Online Social Networks (OSNs) rely on content moderation systems to ensure platform and user safety by preventing malicious activities such as the spread of harmful content. However, there is a growing consensus suggesting that such systems are unfair to historically marginalized individuals, fragile users, and minorities. Additionally, OSN policies are often hardcoded in artificial intelligence–based violation classifiers, making personalized content moderation challenging. In addition, there is a need for more communication between users and platform administrators, especially in the case of disagreement about a moderation decision. To address these issues, we propose integrating content moderation systems with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance support for personal content moderation and improve user–platform communication. We also evaluate the content moderation capabilities of GPT 3.5 and LLaMa 2, comparing them with commercial products, as well as discuss the limitations of our approach and the open research directions.

From the first static webpages to Web 3.0 and ubiquitous devices, technologies enhance and influence our lives today more than ever. Mobile devices, like smartphones, allow users to download millions of applications developed with different programming languages, frameworks, and quality standards. In this context, accessibility is a critical point that needs to be persecuted not only by developers, but even offered as an out-of-the-box feature by mobile technologies so that modern mobile applications can improve the lives of all users. In this paper, we investigate how two frameworks for cross-platform development, Flutter and React Native, address accessibility issues, and we propose some solutions when the official documentation does not.

The digital and mobile revolutions have changed the way people live their sexuality. Sexting, the practice of sending or receiving any sexually explicit content through mobile devices, has gained popularity, especially amongst teenagers and young adults, bringing several concerns, such as the uncontrolled spread of personal nude or semi-nude media without the owner's consent. Moreover, messaging applications generally used to communicate (and practice sexting) are not safe enough, e.g., they permit to send and forward any received content to anyone else. In this scenario, we believe that, beside education, technological solutions should be devised to avoid or limit sexting abuse. To this aim, we have developedSafeSext, a proof of concept messaging system, which also implements an image forwarding control feature. Through it, we have analyzed possible solutions, as well as their limits, in supporting a safer messaging environment where users retain some form of control over the forwarding of their self-generated sensitive contents.

Cities have been developed to support cars rather than people. This has led to a decrease in people's ability to move, live and interact with their urban surroundings., thus affecting the quality-of-life. Obviously., this applies to all of us, especially to people suffering from impairments. Surprisingly, the lack of information is one of the main obstacles to the construction of services that could bridge the gap between people living in urban areas and their environment. Take Google Maps as an example; one can request a route between any two destinations and will surely be provided with the shortest path, whether traveling by car, public transportation, or on foot. However, there are no pathways or information available to help visually impaired people. In response to the above issue, in this paper, we discuss how the widespread presence of sensor-equipped smartphones can be harnessed to create innovative services capable of improving factors such as interaction with the environment, social inclusion, and quality of life.

The United Nations defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to foster equitable, healthy, inclusive and safe communities. Clearly, they involve even social networks and, in particular, the sexuality expressed through them. For instance, consider sexting, the practice of sharing self-generated explicit content through mobile devices. Besides its popularity, this phenomenon carries several concerns, such as the possible damages caused by the spread of personal nude or semi-nude images without the owner’s consent. Unfortunately, messaging applications generally used to practice sexting are not safe enough as they permit to share any received content with anyone else. Aimed at preventing sexting-related adverse consequences for the wellness of people and creating safer, gender-equal and inclusive online communities, we discuss possible technological approaches to contrast the non-consensual spread of private self-generated content and, in particular, we analyse the impact of employing decentralised architectures in this context.

Sexting, the practice of sending and receiving self-generated sexually explicit contents via mobile phone, is becoming more and more popular among the young generation, although at the cost of risking the exposure of their private material. Teenagers are not the only category at risk: one may wonder whether this practice can be even more dangerous for people with disabilities or an opportunity for them to explore their sexuality in an exposure-controlled way. In this work, we present preliminary results of an analysis regarding sexting through multimedia and how its use is perceived. Furthermore, without denying that it is crucial to educate people about the best behaviours and the drawbacks related to sexting, yet we believe that technology could help users in controlling the dissemination/forwarding of their sexy selfies and we discuss here how.

