The advancement of the agricultural economic sector, which is a labour-intensive one, can benefit from robot-based systems, able to identify objects and perform complex processes in cooperation with human actors. From the technical, organizational, and job management viewpoint, cooperation in agriculture can also help facing challenges related to sustainability and climate change, and connected to aspects of the market such as global competition, labour shortages, and fluctuating costs of materials (e.g., fuel and fertilisers). Agricultural robots (agrobots) hold great promise in addressing the aforementioned challenges. Starting from ideas at the basis of our project at POLIMI on fruit farming, this paper presents a context study, and a knowledgebased approach to model smart agricultural environments, where farms use sensors and agrobots, and cooperate via Digital Twins towards the execution of complex tasks. We discuss how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enhance the process of training humans and agrobots in cooperative tasks.

The development of a contact-less monitoring system detecting water flow in the household and identifying the objects utilizing it, can provide support for Human Activities Recognition (HAR) and for Activities of Daily Living (ADL). This makes it particularly valuable in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). This study presents the results of an approach based on analyzing the spectrum of sounds captured in the environment. Two non-invasive solutions are examined, both utilizing a platform with a microphone placed in the environment to detect changes in sound caused by water flow noise. One method is based on spectrum analysis; the other on spectrogram analysis. We present the experiments conducted to test the two approaches in different environments. The two approaches differ in computational cost and are suitable for environments with multiple water sources, requiring no direct contact with plumbing. This makes them particularly suitable for applications related to the use of the bathroom. In particular, the spectrogram approach achieves an accuracy above 90%.

In modern manufacturing, divergent market dynamics impel companies to move toward a zero-defect production by reducing the risk of errors and defects down to zero. Paint-coating of metal surfaces is one of such process steps and most prominent as consumers will be animated to buy based on their first impression. Despite significant advances in automation and precision engineering of paint-coating, the presence of process contaminants as residual of different stages of production may compromise the process. In this contribution, we focus on the paint-coating of washing machine cabinets as a representative. Within the last decade, hyperspectral imaging technology has shown promising potentials in a variety of applications that aim at detecting objects and discriminating materials. In this work, we present a hyperspectral acquisition and analysis system that verifies the feasibility of detection and discrimination of process contaminants smeared on the washing machine cabinet based on spectral information. The acquisition system, aided by a robot arm, collects hyperspectral images based on two scenarios: contaminants on flat steel sheets and contaminants on washing machine chassis. This dataset, which is published publicly, is calibrated, analysed, and segmented through the proposed analysis models. The results for both flat base and structured washing machine surfaces indicate the great capacity of this technology for being integrated into the pre-treatment stage before painting metal parts.

India is a growing country with over 1.2 billion people, out of which more than two-thirds still live in rural areas. Indian rural areas are vibrant heritage-wise. They have both a fascinating hard and soft heritage legacy. Each region has many kinds of villages, and each is characterized by specific arts and crafts skills developed over the centuries. Small settlements retain fascinating heritage, which should be acknowledged and protected. Nowadays, rural villages are slowly perishing and losing their skilled people under the pressure of migration to cities. Rural settlements are suffering the exodus of young people and losing their art and craft skilled artisans. Since these settlements have been neglected, how do we bring attention to these fascinating areas? How do we allow skilled artisans to make a living and want to remain in rural areas? How do we provide a more sustainable future for both our rural and urban settlements? WECRAFT is an initiative that addresses these concerns by combining the best of affordable technologies and humanities, planning to enhance village areas, their skilled artisans and their products. This paper focuses on the requirements we collected and designs the WECRAFT solution.

Abstract This paper aims at understanding the social behavior of people with dementia through the use of technology, specifically by analyzing localization data of patients of an Alzheimer’s assisted care home in Italy. The analysis will allow to promote social relations by enhancing the facility’s spaces and activities, with the ultimate objective of improving residents’ quality of life. To assess social wellness and evaluate the effectiveness of the village areas and activities, this work introduces measures of sociability for both residents and places. Our data analysis is based on classical statistical methods and innovative machine learning techniques. First, we analyze the correlation between relational indicators and factors such as the outdoor temperature and the patients’ movements inside the facility. Then, we use statistical and accessibility analyses to determine the spaces residents appreciate the most and those in need of enhancements. We observe that patients’ sociability is strongly related to the considered factors. From our analysis, outdoor areas result less frequented and need spatial redesign to promote accessibility and attendance among patients. The data awareness obtained from our analysis will also be of great help to caregivers, doctors, and psychologists to enhance assisted care home social activities, adjust patient-specific treatments, and deepen the comprehension of the disease.

