Maurizio Naldi

LUMSA Università Maria SS. Assunta di Roma | Lumsa · Dept. of Law, Economics, Politics and Modern Languages

Purpose Though the circular economy (CE) is a current buzzword, this still lacks a precise definition. In the absence of a clear notion of what that term includes, actions taken by the government and companies may not be well informed. In particular, those actions need to consider what people mean when people talk about the CE, either to refocus pe...

The ongoing deployment of 5G is accompanied by architecture and pricing decisions. Network sharing is a critical feature, allowing operators to reduce their costs, but introducing a mixed partnering/competition situation, where the infrastructure owner, renting out their infrastructure to virtual operators (who act as customers), also provides serv...

The correct detection of negations is essential to the performance of sentiment analysis tools. The evaluation of such tools is currently conducted through the use of corpora as an opportunistic approach. In this paper, we advocate using a different evaluation approach based on a set of intentionally built sentences that include negations, which ai...

Cybersecurity breach probability functions describe how cybersecurity investments impact the actual vulnerability to cyberattacks through the probability of success of the attack. They essentially use mathematical models to make cyber-risk management choices. This paper provides an overview of the breach probability models that appear in the litera...

Parallel to the increasing use of smart speakers (aka virtual assistants), privacy concerns emerge. In this article, we provide a systematic review of the literature on privacy issues in smart speakers. Both Scopus and Web of Science databases are examined, as well as the preprint repository arXiv, to take into account the most recent contributions...

The use of the cloud to store personal/company data and to run programs is gaining wide acceptance as it is more efficient and cost-effective. However, cloud services may not always be available, which could lead to losses for customers and the cloud provider (the provider is typically obligated to compensate its customers). It can protect itself f...

In the context of growing vulnerabilities, cyber-risk management cannot rely on a one-off approach, instead calling for a continuous re-assessment of the risk and adaptation of risk management strategies. Under the mixed investment–insurance approach, where both risk mitigation and risk transfer are employed, the adaptation implies the re-computati...

Discussions about wind energy and its environmental impact take place routinely over Twitter. Twitterers with a strong interest in the matter may also retweet their own tweets (aka self-reposting) as a means to increase their visibility and push their message across. Identifying the features that make self-reposted tweets different from tweets that...

Smart speakers equipped with intelligent voice processing functions, like Siri and Amazon Echo, have become widespread globally. However, their recording and networking capabilities spur concerns about users’ privacy. In this research, we report the results of a text-mining analysis of customers’ perception of privacy in smart speakers. The corpus...

Investors usually resort to financial advisors to improve their investment process until the point of complete delegation on investment decisions. Surely, financial advice is potentially a correcting factor in investment decisions but, in the past, the media and regulators blamed biased advisors for manipulating the expectations of naive investors....

The Industry 4.0 paradigm represents the fourth industrial revolution, embodied by the marriage between information and communication technologies and manufacturing. Assessment campaigns are conducted to examine the status of deployment of that paradigm, mostly through self-assessment questionnaires. Each campaign is typically limited in scope, inv...

The insurgence of the COVID pandemic calls for mass vaccination campaigns worldwide. Pharmaceutical companies struggle to ramp up their production to meet the demand for vaccines but cannot always guarantee a perfectly regular delivery schedule. On the other hand, governments must devise plans to have most of their population vaccinated in the shor...

Investments in security and cyber-insurance are two cyber-risk management strategies that can be employed together to optimize the overall security expense. In this paper, we provide a closed form for the optimal investment under a full set of insurance liability scenarios (full liability, limited liability, and limited liability with deductibles)...

Online forums represent a widely used means of getting information and taking decision concerning personal finance. The dynamics of conversations taking place in the forum may be examined through a social network analysis (SNA). Two major personal finance forums are analysed here though an SNA approach, also borrowing metrics from Industrial Econom...

Dialogues in a TV series (especially in sitcoms) represent the main interaction among characters. Dialogues may exhibit concentration, with some characters dominating, or showing instead a choral action, where all characters contribute equally to the conversation. The degree of concentration represents a distinctive feature (a signature) of the TV...

Current anonymization techniques for statistical databases exhibit significant limitations, related to the utility-privacy trade-off, the introduction of artefacts, and the vulnerability to correlation. We propose an anonymization technique based on the whitening/recolouring procedure that considers the database as an instance of a random populatio...

By Asian digital economy, we refer to high-tech developments, business and social transformations, and information-driven changes in the region's growth. We discuss its background and foundations, significance in Asia and contribution to removal of historical barriers in traditional business. We assess how new value chains are transforming country-...

The determination of node centrality is a fundamental topic in social network studies. As an addition to established metrics, which identify central nodes based on their brokerage power, the number and weight of their connections, and the ability to quickly reach all other nodes, we introduce five new measures of Distinctiveness Centrality. These n...