Nowadays, web accessibility is recognized as a fundamental right of people with disabilities. But imposing accessibility by law is not enough: the main problem is the lack of a widespread culture of accessibility among webmasters that often do not know how to answer to accessibility requirements and what must be done to develop accessible web sites. Moreover, accessibility guidelines are legal documents that are not accessible to web developers. WCAG4A11 is a tool that helps them to understand what are the aspects that must be considered during the development process.

Abstract Wearable technology is no longer science fiction. Thanks to the growing capability in the production chain to miniaturize complex electronics, a wide variety of gadgets that can be worn or included in dresses and accessories have emerged. These smart gadgets can collect data about the physical condition of the user and/or the environment providing the basis for innovative and valuable services. The main goal of this paper is to assess this context through field experiments undertaken in a testbed comprised of sensing hardware deployed on open source boards such as Arduino. Moreover, coupled with the sensing tier, we propose a proof‐of‐concept deployment architecture enabling a wide range of wearable sensors to collect and transmit data to a logically centralized unit.

Even if the World Wide Web is one of the main content and service providers, unfortunately, these contents and services are not really available for everyone. People affected by impairments often have difficulties in navigating Web pages for a wide range of reasons. In this paper, we focus on people affected by dyslexia. These users experience difficulties in reading acquisition, despite normal intelligence and adequate access to conventional instruction. For this reason, we have created Help me read!, a Chrome extension that allows to change many features of a Web page. Furthermore, it allows to isolate and enlarge one word at a time. This feature is crucial as it allows people with dyslexia to focus on each single word, thus overcoming one of their main difficulties.

Is the World Wide Web for everyone? Long story short: no and unfortunately it is not only a matter of infrastructures, level of instruction or economic conditions. People affected by visual impairments have often difficulties in navigating web pages for a wide range of reasons. One of the biggest obstacles nowadays is the use of CAPTCHAs, powerful tools against bot attacks but also potential virtual barriers for the aforementioned category of users. In this paper we tested various categories of CAPTCHAs with people affected by visual impairment and not, to understand how discriminatory can be these cybersecurity measures.

Cloud-based interactive multimedia applications such as virtual games and video streaming are gaining high popularity. However, giving the high bandwidth consumption, the remote execution can negatively impact the quality of the multimedia traffic. In such a realm, data travel different communication networks from the cloud to the final users crossing the last meters the home's access point (AP). In such a scenario, the quality-of-service (QoS) support is a challenging task, particularly in the home network environment, with heterogeneous applications simultaneously running and consuming the available bandwidth. To address this issue, we propose ReiLeCS, a Reinforcement Learning-based Controller and Scheduler for interactive multimedia traffic in Home Area Networks (HAN). Through reinforcement learning and the maximization of a reward function, it enables the AP to schedule the arriving multimedia traffic from the cloud according to their required QoS. Simulation results using real multimedia traffic conditions demonstrate that ReiLeCS achieves better performances compared with existing packet scheduling policies.

Although much has been done in the field of accessibility, the World Wide Web is not yet for everyone. Many Internet users often find difficulties in navigating web pages. This is particularly true for people with visual impairments and blind people. In this paper, we present a review of the state of the art of the application of accessibility rules to web pages and describe which are the common problems that people with sight impairments must endure when surfing the Internet; to this aim, we use information collected during an interview with a blind user who is an expert in navigating the web using a screen reader.

