Marco Furini

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia | UNIMO · Department of Communication and Economics

Museums are embracing social technologies in the attempt to broaden their audience and to engage people. Although social communication seems an easy task, media managers know how hard it is to reach millions of people with a simple message. Indeed, millions of posts are competing every day to get visibility in terms of likes and shares and very lit...

Personalized learning models can cut student dropout rates, boost student success, improve the integration of online and on-site students, better support teachers in mixed-teaching modalities, enhance accessibility, and more.

Different studies state that doubts and fears posted on social media are making people hesitant towards vaccines and this hesitancy causes people to post doubts and fears. To break this vicious circle, we propose a method based on psycho-linguistics and time-domain analyses of social media conversations that talk about vaccines and vaccinations. Th...

This book includes 40 peer-reviewed short papers submitted to the Scientific Conference titled Statistics and Information Systems for Policy Evaluation, aimed at promoting new statistical methods and applications for the evaluation of policies and organized by the Association for Applied Statistics (ASA) and the Dept. of Statistics, Computer Scienc...

Nowadays, the term “student” embraces people with different needs and lifestyles (e.g., people with part-time or full-time jobs, people with some forms of disabilities, etc.) and, in the attempt to reach out to these students, many educational institutes are recording and releasing classroom lessons. In this paper, we share our experience building...

Our smartphone is full of applications and data that analytically organize, facilitate and describe our lives. We install applications for the most varied reasons, to inform us, to have fun and for work, but, unfortunately, we often install them without reading the terms and conditions of use. The result is that our privacy is increasingly at risk....

TV advertisements are less and less watched as most viewers turn their attention to the smartphone during commercial breaks. Therefore, broadcasters are facing a novel challenge: how to improve the engagement between viewers and TV commercials. In this paper, we investigate whether gamification can be a winning strategy. Indeed, despite some strate...

Smartphones contain a myriad of personal information and, due to their ubiquity and the possibility to access the Internet through wireless networks, our privacy might be constantly at risk. In this study, we formulate two hypotheses: (H1) users ignore the relationship between authorization requests and privacy and this lack of knowledge affects th...

A sportsman's watch no longer marks the time, but it also provides information on the geographical location, on the number of steps, on the heart rate, on the blood oxygenation, on the blood pressure, etc. The bracelet of an elderly person can measure different physiological signals and can transmit them in real time to her doctor, allowing him to...

Television is no longer the king of the living room: 86% of people watch TV with a second screen in the nearby and more than 30% of the attention time is given to the second device to perform social activities. Therefore, the television industry is facing a new challenge: find a way to re-catch viewers’ attention. A recent and popular approach cons...

Cultural Heritage institutions are embracing social technologies in the attempt to provide an effective communication towards cit- izens. Although it seems easy to reach millions of people with a simple message posted on social media platforms, media managers know that practice is different from theory. Millions of posts are competing every day to...

Many educational institutes are recording classroom lessons to improve the students’ learning process. Unfortunately, a simple recording does not necessarily imply benefits. Indeed, when pro- ducing video lectures, there are different challenges that must be faced: production costs, accessibility, usability, video indexing, just to name a few. In t...

The gamification process is gaining increasing interest in many different environments such as education, business, tourism, smart-cities management. In literature, many studies proposed approaches to transform a non- game activity into a game, but these methods are often too general to be effective (e.g., simple rules, incentive mechanisms such as...

Pervasive sensing of people’s opinions is becoming critical in strategic decision processes, as it may be helpful in identifying problems and strengthening strategies. A recent research trend is to understand users’ opinions through a sentiment analysis of contents published in the Twitter platform. This approach involves two challenges: the large...

The number of physical objects connected to the Internet constantly grows and a common thought says the IoT scenario will change the way we live and work. Since IoT technologies have the potential to be pervasive in almost every aspect of a human life, in this paper, we deeply analyze the IoT scenario. First, we describe IoT in simple terms and the...