The expected utility principle is often used to compute the insurance premium through a second-order approximation of the expected value of the utility of losses. We investigate the impact of using a more accurate approximation based on the fourth-order statistics of the expected loss and derive the premium under this expectedly more accurate appro...

The sharing economy proposes a new approach to designing and delivering products and services, that aims at avoiding waste, improving efficiency, and favouring a bottom-up change. In this research commentary, we survey the current state of things and propose some directions for research. We first describe the industries, products, and services curr...

Cyber-physical data from wearable and other data-sensing devices have been rapidly changing the landscape of opportunity for the conduct of computational social science (CSS) studies. We now have the opportunity to include in our research wearable healthcare data sensors, global positioning system (GPS) data, as well as a range of other digital dat...

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 8th Annual Privacy Forum, APF 2020, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2020. The 12 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on impact assessment; privacy by design; data protection and security; and t...

The determination of node centrality is a fundamental topic in social network studies. In contrast to established metrics, which identify central nodes based on their brokerage power, the number and weight of their connections, and the ability to quickly reach all other nodes, we introduce five new measures of Distinctiveness Centrality. Those new...

TV series represent a growing sector of the entertainment industry. Being able to predict their performance allows a broadcasting network to better focus the high investment needed for their preparation. In this paper, we consider a well known TV series—The Big Bang Theory—to identify factors leading to its success. The factors considered are mostl...

An integrated risk management strategy, combining insurance and security investments, where the latter contribute to reduce the insurance premium, is investigated to assess whether it can lead to reduced overall security expenses. The optimal investment for this mixed strategy is derived under three insurance policies, covering, respectively, all t...

Investors usually resort to financial advisors to improve their investment process until the point of complete delegation on investment decisions. Surely, financial advice is potentially a correcting factor in investment decisions but, in the past, the media and regulators blamed biased advisors for manipulating the expectations of naive investors....

The kinds of interactions taking place in an online personal finance forum and the sentiments expressed in its posts may influence the diffusion and usefulness of those forums. We explore a set of major threads on a personal finance forum to assess the degree of participation of posters and the prevailing sentiments. The participation appears to be...

Service Level Agreements are employed to set availability commitments in cloud services. When a violation occurs as in an outage, cloud providers may be called to compensate customers for the losses incurred. Such compensation may be so large as to erode cloud providers’ profit margins. Insurance may be used to protect cloud providers against such...

Personal finance decisions emerge from a complex network of human connections, where the nodes or agents-banks, investors, financial advisors-take their choices on the basis of a variety of factors. All these agents form a society, which we modeled as an Agent-Based Model (ABM) on a scale-free network. In this paper, we will consider: honest agents...

Agent-based models are now largely adopted to describe how opinions emerge in a group of people. This survey provides an analysis of the literature on the subject, highlighting the major characteristics of such models. Over the last decade, the number of papers has grown at an overall annual rate of 16%, though not continually. Two communities cont...

We formulate a facility location problem where the demand of any single client must be allocated to a single facility and a prize is obtained by allocating the demand of a client to a certain facility, i.e. a prize-based variant of the Single Source Capacitated Facility Location Problem. For this problem we pursue both an exact approach through Int...

An anonymization technique for databases is proposed that employs Principal Component Analysis. The technique aims at releasing the least possible amount of information, while preserving the utility of the data released in response to queries. The general scheme is described, and alternative metrics are proposed to assess utility, based respectivel...

This paper analyzes the economic feasibility of a market for data-based services, which is a scenario envisioned in sectors that are adopting Internet of Things and/or Big Data technologies. A business model for the provision of a data-based service is proposed. In this model, service providers build services from data that is collected and sold by...

The transformation of empirical research due to the arrival of big data analytics and data science, as well as the new availability of methods that emphasize causal inference, are moving forward at full speed. In this Research Commentary, we examine the extent to which this has the potential to influence how e-commerce research is conducted. China...

Four packages in R are analyzed to carry out sentiment analysis. All packages allow to define custom dictionaries. Just one - Sentiment R - properly accounts for the presence of negators.

A business model for sensor-based services is proposed where a platform creates a multi-sided market. The business model comprises a platform that serves as an intermediary between human users, app developers, and sensor networks, so that the users use the apps and the apps process the data supplied by the sensor networks. The platform, acting as a...

An ongoing project is described that aims at developing a computer-assisted translation tool in collaborative language learning, using a wiki approach. The technology stack makes extensive use of Mediawiki and relies on a Ubuntu-powered machine. The GUI closely resembles the familiar Wikipedia environment. Its integration in the syllabus of a unive...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2019, held in Leeds, UK, in September 2019. The 12 full papers and 10 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. This GECON 2019 proceedings was structur...

We study an agent-based model to describe the formation of opinions within a group, where agents belong to classes. In the model any agent influences all the other agents at the same time, and the influence is proportional to the difference of opinions through interaction coefficients. We find that the interaction coefficients must lie within a tet...