The worldwide diffusion of mobile technology has opened the door to a new era of distributed sensing. Indeed, mobile sensing and wireless technology can be exploited to create new information and services that have the potential to improve our lives in many ways. This becomes even more interesting if the benefits could reach the whole community, even people with disadvantages that are often left out by the digital divide. To this aim, we have developed a system able to offer an enhanced route navigation system, while at the same time gathering quality data through smartwatches. Even more interesting, we have endowed our system with an interaction paradigm based on vibration patterns so as to guide the user without the need for looking at the device. Our proposal avoids user distraction and field trials demonstrate its effectiveness when employed by visually impaired people.

Wearable devices are constantly expanding in number and functionalities within both the IT market and the fashion market. Smart watches have become very popular and have moved from a tool only showing information related to the smartphone to a device able to monitor and display a vast plethora of data, including data related to the owner's health (e.g., hearth rate, body temperature, steps per day, etc.). This huge amount of data that wearables in the world can generate could be further elaborated to become even more useful. Yet, designing effective solutions to collect, store and elaborate sensors data is a challenging task. To this aim, in this paper, we present a framework to model a wearable sensors network in a simple and flexible in order to adapt to different scenarios.

In recent years we have seen a great proliferation of smart vehicles, ranging from cars to little drones (both terrestrial and aerial), all endowed with sensors and communication capabilities. It is hence easy to foresee a future with even more smart and connected vehicles moving around, occupying space and creating an Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In this IoV, a multitude of nodes (both static and mobile) will generate a continuous multihop flow of local information to support local smart environment applications. Therefore, one interesting environment for the IoV would be in the form of 3-D mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Unfortunately, MANET routing protocols have generally been designed and analyzed keeping in mind a 2-D scenario; there is no guarantee on how they would support a 3-D topology of the IoV. To this end, we have considered routing protocols deemed as the state-of-the-art for classic MANETs and tested them over 3-D topologies to evaluate their assets and technical challenges.

Mobile games have come to revolutionize the mobile handset and gaming industry, pushing chip vendors to compete in order to provide better and better graphics capabilities by means of dedicated processors. This capability coupled with the sensing and communication ability offered by smartphones, provides the developers with the building blocks for innovative gaming solutions. In particular, multiplayer mobile games could exploit context and proximity information, providing an added value to the gaming experience. In this context, we present the design and analysis of a modern mobile and multiplayer version of the classic Pong game. In addition to the classic interaction model through remote server(s), players could interact and play locally by exploiting ad-hoc connectivity offered by the Wi-Fi Direct technology.

In this paper we describe a new tool for interactive presentations: the speaker shows a common slideshow on the screen, and the users can see the same slide in their smartphone or tablet, independently from its model and brand. The system can be used for both on-line and on-site presentations and encourages the user to perform social activities, e. g., comment or like a slide. The author can also submit a questionnaire or a poll to the audience and see in real-time the answers. Our tool has been used during 37 different events, followed by 3753 users. We recorded the actions of the users and, depending on the different kind of events, the average of actions ranges from 1 to 8 per user per presentation. This data shows that our tool helps to increase users engagement and to maintain user attention.

The increasing number of people that are overweight due to a sedentary life requires persuasive strategies to convince people to change their behaviors. In this paper, we present a machine learning based technique to recognize and count stairsteps when a person climbs or descends stairs. This techn

In this paper we analyze energy consumption of mobile applications using different smartphones sensors, e.g., GPS, accelerometer, etc., and features, e.g., acquiring video or audio from the environment. In particular, we have studied how the use of frameworks for mobile cross-platform development may influence the amount of required energy for the same operation. We use an hardware and software tool to measure energy consumption of the same application, using different sensors, when developed natively or using two frameworks, Titanium and PhoneGap. Our experiments have shown that frameworks have a significant impact on energy consumption which greatly increases compared to an equal native application. Moreover, the amount of consumed energy is not the same for all frameworks.

