80,348 research outputs found
What Would You Ask to Your Home if It Were Intelligent? Exploring User Expectations about Next-Generation Homes
No full textAmbient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper discusses the results of a survey about user expectations with respect to intelligent homes. Starting from a very simple and open question about what users would ask to their intelligent homes, we derived user perceptions about what intelligent homes can do, and we analyzed to what extent current research solutions, as well as commercially available systems, address these emerging needs. Interestingly, most user concerns about smart homes involve comfort and household tasks and most of them can be currently addressed by existing commercial systems, or by suitable combinations of them. A clear trend emerges from the poll findings: the technical gap between user expectations and current solutions is actually narrower and easier to bridge than it may appear, but users perceive this gap as wide and limiting, thus requiring the AmI community to establish a more effective communication with final users, with an increased attention to real-world deploymen
Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments
No full textIntelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement
Il Bilancio secondo gli IAS
No full textL'introduzione dei principi contabili internazionali (IAS/IFRS) rappresenta una rilevante novità per tutti coloro che a vario titolo si interessano al bilancio quale strumento di conoscenza dello stato di salute delle aziende. Con la progressiva globalizzazione dell'attività economica delle imprese appare fondamentale la scelta dell'Unione Europea di creare un comune linguaggio contabile europeo, adottando un corpus di principi contabili quali gli IAS/IFRS. Questi privilegiano una visione del bilancio quale strumento informativo a beneficio di tutti gli stekeholder dell'azienda e, tra questi, i prestatori di capitale di rischio. Questo volume, frutto della collaborazione di diversi studiosi ed esperti, mira a fornire un riferimento sia teorico che operativo attraverso alcuni esempi di supporto
SAT based Enforcement of Domotic Effects in Smart Environments
No full textThe emergence of economically viable and efficient sensor technology provided impetus to the development of smart devices (or appliances). Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of smart devices and sensors, aimed at delivering intelligent services to the users of smart environments. The presence of these diverse smart devices has raised a major problem of managing environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the environments using user defined goals. `Domotic Effects' is a user goal modeling framework, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with an abstract layer that enables the definition of generic goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. The high-level nature of domotic effects also allows the residents to program their personal space as they see fit: they can define different achievement criteria for a particular generic goal, e.g., by defining a combination of devices having some particular states, by using domain-specific custom operators. This paper describes an approach for the automatic enforcement of domotic effects in case of the Boolean application domain, suitable for intelligent monitoring and control in domotic environments. Effect enforcement is the ability to determine device configurations that can achieve a set of generic goals (domotic effects). The paper also presents an architecture to implement the enforcement of Boolean domotic effects, and results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the responsiveness of the implemented effect enforcement architectur
Tetralogy of fallot
No full textThe optimal management of patients with tetralogy of Fallot has to consider the individual intra-cardiac anatomy as the most important variable, together with the age and the body weight of the patient. In any case the potential advantages of a primary early repair should be weighted against the experience and expertise of the individual centre and/or surgical team in dealing with tetralogy of Fallot and with neonates and infants. The best results are achieved by very carefully adapting the surgical technique to the individual morphology of the right ventricular outflow tract and of the pulmonary arteries. The details of the established surgical management for each component of the surgical repair are analysed and described. Over a period of 12 years (from 1993 to 2005) 318 consecutive patients with tetralogy of Fallot underwent repair with one hospital death (1/318=0.3% mortality)
The Corno Alto complex (Adamello batholith): A modern analogue of the high Ba/K sanukitoids
No full textThe Corno Alto complex represents the onset of the intrusive igneous activity during the Alpine Orogen and for this reason has particular importance in the interpretation of the geodynamic evolution of the Alps. Whole-rock chemistry of the granitoid rocks of the Corno Alto complex reveals peculiar features with respect to the other units of the Adamello batholith, and to typical I-type and S-type granitoids. In particular, the Corno Alto rocks are enriched in Ba, Sr and La/Yb at any given SiO2 content. U–Pb geochronology on zircon suggests an incremental assembly of the Corno Alto complex by multiple and possibly discrete magma injections in a time span of about 5 Myr starting from 44 Ma. The different zircon domains have significantly distinct Hf isotopic signature (up to 18 εHf units of variation) with some values trending towards the isotopic composition of the depleted mantle (DM). Bulk major and trace element geochemistry together with in-situ Hf isotope composition of zircon allow to distinguish at least two geochemically components in the Corno Alto rocks: i) a high Ba component characterized by high Sr and La/Yb ratios, likely derived from melting of carbonate sediments of slab origin; ii) a juvenile component with Hf isotopic signature close to the DM and capable to crystallize plagioclase with An90, which is interpreted as the primitive mantle signal. This work constrains for the first time the occurrence of a slab derived carbonate input in the mantle-derived melts during the onset of the Alpine magmatism (dated at 44 Ma). The anomalously high thermal conditions required to induced carbonate melting may reflect the rise of asthenospheric material near the torn edge of the European slab where the Corno alto is located. Remarkably, these high thermal conditions parallel those at the Archean-Proterozoic transition and the Corno Alto complex could thus represent a kind of modern analogues of the high Ba/K sanukitoids
Intelligent Energy Optimization for User Intelligible Goals in Smart Home Environments
No full textIntelligent management of energy consumption is one of the key issues for future energy distribution systems, smart buildings, and consumer appliances. The problem can be tackled both from the point of view of the utility provider, with the intelligence embedded in the smart grid, or from the point of view of the consumer, thanks to suitable local energy management systems (EMS). Conserving energy, however, should respect the user requirements regarding the desired state of the environment, therefore an EMS should constantly and intelligently find the balance between user requirements and energy saving. The paper proposes a solution to this problem, based on explicit high-level modeling of user intentions and automatic control of device states through the solution and optimization of a constrained Boolean satisfiability problem. The proposed approach has been integrated into a smart environment framework, and promising preliminary results are reporte
Publishing LO(D)D: Linked Open (Dynamic) Data for Smart Sensing and Measuring Environments
No full textThe paper proposes a distributed framework that provides a systematic way to publish environment data which is being updated continuously; such updates might be issued at specific time intervals or bound to some environment- specific event. The framework targets smart environments having networks of devices and sensors which are interacting with each other and with their respective environments to gather and generate data and willing to publish this data. This paper addresses the issues of supporting the data publishers to maintain up-to-date and machine understandable representations, separation of views (static or dynamic data) and delivering up-to-date information to data consumers in real time, helping data consumers to keep track of changes triggered from diverse environments and keeping track of evolution of the smart environment. The paper also describes a prototype implementation of the proposed architecture. A preliminary use case implementation over a real energy metering infrastructure is also provided in the paper to prove the feasibility of the architectur
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