Matteo Cristani

• PhD in Computer Science
• Researcher at University of Verona

Precision agriculture (PA) is a management concept that makes use of digital techniques to monitor and optimise agricultural production processes and represents a field of growing economic and social importance. Within this area of knowledge, there is a topic not yet fully explored: outlining a road map towards the definition of an affordable cobot...

The use of meta-rules in logic, i.e., rules whose content includes other rules, has recently gained attention in the setting of non-monotonic reasoning: a first logical formalisation and efficient algorithms to compute the (meta)-extensions of such theories were proposed in Olivieri et al. (2021, Computing defeasible meta-logic. In JELIA 2021, LNCS...

In medicine and sport science, postural evaluation is an essential part of gait and posture correction. There are various instruments for quantifying the postural system’s efficiency and determining postural stability which are considered state-of-the-art. However, such systems present many limitations related to accessibility, economic cost, size,...

Counterfactual reasoning has been the subject of extensive study in philosophy, logics, and AI. The connection between counterfactual reasoning and theory revision is well-known since Ramsey’s intuition, according to which “to find out whether the counterfactual ‘if A were true, then B would be true’ is satisfied in a state S, change the state S mi...

Modelling the concept of explanation is a central matter in AI systems, as it provides methods for developing eXplainable AI (XAI). When explanation applies to normative reasoning, XAI aims at promoting normative trust in the decisions of AI systems: in fact, such a trust depends on understanding whether systems predictions correspond to legally co...

The notion of Business Process Compliance has been widely discussed as one of the most important issues to be solved when comparing the description of a business process against a normative background. Many changes have been provided to the basic notion above. The introduction of changes to the normative background has been considered, as well as t...

The use of meta-rules in logic, i.e., rules whose content includes other rules, has recently gained attention in the setting of non-monotonic reasoning: a first logical formalisation and efficient algorithms to compute the (meta)-extensions of such theories were proposed in Olivieri et al (2021) This work extends such a logical framework by conside...

In this paper we introduce an innovative application of translation techniques applied to the problem of forensics analysis of smartphones. This analysis has the specific objective of determining which messages (either text or vocal), transmitted from and received by a specific device, seized for forensic analysis, may contain data that are relevan...

The process of explaining a piece of evidence by constructing a set of assumptions that are a good explanation for that evidence is ubiquitous in real-life (e.g. in legal systems). In this paper, we introduce, discuss, and formalise the notion of stable explanations in a non-monotonic setting. We show how, while applying it to the process of (1) co...

This paper develops a new comprehensive computational framework for reasoning about private international law that encompasses the reasoning patterns modeled by previous works [3,8,9]. The framework is a multi-modal extension of [10] preserving some nice properties of the original system, including some efficient algorithms to compute the extension...

This paper develops a new comprehensive computational framework for reasoning about private international law that encompasses the reasoning patterns modeled by previous works [3,8,9]. The framework is a multi-modal extension of [10] preserving some nice properties of the original system, including some efficient algorithms to compute the extension...

The use of meta-rules, i.e., rules whose content includes other rules, has been advocated to model policies and the notion of power in legal reasoning, where an agent has the power to create new norms affecting other agents. The use of Defeasible Logic (DL) to model meta-rules in the application area we just alluded to has been investigated, but no...

Defeasible deontic logic has shown to be expressive enough to represent a normative system, and therefore compliance to such a system can be automatically checked by means of classical model checking techniques of logical systems. However, normative systems are not static, as they can be actively changed by the legislator over time, directly, by ch...

Data anonymization is the process of making information contained in a group of data such that it is not possible to identify unique references to single elements in the group after the process. This action, when conducted onto datasets used to make statistical inference is bound to have ananlogous behaviours on certain indices before and after the...

Agents use channels to communicate publicly. An agent announcing a statement on a communication channel poses non trivial questions about the nature of such a statement as well as about the attitude of the agent herself. Does the agent know whether the statement is true? Is this agent announcing that statement or its contrary in any other channel?

In smart environments, there is an increasing demand for scalable and autonomous management systems. In this regard, energy efficiency hands out challenging aspects, for both home and business usages. Scalability in energy management systems is particularly difficult in those industry sector where power consumption of branches located in remote are...