The significant growth of the average age of the world population requires effective solutions to meet the unsustainable number of requests for hospitalization. For this reason, the scientific community is seeking new paradigms of care that provide compensatory interventions to the first signs of warning that can be detected in the behavior of the individuals. At this aim, this work proposes a method to detect the Activities of Daily Living carried out by a subject monitored at home through unobtrusive environmental sensors. The Activity Recognition system is composed of an unsupervised segmentation layer which splits the collected sensors activation data in time periods and a semantic layer that exploits a knowledge-based approach to provide the most probable activity label for each period. The system is enriched with a further layer to adapt the base knowledge according to the information directly provided by the resident.

The wide range of different platforms for web and mobile applications development requires fast prototyping and the evaluation of multiple releases. Model Driven Development (MDD) represents the application at high level with textual or visual languages and can be used to automatically generate the final product by means of model-to-model and model-to-code transformations. We describe IFMLEdit.org, an open-source, online MDD tool for the specification and automatic generation of fast prototypes of Web and mobile application from IFML (Interaction Flow Modeling Language) specifications. The tool also supports the semantic mapping from IFML to PCN, a variant of Petri Nets, for model simulation and checking.

Despite the recent attitude toward making modern urban cities accessible, many barriers and obstacles still challenge impaired people mobility every day. Having a complete and accurate map of both accessible paths and barriers could support people mobility and could drive urban planning renewing efforts. However, mapping accessible paths and barriers timely, and in an accurate way, requires a significant effort and it is often left to volunteers and no-profit associations. The Maps for Easy Paths (MEP) project represents an attempt to build accessibility maps (i.e., maps with accessible routes) fusing, in an automatic fashion, data implicitly collected through mobile devices carried by interested people when they move around the city. In particular, the paper focuses on the design of the MEP-Traces app used for the collection of relevant data and the MEP-Fusion engine for the reconstruction of accessible routes out of inertial readings and GPS measurements. Experimental results in reconstructing accessible routes in urban scenarios show the effectiveness of the approach in dealing with typical problems related to poor inertial sensors quality.

Gestural interaction leveraging the expressiveness of the human hand, either in touch or in air gestures has been a subject of much research. In this work, a user study focusing mainly on static hand poses has been conducted on a heterogeneous group of participants covering different aspects of this interaction method: role of the participants in the creation of the hand poses, context-free pose-action mapping, learnability and memory issues, and physical comfort. Results of the study are discussed.

Thanks to the large diffusion of small wearable devices there are several systems designed for indoor localization. Among the pro- posed solutions, RF-based systems have been deeply investigated due to their flexibility and limited costs. When these systems are employed as assistive tools, they s

This article presents a model-driven approach for the design of the layout in a complex Web application, where large amounts of data are accessed. The aim of this work is to reduce, as much as possible, repetitive tasks and to factor out common aspects into different kinds of rules that can be reused across different applications. In particular, exploiting the conceptual elements of the typical models used for the design of a Web application, it defines presentation and layout rules at different levels of abstraction and granularity. A procedure for the automatic layout of the content of a page is proposed and evaluated, and the layout of advanced Web applications is discussed.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have introduced powerful novel functionalities into the Web architecture, borrowed from client-server and desktop applications. The resulting platforms allow designers to improve the user's experience, by exploiting client-side data and computation, bidirectional client-server communication, synchronous and asynchronous events, and rich interface widgets. However, the rapid evolution of RIA technologies challenges the Model-Driven Development methodologies that have been successfully applied in the past decade to traditional Web solutions. This paper illustrates an evolutionary approach for incorporating a wealth of RIA features into an existing Web engineering methodology and notation. The experience demonstrates that it is possible to model RIA application requirements at a high-level using a platform-independent notation, and generate the client-side and server-side code automatically. The resulting approach is evaluated in terms of expressive power, ease of use, and implementability.

