102,337 research outputs found
La ricerca sociale. Partecipazione dei cittadini alle scelte relative allo sviluppo tecnologico locale (Parte 2)
No full textImpatto sociale ed economico di un impianto sperimentale a fusione: l’esperienza di Porto Torres (vol 2: Impatto sociale)
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A preliminary study of the morphological and biomedical characteristics of olive pollens in the Sassari area with their aerobiological and allergological effects
No full textRecensione del libro G. Giorio (a cura di), Dall’intersoggettività alla reciprocità nelle risposte ai bisogni umani della società tecnologica
No full textCorrelation between blood and hair lead levels in boys and girls of Sardinia (Italy)
No full textThe aim of this study was to analyse the correlation between blood lead (PbB) and hair lead
(PbH) in Sardinian children. Th e sample consisted of 330 children (126 boys and 204 girls) from three
Sardinian towns with diff erent environmental backgrounds: Portoscuso, Sant’Antioco, and Sestu. Th e boys
of Portoscuso have the highest median value of PbB (10.86 μg/dL), followed by the girls of Portoscuso (7.24
μg/dL); they are followed, but with much lower values, by the boys of Sant'Antioco (4.22 μg/dL) and Sestu
(4.06 μg/dL), and lastly by the girls of Sant'Antioco (3.50 μg/dL) and Sestu (3.39 μg/dL). Th ere is a similar
pattern for the PbH values: the Portoscuso boys have the highest median value (10.00 μg/g), followed by
the Portoscuso girls (7.21 μg/g), Sant'Antioco boys (5.44 μg/g), Sant’Antioco girls (4.69 μg/g) and fi nally
the Sestu boys (3.79 μg/g) and girls (1.56 μg/g). Th e values of the Bravais-Pearson coeffi cient of correlation
between logPbB and logPbH are statistically signifi cant both for the total sample (r=0.4351; p≤0.001)
and for the sexes considered separately (r=0.3989, p≤0.001, for males; r=0.3801, p≤0.001, for females). It
should be noted that a high percentage of unexplained variance persists in the total sample (81.07%) and in
males (84.09%) and females (85.55%) separately. Th e pattern among samples with diff erent environmental
backgrounds and the signifi cant correlations between the logPbB and logPbH values suggest that hair can be
used as a suitable biomarker of lead exposure
Recensione del libro di G. Mondardini, Gente di mare in Sardegna. Antropologia dei saperi dei luoghi e dei corpi
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Il commercio equo e solidale: impegno, distinzione, pratiche relazionali
No full textIl saggio si inquadra in un volume che presenta i risultati di un lavoro di ricerca sui consumi responsabili in Italia. Nell’articolo sono in particolare affrontati i temi del consumo equo e solidale. Il fenomeno viene inquadrato inizialmente rispetto alle sue caratteristiche strutturali. In seguito si presentano i principali risultati emergenti dall’analisi dei questionari relativi alle motivazioni e alle frequenze di acquisto.
Poste queste premesse, vengono approfonditi i temi relativi ai principali fattori che predispongono alla conoscenza e al consumo di prodotti equo e solidali con riferimento all’età, al sesso, alla posizione sociale e alla condizione professionale. Ciò permette di porre le premesse per comprendere come le pratiche di consumo equo e solidale siano legate ad altre pratiche culturali e al capitale simbolico detenuto. Un tale tipo di analisi viene poi riconsiderato alla luce degli orientamenti politici, con particolare riferimento ai contesti relazionali in cui prende forma e si esprime l’identità dei consumatori di prodotti equo e solidali.The essay is part of a book that presents the results of a research work on responsible consumption in Italy. The article in particular addresses the issues of fair trade. The phenomenon is framed initially with respect to its structural features. Then we present the main results emerging from the analysis of questionnaires on the reasons and frequency of purchase.
On those basis, the key factors that predispose to the knowledge and consumption of fair trade are discussed with regard to age, sex, social position and professional status. This allows to set the basis for understanding how fair consumption practices are linked to other cultural practices and symbolic capital. This kind of analysis is then reconsidered in the light of policy guidance, with particular reference to the relational contexts in which the identity of consumers of fair trade is shaped and expressed
Intelligent Information Access
No full textIntelligent Information Access techniques attempt to overcome the limitations of current search devices by providing personalized information items
and product/service recommendations. They normally utilize direct or indirect
user input and facilitate the information search and decision processes,
according to user needs, preferences and usage patterns. Recent developments
at the intersection of Information Retrieval, Information Filtering,
Machine Learning, User Modelling, Natural Language Processing and Human-
Computer Interaction offer novel solutions that empower users to go beyond
single-session lookup tasks and that aim at serving the more complex requirement:
“Tell me what I don’t know that I need to know”. Information filtering
systems, specifically recommender systems, have been revolutionizing the way
information seekers find what they want, because they effectively prune large
information spaces and help users in selecting items that best meet their needs
and preferences. Recommender systems rely strongly on the use of various
machine learning tools and algorithms for learning how to rank, or predict
user evaluation, of items. Information Retrieval systems, on the other hand,
also attempt to address similar filtering and ranking problems for pieces of
information such as links, pages, and documents. But they generally focus
on the development of global retrieval techniques, often neglecting individual
user needs and preferences.
The book aims to investigate current developments and new insights into
methods, techniques and technologies for intelligent information access from
a multidisciplinary perspective. It comprises six chapters authored by participants
in the research event Intelligent Information Access, held in Cagliari
(Italy) in December 2008.
