• Proposal of three architectures for biometric airport check-in systems. • Comparisonofcentralized and federated architecture to remark privacy preserving issues. • Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment for privacy analysis. • Trade-off analysis between privacy and accuracy in biometric systems. • Federated Learning-based strategies for privacy preservation. The rapid adoption of automated airport check-in systems using facial recognition raises significant privacy concerns due to their reliance on centralized deep learning models that store and transmit biometric data from edge devices. While Federated Learning (FL) is a promising approach for privacy preservation, its effectiveness in biometric identification remains underexplored, particularly in real-world environments like airports. This study assesses the privacy implications of FL in facial recognition by comparing three architectures. A first centralized system, where biometric data is sent to a central server for model training and inference, posing significant privacy risks. The second is a one-level FL architecture, where biometric data remains on local devices, and only model updates are shared with a central aggregator. The third is a two-level FL architecture, introducing an additional aggregation layer among airlines to enhance model generalization while preserving privacy. To ensure a rigorous privacy preservation evaluation, we integrate both quantitative and qualitative metrics. For the quantitative assessment, we leverage the Privacy Meter Tool, which enables simulations of Membership Inference Attacks and the application of Differential Privacy as a mitigation technique. For the qualitative evaluation, we conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment to analyze potential privacy risks from a regulatory perspective. Additionally, we assess model accuracy, computational efficiency, and communication overhead to determine FL’s feasibility in large-scale airport environments. Our results show that while FL significantly reduces privacy risks, the two-level FL approach introduces new vulnerabilities, such as model poisoning risks and privacy-utility trade-offs, requiring further mitigation strategies like DP.

This paper presents a simulation-based methodology to evaluate the performance of a privacy-compliant edge–blockchain architecture for smart city environments. The proposed model combines edge computing with a private, permissioned blockchain to ensure low-latency processing, secure data management, and verifiable transactions. Using a discrete-event simulation framework, we analyze the behavior of the system under realistic workloads and time-varying traffic conditions. The model captures edge operations, including preprocessing and cryptographic tasks, as well as blockchain validation using Proof of Stake consensus. Several experiments explore saturation thresholds, resource utilization, and latency dynamics, under both synthetic and realistic traffic profiles. Results reveal how architectural bottlenecks shift depending on resource allocation and input rate, and demonstrate the importance of balanced dimensioning between edge and blockchain layers.

This study presents an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) framework to predict the performance of marine scrubbers used for sulfur dioxide ( SO 2 ) removal from marine diesel engine flue gases. Using an aggregated dataset from a roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) cargo ship equipped with an open-loop scrubber, combined with satellite data, the study constructs and evaluates multiple artificial intelligence models, including ensemble models, which were benchmarked against each other using standard regression metrics such as the coefficient of determination (R 2 ), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean squared error (MSE). Results achieve high accuracy R 2 > 0 . 92 and offer insights for optimizing scrubber operations. Nevertheless, artificial intelligence models lack transparency. To overcome this problem, this research integrates post-hoc explainability techniques to elucidate the contributions of various features to model predictions, thereby enhancing interpretability and reliability. The integration of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Explain Like I’m 5 (ELI5) not only confirmed the consistency of feature importance rankings (e.g. seawater acidity level, SO 2 inlet concentration, outlet temperature) but also aligned with the physical-chemical principles of SO 2 absorption. Quantitative comparisons with theoretical expectations demonstrated the reliability of the XAI insights, enhancing both model transparency and interpretability. This can improve the current capability of designing scrubber units by defining more efficient and less expensive options for environmental regulation compliance.

