Marco Angelini

Sapienza University of Rome | la sapienza · Department of Computer, Automatic and Management Engineering "Antonio Ruberti"

Cyber risk assessment is a fundamental activity for enhancing the protection of an organization, identifying and evaluating the exposure to cyber threats. Currently, this activity is carried out mainly manually and the identification and correct quantification of risks deeply depend on the experience and confidence of the human assessor. As a conse...

In this paper we provide a review of the main functionalities of a Visual Analytics Environment (VAE) developed for the assessment of data and information quality in the context of performance evaluation of research organizations. Performing data and information quality tests are necessary procedures to ensure the bibliometric and research performa...

Cryptocurrencies are a novel phenomenon in the finance world that is gaining more attention from the general public, banks, investors, and lately also academic research. A characteristic of cryptocurrencies is to be the target of investments that, due to the volatility of most of the cryptocurrencies, tends to be at high risk and behave very differ...

The traditional approach in medicine starts with investigating patients' symptoms to make a diagnosis. While with the advent of precision medicine, a diagnosis results from several factors that interact and need to be analyzed together. This added complexity asks for increased support for medical personnel in analyzing these data altogether. Our ob...

Progressive visual analytics allows users to interact with early, partial results of long-running computations on large datasets. In this context, computational steering is often brought up as a means to prioritize the progressive computation. This is meant to focus computational resources on data subspaces of interest, so as to ensure their comput...

Researchers are daily engaged in bibliographic tasks concerning literature search and review, both in the role of authors of scientific papers and when they are reviewers or evaluators. Current indexing platforms offer powerful tools for searching bibliographic references, but in general they poorly support the integration, visualization and compar...

Network medicine typically involves analyzing data related to several topics (e.g., genes, diseases, and drugs) to investigate how they interact together. These connections come from different heterogeneous data sources, leading to a series of problems that need to be addressed to perform meaningful analyses, such as the integration of these data,...

RadViz contributes to multidimensional analysis by using 2D points for encoding data elements and interpreting them along the original data dimensions. For these characteristics it is used in different application domains, like clustering, anomaly detection, and software visualization. However, it is likely that using the dimension arrangement that...

The growing amount of cyberspace threats highlights the need to evaluate cybersecurity risks and to plan for effective investments. One document internationally recognized for cybersecurity risk management is the framework (Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (Version 1.1), National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2...

Conducting a cybersecurity assessment is a central activity in protecting a generic organization from cyber-attacks. Several methods exist in research and industry to assess the security level of an organization, from manual activities to automated attack graphs. Unfortunately, automated approaches fail in taking into account the governance aspect...

COVID-19 data analysis has become a prominent activity in the last year. The use of different models for predicting the spread of the disease, while providing very useful insights on the epidemics, are not inherently designed for interactive analysis, with time for a single computation ranging in the tens of seconds. In order to overcome this limit...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the AVI 2020 Workshop on Road Mapping Infrastructures for Artificial Intelligence Supporting Advanced Visual Big Data Analysis, AVI-BDA 2020, held in Ischia, Italy, in June 2020, and the Second Italian Workshop on Visualization and Visual Analytics, held in Ischia, Italy, in...

Data breaches have been one of the most common source of concerns related to cybersecurity in the last few years for many organizations. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, strongly impacted this scenario, as organizations operating with EU citizens now have to comply with strict data protection rules. In this paper we present...

Filtering is one of the basic interaction techniques in Information Visualization, with the main objective of limiting the amount of dis- played information using constraints on attribute values. Research focused on direct manipulation selection means or on simple interactors like sliders or check-boxes: while the interaction with a single attribut...

The quantitative evaluation of research is currently carried out by means of indicators calculated on data extracted and integrated by analysts who elaborate them by creating illustrative tables and plots of results. In this approach, the robustness of the metrics used and the possibility for users of the metrics to intervene in the evaluation proc...

Network Medicine applies network science approaches to investigate disease pathogenesis. Many different analytical methods have been used to infer relevant molecular networks, including protein–protein interaction networks, correlation‐based networks, gene regulatory networks, and Bayesian networks. Network Medicine applies these integrated approac...

RadViz plots are commonly used to represent multidimensional data because they use the familiar notion of 2D points for encoding data elements, displaying the original data dimensions that act as springs for setting the x and y coordinates. However, this intuitive approach implies several drawbacks and produces misleading visualizations that can co...

Modern software systems require the support of automatic program analyses to answer questions about their correctness, reliability, and safety. In recent years, symbolic execution techniques have played a pivotal role in this field, backing research in different domains such as software testing and software security. Like other powerful machine ana...