The amount of digital material in video lecture archives is growing rapidly, causing the search&retrieval process to be time-consuming and almost impractical. Indeed, after the search, students receive a list of videos and often must use VCR-like functions to find the specific piece of video that covers the searched topic. Therefore, a more efficie...

Hashtags are increasingly used to promote, foster and group conversations around specific topics. For example, the entertainment industry widely uses hashtags to increase interest around their products. In this paper, we analyze whether hashtags are effective in a niche scenario like the art exhibitions. The obtained results show very different beh...

Mobile gaming has become very popular thanks to its entertainment nature and to the widespread popularity of high-end mobile devices. The game scenario is very challenging as the support of mobile games is not as easy as one may think. In particular, the traffic generated by mobile games has specific network requirements that need to be satisfied;...

It’s been many years since media began talking about the wonders of the IoT scenario, where a smart fridge checks the milk expiration date and automatically compiles the shopping list, but in the real life how many people have this smart fridge in the kitchen? Yet the interest around the IoT scenario is growing every day, so in this paper we try to...

The younger generations are very focused on what surrounds them and on what happens to their friends, but they are hardly interested in written-based historical contents. This creates a loss of cultural heritage passed down for generations. In the attempt of preserving memories and of intercepting the attention of the new generations, in this paper...

People barely know what they eat and drink: product labels are written with small characters and with a difficult terminology. As a result, people spend too much time reading labels or avoid reading them at all. To connect food data with people we design of a food IoT (Internet of Things) scenario, where a smart cart tells us if the food product we...

People barely know what they eat and drink: product labels are written with small characters and with a diffcult terminology. As a result, people spend too much time reading labels or avoid reading them at all. To connect food data with people we design of a food IoT (Internet of Things) scenario, where a smart cart tells us if the food product we...

Understanding the sentiment of people is a process that may be useful when transforming a city into a smart city. A recent trend is to exploit social media data to infer people sentiments. While many studies focused on textual data, few considered the visual contents. In this paper we investigate whether the images available in the Instagram platfo...

Within social media we find many stories that tell us the world that is around us. Unfortunately, we tend to forget what happened in the past and the young generations are losing a cultural heritage passed down for generations. In the attempt of preserving memories and of intercepting the attention of the new generations, in this paper we propose P...

Social media platforms contain interesting information that can be used to directly measure people’ feelings and, thanks to the use of communication technologies, also to geographically locate these feelings. Unfortunately, the understanding is not as easy as one may think. Indeed, the large volume of data makes the manual approach impractical and...

Games can be used to exploit the computational power of humans to perform tasks that are diffcult for computers. One of these diffcult tasks is the transcription of video lectures. Indeed, the characteristics of the speech that occur in video lectures are not well suited for speech recognition technologies. In this paper we propose ALGA, an ALtruis...

Oggi tutto è social. Stiamo vivendo una rivoluzione che sta cambiando il nostro modo di vivere e lavorare. Applicazioni, siti, servizi, media e business sono sempre più immersi in questo nuovo scenario. Ma cosa vuol dire "social"? Come possiamo trarre vantaggio da questo nuovo scenario? Come possiamo difenderci dalle eventuali insidie? Questo libro...

Understanding the sentiment of people is a process that may be useful when transforming a city into a smart city. A recent trend is to exploit social media data to infer people sentiments. While many studies focused on textual data, few considered the visual contents. In this paper we investigate whether the images available in the Instagram platfo...

Mobile gaming has become very popular thanks to its entertainment nature and to the widespread popularity of high-end mobile devices. The game scenario is very challenging as the support of mobile games is not as easy as one may think. In particular, the traffic generated by mobile games has specific network requirements that need to be satisfied;...

Twitter is the most popular real-time microblogging service and it is a platform where users provide and obtain information at rapid pace. In this scenario, one of the biggest challenge is to find a way to automatically identify the most influential users of a given topic. Currently, there are several approaches that try to address this challenge u...