Monitoring of non-linear phenomena, such as pollution dynamics, which is the result of several combined factors and the evolution of environmental conditions, greatly benefits by AI tools; a larger benefit derives by the application of explainable solutions, which are capable of providing elements to understand those dynamics for better informed decisions. In this paper we discuss a case with real data in which a posteriori explanations have been produced after the application of ensemble models.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen some impressive leaps, achieving the ability to accomplish several tasks, from text completion to powerful chatbots. The great variety of available LLMs and the fast pace of technological innovations in this field, is making LLM assessment a hard task to accomplish: understanding not only what such a kind of systems generate but also which is the quality of their results is of a paramount importance. Generally, the quality of a synthetically generated object could refer to the reliability of the content, to the lexical variety or coherence of the text. Regarding the quality of text generation, an aspect that up to now has not been adequately discussed is concerning the readability of textual artefacts. This work focuses on the latter aspect, proposing a set of experiments aiming to better understanding and evaluating the degree of readability of texts automatically generated by an LLM. The analysis is performed through an empirical study based on: considering a subset of five pre-trained LLMs; considering a pool of English text generation tasks, with increasing difficulty, assigned to each of the models; and, computing a set of the most popular readability indexes available from the computational linguistics literature. Readability indexes will be computed for each model to provide a first perspective of the readability of textual contents artificially generated can vary among different models and under different requirements of the users. The results obtained by evaluating and comparing different models provide interesting insights, especially into the responsible use of these tools by both beginners and not overly experienced practitioners.

Modern environmental regulations require rigorous optimization of operations in process engineering to reduce waste, pollution, and risks while maximizing efficiency. However, the nature of chemical plants, which include components with non-linear behavior, challenges the use of consolidated tuning and control techniques. Instead, ad-hoc, self-adapting, and time-variant controls, with a balanced tuning of parameters at both the subsystem and system level, may be necessary. Needed computing processes may require significant resources and high performance systems, if managed by means of traditional approaches and with exact solution methods. In this regard, domain experts suggest instead the use of integrated techniques based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which include Explainable AI (XAI) and Trustworthy AI (TAI), which are unique in this industry and still in the early stages of development. To pave the way for a real-time, cost-effective solution for this problem, this paper proposes an AI-based approach to model the performance of a real chemical plant, i.e. a marine scrubber installed on a Ro-Ro ship. The study aims to investigate Machine Learning (ML) techniques which can be used to model such processes. Notably, this analysis is the first of its kind, at the best of the authors’ knowledge. Overall, the study highlights the potential of using ML-based techniques, to optimize environmental compliance in the shipping industry.

Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) are getting more and more important in a hyper-connected society. Traditional HMIs are built considering cognitive features while emotional ones are often neglected, bringing sometimes such interfaces to misuse. As a part of a long run research, oriented to the definition of an HMI engineering approach, this paper concretely proposes a method to build an emotional-aware explicit model of the user starting from the behaviour of the human with a virtual agent. The paper also proposes an instance of this model inference process in voice assistants in an automatic depression context, which can constitute the core phase to realize a Human Digital Twin of a patient. The case study generated a model composed of Fluid Stochastic Petri Net sub-models, achieved after the data analysis by a Support Vector Machine.

In a world whose attention to environmental and health problems is very high, the issue of properly managing nuclear waste is of a primary importance. Information and Communication Technologies have the due to support the definition of the next-generation plants for temporary storage of such wasting materials. This paper investigates on the adoption of one of the most cutting-edge techniques in computer science and engineering, i.e. Digital Twins, with the combination of other modern methods and technologies as Internet of Things, model-based and data-driven approaches. The result is the definition of a methodology able to support the construction of risk-aware facilities for storing nuclear waste.

The diffusion of intelligent services and the push for the integration of computing systems and services in the environment in which they operate require a constant sensing activity and the acquisition of different information from the environment and the users. Health monitoring, domotics, Industry 4.0 and environmental challenges leverage the availability of cost-effective sensing solutions that allow both the creation of knowledge bases and the automatic process of them, be it with algorithmic approaches or artificial intelligence solutions. The foundation of these solutions is given by the Internet of Things (IoT), and the substanding Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) technology stack. Of course, design approaches are needed that enable defining efficient and effective sensing infrastructures, including energy related aspects. In this paper we present a Domain Specific Language for the design of energy aware WSN IoT solutions, that allows domain experts to define sensor network models that may be then analyzed by simulation-based or analytic techniques to evaluate the effect of task allocation and offloading and energy harvesting and utilization in the network. The language has been designed to leverage the SIMTHESys modeling framework and its multiformalism modeling evaluation features.