In this paper we discuss a transition model from commonly adopted models of data gathering, transfer and management for environmental monitoring towards more sophisticated ones based on Artificial Intelligence and IoT. The transition model is based on the paradigm of multiple agent systems. The adoption of this transition model is motivated by the...

The social choice theory has focused in the past on the problem of devising methods to determine how individual preferences are transformed into collective ones. In some investigations, scholars provided methods for expressing the social choice function, that, given a set of individual preferences, computes the resulting collective choice. Other st...

Linear Logic and Defeasible Logic have been adopted to formalise different features of knowledge representation: consumption of resources, and non monotonic reasoning in particular to represent exceptions. Recently, a framework to combine sub-structural features, corresponding to the consumption of resources, with defeasibility aspects to handle po...

Linear Logic and Defeasible Logic have been adopted to formalise different features of knowledge representation: consumption of resources, and non monotonic reasoning in particular to represent exceptions. Recently, a framework to combine sub-structural features, corresponding to the consumption of resources, with defeasibility aspects to handle po...

Text normalisation is an important task in the context of Natural Language Processing. By normalisation, free text is mapped into dictionaries, i.e. indexed collections of locutions recognised as typical of a particular jaergon. In general, technical dictionaries are difficult to build and validate. They are typically constructed by hand on the bas...

Weather forecasting is a logical process that consists in evaluating the predictions provided by a set of stochastic models, compare these and take a conclusion about the weather in a given area and a given interval of time. Meteorological forecasting provides reliable predictions about the weather within a given interval of time. The automation of...

Linear Logic and Defeasible Logic have been adopted to formalise different features of knowledge representation: consumption of resources and reasoning with exceptions. We propose a framework to combine sub-structural features, corresponding to the consumption of resources, with defeasibility aspects to handle potentially conflicting information, a...

In this tutorial we describe the approaches to non monotonic reasoning as a means for inference on the web. In particular we are focusing on the ways in which reasoning technologies have adapted to five different issues of the modern era world wide web: (a) epistemic aspects, bound by the new models of the social web, (b) changes over time, (c) lan...

Meteorological forecasting provides reliable prediction about the future weather within a given interval of time. Meteorological forecasting can be viewed as a form of hybrid diagnostic reasoning and can be mapped onto an integrated conceptual framework. The automation of the forecasting process would be helpful in a number of contexts, in particul...

This work deals with the problem of automatic detection of device types given only the power consumption curve, which can be obtained by means of a cheap measurer applied to the device itself. We defined a novel method to detect these types and we describe it in details, providing ground truth evidence coming from the application of the method to r...

Since the birth of digital social networks, management research focused upon the opportunities of social media marketing. A marketing campaign has the best success when it reaches the largest number of potential customers. It is, however, difficult to forecast in a precise way the number of contacts that you can reach with such an initiative.

Linear Logic and Defeasible Logic have been adopted to formalise different features relevant to agents: consumption of resources, and reasoning with exceptions. We propose a framework to combine sub-structural features, corresponding to the consumption of resources, with defeasibility aspects, and we discuss the design choices for the framework.

Diagnostic tests are used to determine anomalies in complex systems such as organisms or built structures. Once a set of tests is performed, the experts interpret their results and make decisions based on them. This process is named diagnostic reasoning. In diagnostic reasoning a decision is established by using both rules and general knowledge on...

Linear Logic and Defeasible Logic have been adopted to formalise different features relevant to agents: consumption of resources, and reasoning with exceptions. We propose a framework to combine sub-structural features, corresponding to the consumption of resources, with defeasibility aspects, and we discuss the design choices for the framework.

Lexical classification is one of the most widely investigated fields in (computational) linguistic and Natural language Processing. Adjectives play a significant role both in classification tasks and in applications as sentiment analysis. In this paper a simple algorithm for lexical classification of comparable adjectives, called MORE (coMparable f...

The frequency and harmfulness of cyber-attacks are increasing every day, and with them also the amount of data that the cyber-forensics analysts need to collect and analyze. In this paper, we propose a formal analysis process that allows an analyst to filter the enormous amount of evidence collected and either identify crucial information about the...