The use of emotions has recently been considered to improve the indexing of video contents and two different approaches are usually followed: computation of objective emotions through low-level video features analysis and computation of subjective emotions through analysis of the viewers’ physical signals. In this paper, we propose a different appr...

The highavailability of geolocation technologies is changing the social media mobile scenario and is exposing users to privacy risks. Different studies have focused on location privacy in the mobile scenario, but the results are conflicting: some say that users are concerned about location privacy, others say they are not. In this paper, we initial...

Location-aware services may expose users to privacy risks as they usually attach user’s location to the generated contents. Different studies have focused on privacy in location-aware services, but the results are often conflicting. Our hypothesis is that users are not fully aware of the features of the location-aware scenario and this lack of know...

The high availability of user-generated contents in the Web scenario represents a tremendous asset for understanding various social phenomena. Methods and commercial products that exploit the widespread use of the Web as a way of conveying personal opinions have been proposed, but a critical thinking is that these approaches may produce a partial,...

With a growing number of online videos, many producers feel the need to use video captions in order to expand content accessibility and face two main issues: production and alignment of the textual transcript. Both activities are expensive either for the high labor of human resources or for the employment of dedicated software. In this paper, we fo...

The simple act of listening or of taking notes while attending a lesson may represent an insuperable burden for millions of people with some form of disabilities (e.g., hearing impaired, dyslexic and ESL students). In this paper, we propose an architecture that aims at automatically creating captions for video lessons by exploiting advances in spee...

The process of producing new creative videos by editing, combining, and organizing pre-existing material (e.g., video shots) is a popular phenomenon in the current web scenario. Known as remix or video remix, the produced video may have new and different meanings with respect to the source material. Unfortunately, when managing audiovisual objects,...

In contrast to what is happening in the Internet-based scenario, the music market in the mobile scenario is far from being considered a large success. Several studies state that excessive downloading time and high cost are the main burdens. Motivated by the growth of social and mobile applications, in this paper we propose an approach that aims at...

In the current Web scenario a video browsing tool that produces on-the-fly storyboards is more and more a need. Video summary techniques can be helpful but, due to their long processing time, they are usually unsuit- able for on-the-fly usage. Therefore, it is common to produce storyboards in advance, penalizing users customization. The lack of cus...

Web 2.0 is affecting the structure of our society by creating new spaces of freedom, giving voice to any opinion, easing interpersonal relationships, and encouraging the creation of collaborating collectivities. Technologies such as blog, podcasting, wiki, and news feeds have the power to transform every user from a mere information consumer to a p...

The usage of sensors is emerging in the nowadays scenario where safety related applications are more and more used. These applications have timing constraints that need to be met by the control system. Thus, guaranteeing timeliness properties is considered a key challenge for research on wireless sensor networks. Among the different components that...

The mobile digital world is seen as an important business opportunity for two main reasons: the widespread usage of cellphones (more than two billions [30], most of them with sound features) and the pervasiveness of mobile technologies. As a result, music industry and telecoms are bringing the successful Internet-based music market strategy into th...

The popularity of social media is affecting society as they are changing the way communication, collaboration, inter- action, and information are produced and consumed. A part of the society (e.g., the one more technologically advanced) takes advantage of social media,whereas another part of so- ciety (e.g., old or people with different abilities)...

The production of video lectures for the mobile scenario is becoming popular, as the pervasiveness of mobile technologies is making learning independent of time and space. In such a scenario several challenges need to be addressed, and the contribution of this paper is MOLE, an architecture that produces secure, portable, and customizable video lec...

The digital home entertainment market is growing at an exceptional speed and, although limited to passive listeners, audiobook applications are growing at an annual rate of nearly 20% and hence are playing an important role inside this market. In this paper we propose an architecture to produce interactive audiobooks, so as to transform a passive l...