This paper addresses conceptual modeling and automaticcode generation for Rich Internet Applications, a variant ofWeb-based systems bridging desktop and thin-client Webinterfaces. We show how classical Web modeling conceptsare not enough to capture the specificity of RIAs, extend anexisting Web modeling language, and provide an implementationof a CASE tool for visual modeling and code generationfrom RIA-aware specifications. Experimentation of theproposed approach in real-world scenarios is also reported.

This work addresses conceptual modeling and automatic code generation for Rich Internet Applications, a variant of Web-based systems bridging the gap between desktop and Web interfaces. The approach we propose is a first step towards a full integration of RIA paradigms into the Web development process, enabling the specification of complex Web solutions mixing HTTP+HTML and Rich Internet Applications, using a single modeling language and tool.

As the Web becomes a platform for implementing B2B applications, the need arises of Web conceptual models for describing Web oriented workflow applications implementing business processes. In this context, new problems about process correctness arise, due to the loose control of Web applications upon the behavior of their Web clients. Indeed, incoherent user's behavior can lead to inconsistent processes.This paper presents a high level approach to the management of exceptions that occur during the execution of processes on the Web. We present a classification of exceptions that can be raised inside workflow-driven Web applications, and recovery policies to retrieve coherent status and data after an exception. We devise these concepts at high level and then we exploit them using a Web modeling language (WebML) that in turn provides development facilities like automatic code generation, validation of hypertext models, and so on. An industrial implementation experience is briefly presented too.

Significant effort is currently invested in application integration, enabling business processes of different companies to interact and form complex multiparty processes. Web service standards, based on WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), have been adopted as process-to-process communication paradigms. However, the conceptual modeling of applications using Web services has not yet been addressed. Interaction with Web services is often specified at the level of the source code; thus, Web service interfaces are buried within a programmatic specification.In this article, we argue that Web services should be considered first-class citizens in the specification of Web applications. Thus, service-enabled Web applications should benefit from the high-level modeling and automatic code generation techniques that have long been advocated for Web application design and implementation. To this end, we extend a declarative model for specifying data-intensive Web applications in two directions: (i) high-level modeling of Web services and their interactions with the Web applications which use them, and (ii) modeling and specification of Web applications implementing new, complex Web services.Our approach is fully implemented within a CASE tool allowing the high-level modeling and automatic deployment of service-enabled Web applications.

This demo presents an extension of a declarative language for specifying data-intensive Web applications. We demonstrate a scenario extracted from a real-life application, the Web portal of a computer manufacturer, including interactions with third-party service providers and enabling distributors to participate in well-defined business processes. The crucial advantage of our framework is the high-level modeling of a complex Web application, extended with Web service and workflow capabilities. The application is automatically verified for correctness and the code is automatically generated and deployed.

An active database system is a DBMS endowed with active rules, i.e., stored procedures activated by the system when specific events occur. The processing of active rules is characterized by two important properties: termination and confluence. We say that the processing of a set of active rules terminates if, given any initial active database state, the execution of the rules does not continue indefinitely; it is confluent if, for any initial database state, the final state is not influenced by the order of execution of the rules. Finding sufficient conditions for these properties to hold is a nontrivial problem, and the lack of a structured theory for the design of a system of active rules makes the analysis of the two properties more difficult. In this work, we translate a set of rules from any of the existing systems into an internal format; then, we translate the active rules into logical clauses, taking into account the system's execution semantics, and transfer to the active process known simple results about termination and determinism available in the literature for deductive rules.

The rapid evolution of XML from a mere data exchange format to a universal syntax for encoding domain-specific information raises the need for new query languages specifically conceived to address the characteristics of XML. Such languages should be able not only to extract information from XML documents, but also to apply powerful transformation and restructuring operators, based on a well-defined semantics. Moreover, XML queries should be natural to write and understand, as nontechnical persons also are expected to access the large XML information bases supporting their businesses. This article describes XML-GL, a graphical query language for XML data. XML-GL's uniqueness is in the definition of a graph-based syntax to express a wide variety of XML queries, ranging from simple selections to expressive data transformations involving grouping, aggregation, and arithmetic calculations. XML-GL has an operational semantics based on the notion of graph matching, which serves as a guideline both for the implementation of native processors, and for the adoption of XML-GL as a front-end to any of the XML query languages that are presently under discussion as the standard paradigm for querying XML data.