This work deals with the problem of automatic detection of device types given only the power consumption curve, which can be obtained by means of a cheap measurer applied to the device itself. We defined a novel method to detect these types and we describe it in details, providing ground truth evidence coming from the application of the method to r...

In this paper we introduce a simplified approach to sentiment analysis: a lexicon-driven method based upon only adjectives and adverbs. This method is compared in cross-validation with other known techniques and then compared directly to the gold standard, a sample of human subjects asked to deliver the same class of judgments computed by the metho...

In this paper we summarize the results obtained so far in the communities interested in the development of automated processing techniques as applied to business documents, and devise a few evolutions that are demanded by the current stage of either those techniques by themselves or by collateral sector advancements. It emerges a clear picture of a...

In this paper we introduce a simplified approach to sentiment analysis: a lexicon-driven method based upon only adjectives and adverbs. This method is compared in cross-validation with other known techniques and then compared directly to the gold standard, a sample of human subjects asked to deliver the same class of judgments computed by the metho...

The frequency and harmfulness of cyber-attacks are increasing every day, and with them also the amount of data that the cyber-forensics analysts need to collect and analyze. In this paper, we propose a formal analysis process that allows an analyst to filter the enormous amount of evidence collected and either identify crucial information about the...

Diagnosis is widely used in many different disciplines to identify the nature and cause of a certain phenomenon. We present \(t\mathsf {L}\), a new logical framework able to formalise diagnostic reasoning, i.e., an hybrid learning technique based both on deduction and experiments. In this paper we introduce tL, a Labeled Modal Logic, garnishing wit...

Agents negotiate the meaning of terms in numerous real-life situations. When they behave so, they can be used as the basis for providing an emulation paradigm for software agents, habilitating therefore socio-technical systems to perform meaning negotiation. In this paper we focus upon two methods for meaning negotiation in defeasible logic and pro...

We propose a topological categorization of agents that makes use of the multiple-channel logic (MCL) framework, a recently developed model of reasoning about agents. We firstly introduce a complete formalization of prejudices on agents’ attitudes and propose an extension of the rules of the MCL framework. We then use RCC5 (the Region Connection Cal...

Normative systems accommodate temporary norms of several types, which can also be modified in different, and codified ways. In this paper we address the problem of modifying temporary norms that are represented by means of the combination of two known formalisms in the current literature. The framework evolves from a known one, which provides a sys...

Conflicting rules and rules with exceptions are very common in natural language specification employed to describe the behaviour of devices operating in a real-world context. This is common exactly because those specifications are processed by humans, and humans apply common sense and strategic reasoning about those rules to resolve the conflicts....

A channel is a logical spcae where agents make announcements publicly. Examples of such objects are forums, wikis and social networks. Several questions arise about the nature of such a statement as well as about the attitude of the agent herself in doing these announcements. Does the agent know whether the statement is true? Is this agent announci...

We proposed a novel framework for the representation of goals and other mental-like attitudes in terms of degree of expected outcomes, where an outcome is an order of possible alternatives. The sequences of alternatives is modelled by a non-classical (substructural) operator. In this paper we provide a modal logic based axiomatisation of the intuit...

Automated document classification process extracts information with a systematical analysis of the content of documents. This is an active research field of growing importance due to the large amount of electronic documents produced in the world wide web and made readily available thanks to diffused technologies including mobile ones. Several appli...

In this paper we analyse the problem of synthesising compliant business processes from rules-based declarative specifications for agents. In particular , we consider the approach by [1,2] and we propose computationally efficient algorithms to combine plans extracted from the deliberation of an agent to generate the corresponding business processes...

The paper proposes a fresh look at the concept of goal and advances that motivational attitudes like desire, goal and intention are just facets of the broader notion of (acceptable) outcome. We propose to encode the preferences of an agent as sequences of "alternative acceptable outcomes". We then study how the agent's beliefs and norms can be used...

Hiding true personality behind a façade is one of the basic tricks adopted by humans who live double lives for illegal purposes. In particular terrorists have historically adopted the protocol of a façade behaviour coupled with a second life consisting mainly in illegal activities and their planning. Nowadays a few cases of behaviours that hide a d...