The number and types of applications developed for multi-touch tabletops are dramatically increased in the last years, mainly due to the fact that interactive tabletops allow a more natural interaction with the user through their multi-touch interfaces. Despite many applications share a big set of common features, e.g., gestures recognition, interface orientation, etc., almost all applications implement their home made software solutions. In this paper we present Tactive, a software layer for fast development of portable applications for multi-touch interactive tabletops. Tactive allows to abstract from hardware and software equipment and to embed a web application into a application for multi-touch surfaces. Our framework supports up to five fingers gestures recognition and communication between different windows, and allows to save more than 60% of developing time.

Dyslexia is one of the main cognitive disabilities affecting the reading acquisition. As it may interfere with educational opportunities even in presence of adequate intelligence, it is of crucial importance to obtain early diagnosis and help affected children as soon as possible. Generally, dyslexia is diagnosed not earlier than primary school as difficulties in reading is used as first indicator. Yet, being able to detect and treat this problem even in preschool years would ensure better chances to limit its impact and help the child's future reading ability. To this aim, we discuss here a series of serious games we designed and tested to train specific skills that have been proven to be effective against dyslexia.

Web 2.0 is evolving and offering services based on the wide popularity of smartphones and the possibility of gathering data ubiquitously from these mobile devices; this new paradigm is often referred to as Web2. In this paper, we hence present and discuss a Web2 application designed to enable users to interact with remote smartphones' cameras to receive a video generated in real time. In essence, users can individuate on a map which mobile cameras are available in a location of interest and request the remote user to generate and send back a short video of the surrounding environment or event. We discuss technical issues related to implementing such a service and the solutions we devised to address them. Finally, we also present experimental results we obtained from a preliminary testbed evaluation that encourages the prosecution of this work.

In this paper we define a formal semantics for the language SMIL which can be used in a number of applications. First of all, we propose a computer aided authoring system which include a Semantic Validator Module for the evaluation of the temporal consistency of the resulting multimedia presentation. If any temporal conflict is found, the system returns to the user a message pointing out the tag which contains the error and its motivation. This helps the user to correct the error. We also introduce a notion of equivalence for SMIL tags which is useful to find a candidate for substitution in the development of complex multimedia structure, for example in the context adaptation process.

In this article we describe a prototyping environment, which allows an author to set up and test a complex hypermedia presentation. It contains a visual editor, based on a graph notation, in which the nodes are media objects and the edges are the synchronization relations between them; an execution simulator, which helps the author to test the presentation dynamics by manually triggering media related events; and a player, which allows the author to preview the presentation and to visually relate the execution evolution with the interpretation of the synchronization schema.

Data-centered approaches to multimedia presentation design and implementation can be developed by extending methodologies and technologies common in text-based applications. A multimedia report is a multimedia presentation built on a set of data returned by one or more queries to multimedia repositories, integrated according to a template with appropriate spatial layout and temporal synchronization, and coherently delivered to a user for browsing. We discuss the problem of defining templates for such multimedia reports with a focus on media coordination and synchronization. Multimedia presentations can be automatically generated according to the template by instantiating it on actual data instances. An XML language describes the spatial layout and the temporal constraints of the media objects. An authoring system and a player have been implemented.

Multimedia documents are an effective way to present different kinds of information, since the integration of different media types gives more expressive power and opportunities to catch the user attention. A multimedia report is a multimedia presentation built on a set of data returned by one or more queries to multimedia repositories, integrated according to a schema with appropriate spatial layout and temporal synchronization, and coherently delivered to a user for browsing. We discuss the problem of defining schemas for such multimedia reports with a focus on the media coordination and synchronization constraints. Multimedia presentations can then be automatically generated according to the schema. We have defined an XML language to describe the spatial layout and the temporal constraints of the media objects, together with a visual authoring system helping the user to design the presentation template.

This paper discusses some issues related to authoring and navigating World Wide Web documents composed of continuous and non-continuous media, based on a video or audio narration to which static or dynamic documents are attached. The discussion stems from a model able to describe synchronization among media elements and media behavior depending on user interaction. A prototype implementation addressing SMIL as a target language is described.