Simple and easy-to-play casual games are flooding the mobile gaming market and are best-sellers on the mobile game charts of several cellphone network operators. Most of the titles are mobile versions of videogames developed in the '80s and '90s, which were also very simple and easy-to-play. In this article we focus on adventure and movie games, a...

The advent of digital devices with innovative features has changed the world of home video entertainment. Nowadays we have access to devices that store several hours of video material, skip commercials, and even pause the play out of a live event. Despite these innovative features, modern digital devices access to recorded material in a way very si...

Record labels and telecoms are using the pervasiveness of mobile tech- nologies to create a mobile music market, where customers can have their preferred music at any time and in any place. The idea is to replicate the successful strategy of the Internet-based music market into the mobile scenario. In this paper we first analyze the current mobile...

As Bluetooth is available in most personal and portable terminals (eg, cellular phone, PDA, videocamera, laptop, etc) Peer-to-peer video streaming through Bluetooth networks is now a reality. Camera equipped Bluetooth phones capture video and broadcast ...

A tool to provide an idea of the content of a given video is becoming a need in the current Web scenario, where the presence of videos is increasing day after day. Dynamic summarization techniques can be used to this aim as they set up a video abstract, by selecting and sequencing short video clips extracted from the original video. Needless to say...

Internet and the latest correlated technologies, such as Web 2.0, represent inventions that have changed the world with their social contribution. Yet, digital divide and cyber-balkanization are Internet's discriminatory phenomena well known by field experts. In addition, we want now to raise the attention on the actual employment of these technolo...

Media streaming applications are becoming very popular in the Internet world. Since they mainly rely on a not scalable client/server model, the P2P model is receiving more and more attention as a system to provide media streaming. Different P2P media streaming systems are available, but today the most successful approach seems the chunk-driven P2P...

Web video browsing is rapidly becoming a very popular ac- tivity in the Web scenario, causing the production of a con- cise video content representation a real need. Currently, static video summary techniques can be used to this aim. Unfortunately, they require long processing time and hence all the summaries are produced in advance without any use...

The current mobile gaming market is filled with the so- called casual games. Simple and easy, these games are well suited for devices with limited resources and for people who play games now and then. This is why Tetris and Pac-man are among the best sellers games of several mobile games charts. In this paper we analyze current developing platforms...

Despite the increasing number of e-music downloads and the large use of mobile devices, the mobile music market is slowly taking off. Prices seem to be the main burden: compared to the wired environment, a song is twice or three times more expensive. Furthermore, mobile network transfer data rate causes the download time to be very long. In this pa...

Multimedia contents are more and more present in our life and their presentation usually rests on a text-based description that defines rules and properties of such contents and is produced by markup description languages (e.g., XML, MPEG7-DDL and SMIL). Although effective, the criticism to such approach regards the length of the produced descripti...

Although the audiobook market is growing at an exceptional speed, an audiobook is limited to passive listeners. In this paper we propose a novel approach to transform a passive listener into a story director. By introducing interactivity into digital audiobook, a user can interact with the storyline and the story develops according to user choices....

Multimedia contents are more and more present in our life and their presentation usually rests on a text-based description that defines rules and properties of such contents and is produced by markup description languages (e.g., XML, MPEG7-DDL and SMIL). Although effective, the criticism to such approach regards the length of the produced descripti...

Portable devices and wireless connections are creating a new scenario in which digital information is entering our lives in a massive way. In this article we consider MP3 audiobook applications and propose an approach to completely restyle the applications to the current mobile and multimedia scenario. Our mechanism introduces multimedia contents (...

The high availability of video streams is making necessary mechanisms for indexing such contents in the Web world. In this paper we focus on news programs and we propose a mechanism that integrates low and high level video features to provide a high level semantic description. A color/luminance analysis is coupled with audio analysis to provide a b...

The availability of video flies in the Internet is growing at an exceptional speed and in the near future video browsing will be a common activity. To facilitate such activity it will be necessary to have a small clip for any given video. Currently, video skimming and video summarization techniques can reduce the temporal representation of a given...