Energy saving is one of the most challenging aspects of modern ambient intelligence technologies, for both domestic and business usages. In this paper we show how to combine Ambient Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence techniques to solve the problem of scheduling a set of devices under a given set of constraints, like limits to the maximal ene...

Training sets of images for object recognition are the pillars on which classifiers base their performances. We have built a framework to support the entire process of image and textual retrieval from search engines, which, giving an input keyword, performs a statistical and a semantic analysis and automatically builds a training set. We have focus...

Nowadays the problem of energy consumption is becoming a pressing problem. We present an innovative system named Elettra able to allow people to monitor and control energy consumption in one or more buildings. For improving Elettra we introduce different methods taken from ambient intelligence. Through these methods we can infer energy consumption,...

Non-monotonic reasoning typically deals with three kinds of knowledge. Facts are meant to describe immutable statements of the environment. Rules define relationships among elements. Lastly, an ordering among the rules, in the form of a superiority relation, establishes the relative strength of rules. To revise a non-monotonic theory, we can change...

Automated document classification process extracts information with a systematic analysis of the content of documents. This is an active research field of growing importance due to the large amount of electronic documents produced in the world wide web and available thanks to diffused technologies including mobile ones. Several application areas be...

In this paper we study the complexity of strategic argumentation for dialogue games. A dialogue game is a 2-player game where the parties play arguments. We show how to model dialogue games in a skeptical, non-monotonic formalism, and we show that the problem of deciding what move (set of rules) to play at each turn is an NP-complete problem.

We propose algorithms to synthesise the specifications modelling the capabilities of an agent, the environment she acts in, and the governing norms, into a process graph. This process graph corresponds to a collection of courses of action and represents all the licit alternatives the agent may choose to meet her outcomes. The starting point is a co...

Scholars understand an agent as a system acting in an environment. Such an environment is usually governed by norms, and the agent has to obey to such norms when pursuing her objectives. We report a non-monotonic modal logic able to describe the environment, the norms, and the agent's capabilities as well as her mental attitudes (e.g., desires, int...

In many real-life situations making a decision entails evaluating the risks associated with the decision, which in turn requires reasoning about events and their relations. In addition to the simpler and better-understood notions of causation and precondition, in this paper we focus on block (or prevention), which is the relation established betwee...

In this paper we analyse different notions of the concept of goal starting from the idea of sequences of "alternative acceptable outcomes". We study the relationships between goals and concepts like agent's beliefs, norms, and desires, and we propose a formalisation using Defeasible Logic that will be able to provide a computationally feasible appr...

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the security measures undertaken to protect a distributed system (e.g., protecting privacy of data in a network or in an information system) one should, among other things, perform a risk assessment. In this paper, we introduce a logical framework that allows one to reason about risk by means of operators t...

Evaluating the effectiveness of the security measures undertaken to protect a distributed system (e.g., protecting privacy of data in a network or in an information system) is a difficult task that, among other things, requires a risk assessment. We introduce a logical framework that allows one to reason about risk by means of operators that formal...

There are several contexts of non-monotonic reasoning where a priority between rules is established whose purpose is preventing conflicts. One formalism that has been widely employed for non-monotonic reasoning is the sceptical one known as Defeasible Logic. In Defeasible Logic the tool used for conflict resolution is a preference relation between...

The process of reaching an agreement about the meaning of a set of terms is known as Meaning Negotiation. The problem of representing this process contains some sub-problems: to represent the knowledge of the agents about the meaning of the negotiating set of terms, to model the behaviour of the agents involved and to define the agreement and disag...

We address the problem of define a modal defeasible theory able to capture intuitions as "being compliant" with a set of norms and a set of goals. We will treat norms and goals as modalised literals. From the definition of this new kind of logic, two main issues arises whether a theory is compliant or not: (a) how to revise a non compliant theory t...

Many recent investigations of Computational Decision Theory focused on the problem of making decisions in presence of more than one single criterion. The so called multiple criteria decision theory, in particular, deals with such problems, in depth. In general these investigations tend to be specifically quantitative, and withal in those approaches...

