Walter Allasia

Intesa Sanpaolo · Compliance

The book provides the foundations of object oriented programming based on Java language. Trying to avoid falling into the trap of writing yet another Java manual, the book introduces the reader (without specific IT skills required) to the object oriented programming, and can help university students to acquire a more structured approach for their f...

Money laundering refers to the criminal attempt of concealing the origins of illegally obtained money, usually by passing it through a complex sequence of seemingly legitimate financial transactions through several financial institutions. Given a large time-evolving graph of financial transactions, how can we spot money laundering activities? In th...

The idea of the Preserve-or-Forget (PoF) approach introduced in this book is to follow a forgetful, focused approach to digital preservation, which is inspired by human forgetting and remembering. Its goal is to ease the adoption of preservation technology especially in the personal and organizational context and to ensure that important content is...

Parallaxes for 331 classical Cepheids, 31 Type II Cepheids and 364 RR Lyrae stars in common between Gaia and the Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues are published in Gaia Data Release 1 (DR1) as part of the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS). In order to test these first parallax measurements of the primary standard candles of the cosmological dis...

Context. The first Gaia Data Release contains the Tycho - Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS). This is a subset of about 2 million stars for which, besides the position and photometry, the proper motion and parallax are calculated using H ipparcos and Tycho-2 positions in 1991.25 as prior information. Aims. We investigate the scientific potential and...

Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to a direct-imaging approach. Both the spacecraft and the payload were built by European industry. The involvement of the scientific...

Context. At about 1000 days after the launch of Gaia we present the first Gaia data release, Gaia DR1, consisting of astrometry and photometry for over 1 billion sources brighter than magnitude 20.7. Aims. A summary of Gaia DR1 is presented along with illustrations of the scientific quality of the data, followed by a discussion of the limitations d...

Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to direct-imaging approach. Both the spacecraft and the payload were built by European industry. The involvement of the scientific co...

The first data release from the Gaia mission contains accurate positions and magnitudes for more than a billion sources, and proper motions and parallaxes for the majority of the 2.5 million Hipparcos and Tycho-2 stars. Aims. We describe three essential elements of the initial data treatment leading to this catalogue: the image analysis, the constr...

Context. At about 1000 days after the launch of Gaia we present the first Gaia data release, Gaia DR1, consisting of astrometry and photometry for over 1 billion sources brighter than magnitude 20.7. Aims. A summary of Gaia DR1 is presented along with illustrations of the scientific quality of the data, followed by a discussion of the limitations d...

Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to a direct-imaging approach. Both the spacecraft and the payload were built by European industry. The involvement of the scientific...

SALVEREMO project aims at designing and prototyping an innovative system for searching and rescuing individuals (especially hikers and mountaineers) who got lost or in peril in wilderness or mountain areas. It makes use of Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) equipped with a sensor suite specifically selected according to the requirements identi...

Context. The first data release from the Gaia mission contains accurate positions and magnitudes for more than a billion sources, and proper motions and parallaxes for the majority of the 2.5 million Hipparcos and Tycho-2 stars. Aims: We describe three essential elements of the initial data treatment leading to this catalogue: the image analysis,...

In the last decades, the amount of space debris in Earth orbit, from spent rocket stages to broken satellites, is constantly growing up. This is a relevant issue, since space junk hampers the access road to space and raises collision threats. Some countries have already identified as unavoidable solution the complete stop of future launches of sate...

Several measures exist to describe similarities between digi- tal contents, especially for what concerns images. Nevertheless, distances based on low-level visual features embedded in a multidimensional lin- ear space are hardly suitable for capturing semantic similarities and re- cently novel techniques have been introduced making use of hierarchi...

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil aviation is growing up quickly, enabling new scenarios, especially in environmental monitoring and public surveillance services. So far, Earth observation has been carried out only by satellite images, which are limited in resolution and suffer from important barriers such as cloud occlusion. Micr...

In the last decades, several models have been proposed to describe the functions and the structure of human memory. Many of these agree in representing semantic memory, i.e. The part of memory which contains the general knowledge about the world, as a network. On the other hand, the study of complex networks is a new and emerging field at the inter...

This paper introduces the motivation and describes the model of a novel metadata standard for the exchange of preservation metadata of multimedia content. The model is being standardised as the MPEG Multimedia Preservation Application Format (MP-AF), addressing the specific issues related to the preservation description information of audiovisual c...

Talk at the EWOMS Conference in Edinburgh

In this paper we describe EAGLE, an application of the Solid Telescope principle. The idea stems from a particular scenario (search and rescue), where it is essential to have two fields of view with two different information acquired simultaneously in order to reduce the cali- bration issues. This is the case when the user needs to recognize differ...

This paper describes a software application based on statistical methods for the automatic recognition of traffic sign deterioration. The evaluation of traffic sign degradation is usually performed by devices applied on top of the road sign surface, measuring color parameters such as chromatic coordinates and the luminance factor. Moreover, the dev...

This paper describes a novel approach for managing low level descriptors of images in order to allowing automatic classification and similarity searches. Several works have been made in this field, mostly making use of vector spaces and classical mathematical approaches. The focus of this paper is to investigate the more sophisticated formalisms of...

Taxiing within the airport of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is currently based on front camera video provided to the remote pilot and GPS information. The latter introduces a systematic and, most tricky, random error that cannot allow the complete automatic taxiing. This paper presents a novel approach where image processing allows a GPS signal re...