In 1947, N. Herlofson proposed a modification to the 1884 Heinrich Hertz’s Emagram with the goal of getting more precise hand-made weather forecasts providing larger angles between isotherms and adiabats. Since then, the Herlofson’s nomogram has been used every day to visualize the results of about 800 radiosonde balloons that, twice a day, are glo...

Abstract Visualizing contextual information to a map often comes at the expense of overplotting issues. Especially for use cases with relevant map features in the immediate vicinity of an information to add, occlusion of the relevant map context should be avoided. We present SurgeryCuts, a map manipulation technique for the creation of additional c...

The amount of generated and analyzed data is ever increasing, and processing such large data sets can take too long in situations where time-to-decision or fluid data exploration are critical. Progressive visual analytics (PVA) has recently emerged as a potential solution that allows users to analyze intermediary results during the computation with...

A key component in using Progressive Visual Analytics (PVA) is to be able to gauge the quality of intermediate analysis outcomes. This is necessary in order to decide whether a current partial outcome is already good enough to cut a long-running computation short and to proceed. To aid in this process, we propose ten fundamental quality indicators...

Software vulnerabilities represent one of the main weaknesses of an Information Technology (IT) system w.r.t. cyber attacks and nowadays consolidated official data, like the Common Vulnerability Exposure (CVE) dictionary , provide precise and reliable details about them. This information, together with the identification of priority systems to defe...

The emerging Network Medicine domain is causing a shift between diagnosis based on the conventional reductionist approach, arguing that biological factors work in a simple linear way, and the analysis of perturbations within the comprehensive network map of molecular components and their interactions, i.e., the "Interactome". As a consequence, clin...

Information Retrieval (IR) develops complex systems, constituted of several components, which aim at returning and optimally ranking the most relevant documents in response to user queries. In this context, experimental evaluation plays a central role, since it allows for measuring IR systems effectiveness, increasing the understanding of their fun...

Exploits based on ROP (Return-Oriented Programming) are increasingly present in advanced attack scenarios. Testing systems for ROP-based attacks can be valuable for improving the security and reliability of software. In this paper, we propose ROPMATE, the first Visual Analytics system specifically designed to assist human red team ROP exploit build...

Vulnerabilities represent one of the main weaknesses of IT systems and the availability of consolidated official data, like CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), allows for using them to compute the paths an attacker is likely to follow. However, even if patches are available, business constraints or lack of resources create obstacles to thei...

This paper presents a system that prioritizes user actions according to the domain context and user preferences, in order to provide the adaptation process with a partial order of functionalities, useful to optimize the user interface with the main goal of minimizing screen usage and user interaction. The solution is instantiated in a smart home en...

In this paper, we describe Combinatorial visuaL Analytics system for Information Retrieval Evaluation (CLAIRE), a Visual Analytics (VA) system for exploring and making sense of the performances of a large amount of Information Retrieval (IR) systems, in order to quickly and intuitively grasp which system configurations are preferred, what are the c...

Progressive Visual Analytics (PVA) has gained increasing attention over the past years. It brings the user into the loop during otherwise long-running and non-transparent computations by producing intermediate partial results. These partial results can be shown to the user for early and continuous interaction with the emerging end result even while...

Visual data analysis is a key tool for helping people to make sense of and interact with massive data sets. However, existing evaluation methods (e.g., database benchmarks, individual user studies) fail to capture the key points that make systems for visual data analysis (or visual data systems) challenging to design. In November 2017, members of b...

The evaluation of an information visualization system is a complex activity, involving the understanding of both the visual-ization itself and the process that it is meant to support. Moreover, if the evaluation activity includes a task based user study, it requires a considerable effort, involving both conceptual (e.g., the definition of user task...

Large mobile operators have to quickly react to mobile network failures to ensure service continuity and this task is a complex one, due to the continuous and very fast evolution of mobile networks: from 2G to 3G and onto LTE, each significant milestone in the mobile technology has increased the complexity of networks and services management. Failu...

Big Data technology has discarded traditional data modeling approaches as no longer applicable to distributed data processing. It is, however, largely recognized that Big Data impose novel challenges in data and infrastructure management. Indeed, multiple components and procedures must be coordinated to ensure a high level of data quality and acces...

In the last years, several standards and frameworks have been developed to help organizations to increase the security of their Information Technology (IT) systems. In order to deal with the continuous evolution of the cyber-attacks complexity, such solutions have to cope with an overwhelming set of concepts, and are perceived as complex and hard t...

Data-driven approaches to problem solving and data analysis are becoming more and more important problems to consider and on which apply research ideas. In this respect, the capability to explore data, understands how algorithmic approaches work and steer them toward the desired goals make Visualization and Visual Analytics strong research fields i...