Currently, research in Artificial Intelligence, both in Machine Learning and Deep Learning, paves the way for promising innovations in several areas. In healthcare, especially, where large amounts of quantitative and qualitative data are transferred to support studies and early diagnosis and monitoring of any diseases, potential security and privacy issues cannot be underestimated. Federated learning is an approach where privacy issues related to sensitive data management can be significantly reduced, due to the possibility to train algorithms without exchanging data. The main idea behind this approach is that learning models can be trained in a distributed way, where multiple devices or servers with decentralized data samples can provide their contributions without having to exchange their local data. Recent studies provided evidence that prototypes trained by adopting Federated Learning strategies are able to achieve reliable performance, thus by generating robust models without sharing data and, consequently, limiting the impact on security and privacy. This work propose a literature overview of Federated Learning approaches and systems, focusing on its application for healthcare. The main challenges, implications, issues and potentials of this approach in the healthcare are outlined.

Authorship Attribution (AA) is currently applied in several applications, among which fraud detection and anti-plagiarism checks: this task can leverage stylometry and Natural Language Processing techniques. In this work, we explored some strategies to enhance the performance of an AA task for the automatic detection of false and misleading information (e.g., fake news). We set up a text classification model for AA based on stylometry exploiting recurrent deep neural networks and implemented two learning tasks trained on the same collection of fake and real news, comparing their performances: one is based on Federated Learning architecture, the other on a centralized architecture. The goal was to discriminate potential fake information from true ones when the fake news comes from heterogeneous sources, with different styles. Preliminary experiments show that a distributed approach significantly improves recall with respect to the centralized model. As expected, precision was lower in the distributed model. This aspect, coupled with the statistical heterogeneity of data, represents some open issues that will be further investigated in future work.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is being recently explored also to its application in supporting malicious activities and objects detection. Furthermore, NLP and Deep Learning have become targets of malicious attacks too. Very recent researches evidenced that adversarial attacks are able to affect also NLP tasks, in addition to the more popular adversarial attacks on deep learning systems for image processing tasks. More precisely, while small perturbations applied to the data set adopted for training typical NLP tasks (e.g., Part-of-Speech Tagging, Named Entity Recognition, etc..) could be easily recognized, models poisoning, performed by the means of altered data models, typically provided in the transfer learning phase to a deep neural networks (e.g., poisoning attacks by word embeddings), are harder to be detected. In this work, we preliminary explore the effectiveness of a poisoned word embeddings attack aimed at a deep neural network trained to accomplish a Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. By adopting the NER case study, we aimed to analyze the severity of such a kind of attack to accuracy in recognizing the right classes for the given entities. Finally, this study represents a preliminary step to assess the impact and the vulnerabilities of some NLP systems we adopt in our research activities, and further investigating some potential mitigation strategies, in order to make these systems more resilient to data and models poisoning attacks.

Modern networking is moving towards exploitation of autonomic features into networks to reduce management effort and compensate the increasing complexity of network infrastructures, e.g. in large computing facilities such the data centers that support cloud services delivery. Autonomicity provides the possibility of reacting to anomalies in network traffic by recognizing them and applying administrator defined reactions without the need for human intervention, obtaining a quicker response and easier adaptation to network dynamics, and letting administrators focus on general system-wide policies, rather than on each component of the infrastructure. The process of defining proper policies may benefit from adopting model-based design cycles, to get an estimation of their effects. In this paper we propose a model-based analysis approach of a simple autonomic router, using Stochastic Petri Nets, to evaluate the behavior of given policies designed to react to traffic workloads. The approach allows a detailed analysis of the dynamics of the policy and is suitable to be used in the preliminary phases of the design cycle for a Software Defined Networks compliant router control plane.