In order to enable the non-cooperative rendezvous, capture, and removal of large space debris, automatic recognition of the target is needed. Several technologies are currently available and stereo vision is one of the most suitable in the strict context of space missions, where low energy consumption is fundamental and sensors should be passive in...

The paper proposes the abstract approach enabling the delegation of the preservation processes that can be applied automatically to the access copies. The current standard, OAIS, is a reference model only and does not prescribe or even guide implementation. In particular, OAIS is designed around the Archival Information Package, leaving the Dissemi...

This paper introduces a novel approach to the software design of an Open Archival Information System (OAIS): identify the needed abstract components and get the architecture as a result. Instead of starting writing the architecture first, the presented approach makes use of the Object Oriented Design and selects the suitable Design Patterns for def...

The abstract should summarize the contents of the paper and should contain at least 70 and at most 150 words. It should be written using the abstract environment. The scope of the European funded project PrestoPRIME is the digi- tal preservation of audiovisual files. Differently from other types of files, audiovisual are especially challenging beca...

This paper introduces the SALC project which aims at developing a technological , extensible platform enabling on demand aggregate of heterogeneous digital media services. It experiments emerging MPEG technologies in the field of audiovisual content management on distributed networks that can benefit broadcasters as well as multimedia archive stake...

This work explores the analogies between an Information Retrieval (IR) task and the process of measuring an observable quantity in Quantum Mechanics (QM) applied to digital images represented by MPEG-7 Visual Descriptors. Clusters of images are described as superpositions of vectors, taking into account the distribution of the feature values of all...

We are living in a landscape of quickly growing audiovisual formats and assisting at a very short lifetime of some of them. In order to be able to set up a strong global preservation action we have to agree and define formats and protocols as well as establish distributed registries for automatic obsolescence evaluation and risk assessment. A pract...

We report the preliminary results of PrestoPRIME, an EU FP7 integrated project, including audiovisual (AV) archives, academics and industrial partners, focused on long-term digital preservation of AV media objects and on ways to increase access by integrating media archives with European on-line digital libraries, specifically Europeana. Project ou...

We report the preliminary results of PrestoPRIME, an EU FP7 integrated project, including audiovisual (AV) archives, academics and industrial partners, focused on long-term digital preservation of AV media objects and on ways to increase access by integrating media archives with European on-line digital libraries, specifically Europeana. Project ou...

This paper describes a working prototype for road traffic sign recognition, presenting experimental results and eval- uation. The elaboration chain involves the acquisition of the videos provided by digital cameras fixed on a vehicle and a video processing system based on degenerate deci- sion trees, made up of two classifiers adopting two differen...

This paper proposes a decentralized, distributed and secure communication infrastructure for indexing and retrieving multimedia contents with associated digital rights. The lack of structured metadata describing the enormous amount of multimedia contents distributed on the the web leads to simple search mechanisms that usually are limited to querie...

Content based search in audio-visual collections requires media specific analysis for extracting low level features to be efficiently indexed and searched. We present the SAPIR media framework for analyzing digital content and representing the extracted features in a common schema, used to index and search content in a P2P network. The framework co...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are widely used for sharing digital items without structured metadata and in absence of any kind of digital rights management applied to the distributed contents. In this paper we propose the implementation of a prototype application that makes use of a structured P2P system enabling the indexing of complex metadata, used...

The aim of this work is the design of a software solution for the management of digital rights on a Peer-to- Peer Structured Overlay Network (SON), making use of open standards and enabling further extensions. The thesis is the result of the research activity performed by the author within the following projects: • Search in Audio-Visual Content us...

This paper introduces a suitable way for indexing multimedia metadata on a structured peer-to-peer overlay network, with special care to the management of rights metadata expressed by MPEG-21. We have selected a suitable subset of MPEG-21 rights expression language elements to be indexed, in order to map governed contents into a flat space and allo...

Our aim is the management of the metadata related to the digital rights in centralized systems or networks with indexing capabilities for both text and similarity searches, providing the basic infrastructure enabling the private use and the commercial exploitation as well. We present an innovative approach that treats the DRM metadata as metric obj...

We present the Publication Platform, a component of the PrestoSpace 1 project, which provides retrieval and browsing functionalities of enriched audio-visual material. The Prestospace Factory is a system for enriching audio-visual documents in order to provide automated content and semantic analysis.The Publication Platform provides a user interfac...

ABSTRACT This paper presents a novel approach to the retrieval of multimedia documents,that considers Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) metadata,as a multidimensional feature in a metric space. The approach allows us to perform simi- larity searches on the IPR attributes of digital items and to integrate these searches in a common,query-by-example...

We present an innovative approach that treats the right management meta-data as metric objects, enabling similarity search on IPR attributes between digital items. We show how the content base similarity search can help both the user to deal with a huge amount of similar items with different licenses and the content providers to detect fake copies...

This paper will present the contribution of the European PrestoSpace project to the study and development of a Metadata Access and Delivery (MAD) platform for multimedia and television broadcast archives. The MAD system aims at generating, validating and delivering to archive users metadata created by automatic and semi- automatic information extra...

This paper describes the part of the European PrestoSpace project dedicated to the study and development of a metadata access and delivery (MAD) system for television broadcast archives. The mission of the MAD system, inside the wider perspective of the PrestoSpace factory, is to generate, validate and deliver to the archive users metadata created...