In the last decades, visually querying data and visualizing information have been investigated in order to allow users to get insights and extract knowledge from data. Nowadays, these functionalities should be adapted to big data, including streaming ones. In this chapter, we will review the main approaches to visual queries and provide an historic...

Information Retrieval (IR) develops complex systems, constituted of several components, which aim at returning and optimally ranking the most relevant documents in response to user queries. In this context, experimental evaluation plays a central role, since it allows for measuring IR systems effectiveness, increasing the understanding of their fun...

Modern distributed systems are characterized by complex deployment designed to ensure high availability through replication and diversity, to tolerate the presence of failures and to limit the possibility of successful compromising. However, software is not free from bugs that generate vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker through...

Big data, complex computations, and the need for fluent interaction, are the well known enemies of Visual Analytics. They can seriously impair the fluent interactive back and forth between computational analysis and human analyst that happens using the visualizations that a Visual Analytics solution provides for supporting this combined analysis. T...

Malware associated with Web downloads is responsible for many attacks trying to execute malicious code on a remote machine. Web browsers are protected by anti-malware utilities that try to distinguish between good downloads and bad downloads, blocking the bad ones and alerting the user. In order to cope with the uncertainty of such a process, very...

In the last years, several standards and frameworks have been developed to help organizations to increase the security of their Information Technology (IT) systems. In order to deal with the continuous evolution of the cyberattacks complexity, such solutions have to cope with an overwhelming set of concepts, and are perceived as complex and hard to...

Information Retrieval (IR) has been deeply rooted in experimentation since its inception, allowing researchers and developers to understand the behavior and interactions within increasingly complex IR systems, such as web search engines, which have to address ever increasing user needs and support challenging tasks. This paper focuses on the innova...

We present the innovative visual analytics approach of the VATE 2 system, which eases and makes more effective the experimental evaluation process by introducing the what-if analysis. The what-if analysis is aimed at estimating the possible effects of a modification to an IR system to select the most promising fixes before implementing them, thus s...

This paper focuses on cyber situational awareness and describes a visual analytics solution for monitoring and putting in tight relation data from network level with the organization business. The goal of the proposed solution is to make different security profiles (network security officer, network security manager, and financial security manager)...

With today's technical possibilities, a stable visualization scenario can no longer be assumed as a matter of course, as underlying data and targeted display setup are much more in flux than in traditional scenarios. Incremental visualization approaches are a means to address this challenge, as they permit the user to interact with, steer, and chan...

In this short position paper, we present a few concrete experiences of Visual Analytics (VA) over big data; as our experiences have been gained on the application domains of cyber-security and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), which are very relevant and crucial domains targets of possible Virtual Research Environments (VREs), we also discuss and p...

The Mobile Operators European market is likely one of the most competitive arenas, and even big telecommunication companies are continuously tuning their marketing strategies to contrast the aggressive campaigns of old and new competitors. This paper presents a visual analytics solution developed for supporting one of the decision making processes...

This paper focuses on the innovative visual analytics approach realized by the Visual Analytics Tool for Experimental Evaluation (VATE 2) system, which eases and makes more effective the experimental evaluation process by introducing the what-if analysis. The what-if analysis is aimed at estimating the possible effects of a modification to an Infor...

Situational awareness is a key concept in cyber-defence. Its goal is to make the user aware of different and complex aspects of the network he or she is monitoring. This paper proposes PERCIVAL, a novel visual analytics environment that contributes to situational awareness by allowing the user to understand the network security status and to monito...

The increasing number of security accidents, due to failures or cyber attacks, that critical infrastructures/smart grids are experimenting is pushing researchers to investigate on the different issues associated with such a problem. Among them, an increasing attention has been devoted to the development of monitoring systems that exploit geographic...

Measuring is a key to scientific progress. This is particularly true for research concerning complex systems, whether natural or human-built. The tutorial introduced basic and intermediate concepts about lab-based evaluation of information retrieval systems, its pitfalls, and shortcomings and it complemented them with a recent and innovative angle...

Evaluation initiatives have been widely credited with contributing highly to the development and advancement of information access systems, by providing a sustainable platform for conducting the very demanding activity of comparable experimental evaluation in a large scale. Measuring the impact of such benchmarking activities is crucial for assessi...

With today's technical possibilities, a stable visualization scenario can no longer be assumed, as underlying data and operations are much more in flux than in traditional scenarios. We term such dynamic visualization scenarios online visualization. In contrast to traditional offline visualization that rely on monolithic visualization operators and...