In Chapter 1, Enhancing Conversational Access to Information through a
Socially Intelligent Agent, Berardina De Carolis, Irene Mazzotta and Nicole
Novielli emphasize the role of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) as
a natural interaction metaphor for personalized and context-adapted access
to information. They propose a scalable architecture for the development of
ECAs able to exhibit an emotional state and/or social signs.
VI Preface
The automatic detection of emotions in text is the problem investigated
in Chapter 2, Annotating and Identifying Emotions in Text, by Carlo Strapparava
and Rada Mihalcea. The authors describe the “Affective Text” task,
presented at SEMEVAL- 2007. The task focused on classifying emotions in
news headlines, and was intended to explore the connection between emotions
and lexical semantics. After illustrating the data set, the rationale of
the task and a brief description of the participating systems, several experiments
on the automatic annotation of emotions in text are presented. The
practical applications of the task are very important. Consider for example
opinion mining and market analysis, affective computing, natural language
interfaces for e-learning environments or educational games.
Personalization of the ranking computed by search engines and recommender
systems is the main topic of Chapter 3, Improving Ranking by Respecting
the Multidimensionality and Uncertainty of User Preferences, by
Bettina Berendt and Veit Koppen. The research question addressed by the
authors is whether system ranking is the “right ranking” for the user, based
on the context in which she/he operates. A general conceptualization of the
ranking-evaluation task is proposed: the comparison between the ranking
generated by a computational system, and the “ user’s ideal ranking”. Eight
challenges to this simple model are discussed, leading to the conclusion that
approaches for dealing with multidimensional, and often only partial, preference
orders are required and that randomness could be a beneficial feature
of system rankings.
In Chapter 4, Hotho reviews the state of the art in the new research area
of data mining on folksonomies. The first part describes the basics of folksonomies,
summarizing del.icio.us, the most popular social bookmarking system,
and illustrates in detail BibSonomy, a very successful online service for
social bookmarking and publication sharing. Starting from these systems,
the author discusses in greater depth the main issues regarding folksonomies,
proposing a formal model and presenting their most important network properties.
In the second part, the author illustrates three applications: spam
detection, ranking and recommendation. Regarding spam detection, the author
develops techniques, based on binary classifiers, which prevent spammers
from publishing in social bookmarking systems. As far as ranking is
concerned, a new algorithm is proposed, namely FolkRank, which takes into
account the folksonomy structure for ranking users, tags and resources. For
recommendation, the author evaluates a tag recommender based on Collaborative
Filtering, a graph based recommender using FolkRank and several
simple approaches based on tag counts. In the third part, a possible
link between folksonomies and ontologies is suggested, paving the way to
some very promising strategies for detecting organizational principles hidden
within folksonomies.
Amati, Amodeo, Bianchi, Gaibisso and Gambosi propose, in Chapter 5, A Uniform Theoretic Approach to Opinion and Information Retrieval,
an application of the Divergence From Randomness (DFR) model to the
Preface VII
opinion finding task, the task of retrieving opinionated blog posts, relevant for
a given topic, from a large collection. The opinion finding task can be seen as a
search in which, after the standard retrieval of ranked documents, documents
are re-ranked according to the presence of opinions within the selected documents.
This task can be handled by a supervised or unsupervised method.
The authors propose a method for creating a lexicon of opinionated terms
for re-ranking the documents, using a supervised algorithm. The first part
introduces the statistical basis underpinning the proposed approach and its
adoption in opinion retrieval. In particular, two information-theoretic functions
are defined, opinion entropy and average opinion entropy. The authors
also formally describe their lightweight opinion retrieval algorithm. Lastly, the
authors discuss the effectiveness of their approach for creating a dictionary
of polarity-bearing terms. They also describe some preliminary experiments
and propose alternative ways to approach the polarity detection problem.
In Chapter 6, A Suite of Semantic Web Tools Supporting Development
of Multilingual Ontologies, Pazienza, Stellato and Turbati propose a suite of
software libraries, tools and ontologies to support multilingual development
of Semantic Web ontologies. The three tools illustrated in this Chapter are
Semantic Turkey, The Linguistic Watermark, and Ontoling. Semantic Turkey
is aimed at providing innovative solutions for web browsing and for gathering
and organizing the information observed when surfing the net. The novel
aspect of Semantic Turkey is its ability to provide a clear separation between
acquired data and web links. The Linguistic Watermark is an ontological and
software framework for describing and managing heterogeneous linguistic resources
and for using their contents for ontological-driven document enrichment.
Ontoling is a generic architecture for extending ontology development
tools with functionalities for enriching ontological knowledge with linguistic
content. The tools presented implicitly embed a new way of rethinking the
development of ontologies in terms of making their content reusable and comprehensible.
Furthermore, they represent living proof of software engineering
principles associated with software reuse, documentation, modularity, interaction
analysis, applied to the domain of Knowledge Management Software.
We would like to thank all the authors for their excellent contributions and
the reviewers for their careful revision and suggestions for improving them.
We are grateful to the Springer-Verlag Team for their assistance during the
preparation of the manuscripts.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Fiorella de Rosis in recognition of
her contribution to user modeling. She was a pioneer in the field of affective
computing, a leader in research on modeling emotions and constructing embodied
animated agents. She produced key contributions in intelligent user
interfaces, in particular on user-adapted generation of natural language and
multimedia messages, uncertainty in user models, and presentation of medical
explanations and clinical guidelines. During her teaching and research activities
she mentored many students who have become established researchers.
These research and teaching activities didn’t prevent her from being an active
VIII Preface
member of the ACM, of the International Society for Research on Emotions,
of the European Network of Excellence on Emotions (HUMAINE), of the
editorial boards of UMUAI and co-chair of many international conferences.
All the people acquainted with Fiorella have appreciated her scientific and
human value and are grateful for her friendship
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