the context under which the users' ratings are acquired. In this paper we present a novel contextu-al pre-filtering approach that takes advantage of the semantic similarities be-tween contextual situations. For assessing con...

A clinical decision support system, based on rules described in the semantic web rule language and with semantic annotations from biomedical and time ontologies, is used to reason on processes modeled in the business process modeling notation. This paper, as a case study within the framework of functional rehabilitation processes, analyzes the mode...

Several research works have demonstrated that if users’ ratings are truly context-dependent, then Context-Aware Recommender Systems can outperform traditional recommenders. In this paper we present a novel contextual pre-filtering approach that exploits the implicit semantic similarity of contextual situations. For determining such a similarity we...

The lack of automatic, personalized services of information, which were easily accessible to tourists and citizens when they are in public spaces, negatively impacts the tourism sector, since it reduces the use of the services offered by the city and the satisfaction degree of the users. The SOPAT project has developed a personalized service of inf...

This paper presents and discusses an ongoing work aimed at defining the profile of people with disabilities, i.e., automatically assessing their quality of life, through a sensor-based telemonitoring system. To illustrate how the approach works, a case study is presented and discussed.

In this article, key points are discussed concerning knowledge representation for clinical decision support systems in the domain of physical medicine and rehabilitation. Information models, classifications and terminologies, such as the “virtual medical record” (vMR), the “international classification of functioning, disability and health” (ICF),...

Recommendation models based on collaborative filtering have good prediction accuracy; however, they have very poor performance in cold-start scenarios, when no or few rating data are associated to certain items or users. An approach for dealing with cold-start problem is to build hybrid models that include content-based filtering. This paper focuse...

Environmental problems should not be tackled by scientists or policymakers alone. Involving the general public in observing and understanding our changing world, and encouraging citizen stewardship for the (marine) environment are crucial elements for a sustainable way of facing current and future problems. The EC-funded project Citclops starts in...