Allocating the overall budget to projects is a major decision for an organization. Taking that decision by looking at the overall profit only may result in an unfair treatment of departments, with some departments overloaded and others underemployed (and dissatisfied). We consider an alternative approach, where the budget allocation is accomplished...

The concentration of market power is typically measured by the Hirschman–Herfindahl Index (HHI). When a new company enters the market, the changes in the HHI reflect the change in concentration and may elicit a regulatory intervention. In this paper, we evaluate the potential benefits (HHI decrease) or harms (HHI increase) in advance of the new ent...

Interactions on a personal finance forum are investigated as a conversation, with post submitters acting as speakers. The presence of dominant positions is analysed through concentration indices. Patterns in replies are analysed through the graph of replies and the distribution of reply times.

A transformation of data in statistical databases is proposed to hide the presence of an individual. The transformation employs a cascade of spectral whitening and colouring (named recolouring for brevity) that preserves the first- and second-order statistical properties of the true data (i.e. mean and correlation). A measure of practical indisting...

The possible scarcity of copper (and the likely resulting pressure on prices) is an issue of concern, especially in the light of its importance for the ever growing networking industry. Also for that reason, copper is the nonferrous metal most traded in the markets. Therefore, assessing the nature of its price fluctuations is an important task. Sev...

Energy commodity prices have been examined over the last 20 years to detect the presence of chaos as an alternative to stochastic models, with contrasting results. In this paper, we wish to reassess the chaotic paradigm in the light of two new pieces of information with respect to the literature: the appearance of noise-aware estimation methods for...

Though cloud providers claim to provide a very high reliability, outages of few hours are not uncommon and may provide significant harm to the business operations of cloud customers. In addition to improving the reliability of the cloud infrastructure through redundancy and technical means, the cloud provider can protect itself from the damaging co...

The Hirschman–Herfindahl Index (HHI) is a well known measure of market concentration. However, its exact computation would require the knowledge of the market share of all the companies. In this paper, accurate estimates of the HHI are computed even if just the market shares of the top companies are known (or just the top company and a few scattere...

The Learned Hand’s rule, comparing security investments against the expected loss from data breaches, can be used as a simple tool to determine the negligence of the company holding the data. On the other hand, companies may have several incentives to distribute their data over a cloud. In order to analyze the conflict between the sanctioning behav...

In a group of individuals aiming for a collective decision, that decision is influenced by individual competences, but these are in turn subject to a reciprocal influence. Such an influence may lead to less competent agents exerting an unduly influence, a phenomenon known as equality bias. In this paper an agent-based model is proposed to investiga...

Cloud outages may cause heavy economic losses for customers, who may ask the cloud provider for compensation. Cloud providers may therefore wish to insure themselves against that risk. Considering a scenario where outages take place according to a Poisson process and their duration follows a generalized Pareto model, we provide formulas to properly...

Cloud services may suffer from outages, which interrupt customers’ activities and result in economic losses. A linear model is proposed here to translate outages into economic losses, accounting for both the frequency and the duration of outages. Two tools, the exceedance loss probability and the Value-at-Risk, are employed to assess the maximum ec...

The estimation of project completion time is to be repeated several times in the project planning phase to reach the optimal tradeoff between time, cost, and quality. Estimation procedures provide either an interval or a point estimate. The computational load of several estimation procedures is reviewed. A multiple polynomial regression model is pr...

The application of differential privacy requires the addition of Laplace noise, whose level must be measured out to achieve the desired level of privacy. However, the protection of the data concerning a Mr. X, i.e., its privacy level, also depends on the other data contained in the database: a negative externality is recognized. In this paper we sh...

This paper proposes a business model for providing services based on the Internet of Things through a platform that intermediates between human users and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The platform seeks to maximize its profit through posting both the price charged to each user and the price paid to each WSN. A complete analysis of the profit max...

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to bring major benefits to a wide range of areas. However, the successful deployment of the IoT calls for the existence of sustainable and well-understood business models. In this paper, we propose and analyze a business model for a likely scenario in the IoT, which is made up of WSNs, service...

Cloud availability is an important parameter present in a typical Service Level Agreement (SLA). In order to check compliance with SLA commitments, a third party availability measurement is strongly needed. An availability estimation methods is evaluated here, based on the periodic repetition of sequence of probing packets in ICMP. Majority Voting,...

Each company continually has to choose the projects in which to invest, among the numerous proposals submitted by company departments. Just a few projects among those put forward for funding can be actually accepted, due to the unavoidable discrepancy between available money and required investments. Though overall profit maximization could appear...

The upcoming Internet of things will generate a massive amount of data. Much of them will be distributed and traded in a marketplace. Brokering third-parties may ease the relationship between data producers and data consumers. Brokers take care of bundling data coming from different sources and delivering them to consumers within a single commercia...