Meaning negotiation (MN) is the general process with which agents reach an agreement about the meaning of a set of terms. Artificial Intelligence scholars have dealt with the problem of MN by means of argumentations schemes, beliefs merging and information fusion operators, and ontology alignment but the proposed approaches depend upon the number o...

Similar to what happens between humans in the real world, in open multi-agent systems distributed over the Internet, such as online social networks or wiki technologies, agents often form coalitions by agreeing to act as a whole in order to achieve certain common goals. However, agent coalitions are not always a desirable feature of a system, as ma...

Similar to what happens between humans in the real world, in open multi-agent systems distributed over the Internet, such as online social networks or wiki technologies, agents often form coalitions by agreeing to act as a whole in order to achieve certain common goals. However, agent coalitions are not always a desirable feature of a system, as ma...

We propose a systematic investigation on how to modify a preference relation in a defeasible logic theory to change the conclusions of the theory itself. We argue that the approach we adopt is applicable to legal reasoning, where users, in general, cannot change facts and rules, but can propose their preferences about the relative strength of the r...

We describe a technology that is used to gather information about the Italian Real Estate Property Tax. The documents are employed for generating records that populate a database in a semi-automatic way, This database is used afterwards for assistance in tax payment.

Meaning negotiation (MN) is the general process with which agents reach an agreement about the meaning of a set of terms. We give here a general model of MN for two agents, in which each agent discusses with the other one her viewpoint by exhibiting it in an actual set of constraints on the meaning of the negotiated terms. We call this presentation...

In this paper we survey the literature of both Knowledge Representation and Civil Engineering regarding the Applications of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Techniques to Civil and Structural Engineering. The reviewed works are analyzed in terms of the scope, objectives and approach employed in the investigation, and compared to each other ba...

In conceptual modeling we need to consider a general level of abstraction where the domain of interest is formalized in an independent way with respect to the specific application for which the conceptual modeling process is performed. This leads to an integrated approach that takes into account knowledge about a domain and metaknowledge about a me...

In this paper we focus upon a specific process of knowledge sharing, the meaning negotiation one, in presence of a number of negotiating subjects greater than two. Current approaches of the literature are based upon argumentation techniques, persuasion dialogue and game theory and all of them are specific of the negotiation subject and typically li...

We survey the literature on Applications of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Techniques to Structural Engineering. We focus on the aspects related to healthcare: Hospitals and Structures related to accidents and emergencies, which are actors of the healthcare system. The conclusions of the review are three: focus is necessarily on actual syst...

Moral dilemmas are one of the major issues of current research in ethical reasoning. In particular, it is well known that admitting moral dilemmas in Standard Deontic Logic generates a family of inconsistencies that are intrinsically unsolvable. Since managing dilemmas means performing preferential reasoning, we argue that one simple approach to bo...

Spatial reasoning with description logic has become an im- portant research topic in the recent past. Several authors dealt with the problem of finding logical frameworks in which concept definitions can be made by using also spatial opera- tors, particularly those of the Region Connection Calculus. Lutz and Miliˇ cic investigated the formal proper...

We provide a complete classification of agents' attitudes in performing actions that are evaluated in a three-valued space with respect to three evaluation contexts: personal advantage, social usefulness and legality. Moreover we found an algorithmical approach to approximatively solve the problem of abducing the agent's attitude by observing the a...

SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) technologies are used to provide a framework for transferring data from sensors to micro-controllers, like PLC (programmable logic controllers) to supervising computers. Given a set of active sensors in a given field, connected to a correspondingly complex net of PLCs, the generated stream of measure...

In several common real-life cases of usage of postal address databases an important problem that is often necessary to solve is the one of duplicate elimination. This may occur because a database of addresses is merged to another one, for instance during a joint-venture or a fusion between two companies, so that two or more than two addresses are t...

What is an ontology? Why is this relevant to a learning environment? It is quite well-established in recent investigations on information systems that formal ontologies area crucial problem to deal with, and in fact, received a lot of attention in several different communities, such as knowledge management, knowledge engineering, natural language p...

In conceptual modeling we need to consider a general level of abstraction where the domain of interest is formalized in an independent way with respect to the specific application for which the conceptual modeling process is performed. This leads to an integrated approach that takes into account knowledge about a domain and metaknowledge about a me...