Strategy & Innovation

Our research explores novel forms of smart spaces that support full body interaction with smart objects instrumented with audio, light, and motion sensors and actuators, virtual worlds on medium-large displays , and smart lights, and are integrated with cloud services for remote supervision and analysis of user behaviour. In this paper, we present the architecture and coordination infrastructure created in the Playful Supervised Smart Space (P3S) project, as well as initial designs for the Smart Object and Smart Space Gateway Components.

The advent of contemporary mobile devices and their increasing computing power and location capabilities combined with the most innovative Web technologies has provided mobile users with new possibilities to share experiences on-the-go. The growing quantity of multimedia content present on the Web makes it difficult for mobile users to retrieve suitable content. Typically, users looking for interesting content related to their current position or POI (point of interest), access Web search engines relying on keywords to describe their ideas. Unfortunately such descriptions are often subjective and thus retrieval can be ineffective. To address these issues, our platform provides users with an application targeted for modern mobile devices that allows content acquisition and publication. Published content is automatically analyzed and stored on our server with semantic annotations based on the user's context and content, for further semantic search. We describe how and why we migrated from a triple-tags technology to semantics, hoping for related Linked Data.

The spectrum scarcity is a known problem for a multitude of services. Several bands have been licensed, and nowadays it is difficult to find unused spectrum. Cognitive radio networks have been proposed as a possible solution to contrast the experienced spectrum scarcity. One case of particular interest come from the scarce utilization of TV frequencies, which form the so-called TV White Spaces. In this paper we investigate the utilization of occupied frequencies by secondary devices for indoor communication. We conduct spectrum measurements to quantify the availability of spectrum, and study how indoor communications could impact the DTV receiver. We show that this portions of spectrum, called gray spaces, can be utilized under certain circumstances, for example in highly populated areas, which is the scenario in which it is harder to find TV White Spaces. Simulation studies show the impact gray spaces can have on the available spectrum for opportunistic use.

In the recent years, wireless communication experienced a huge growth, and nowadays many services are built on top of it. Much of the user demands comes from indoor environments, in which obstructions like walls and floors decrease the received signal to levels not suitable for reliable and high speed communication. Recently, national regulators worldwide started to investigate the usage of TV bands, thanks to the switch from analog to digital TV. These regulations gave birth to different wireless standards to make use of this new opportunistic spectrum. In this paper, we show how different 802.11 standard behave in indoor environment. Namely, we analyze IEEE 802.11n networks in the 2.4 GHz band, and IEEE 802.11af in the TV band, by means of theoretical analisys and simulations. Then, we design an algorithm that leverages the use of the different IEEE 802.11 amendments, by monitoring the achievable data rates with respect to the packet-error-rate, and provide simulation results on its performance on different modeled scenarios.

The advent of contemporary mobile devices and their increasing computing power and location capabilities combined with the most innovative Web technologies has provided mobile users with new possibilities to share experiences on-the-go. The growing quantity of multimedia content present on the Web makes it difficult for mobile users to retrieve suitable content. Typically, users looking for interesting content related to their current position or POI (point of interest), access Web search engines relying on keywords to describe their ideas. Unfortunately such descriptions are often subjective and thus retrieval can be ineffective. To address these issues, our platform provides users with an application targeted for modern mobile devices that allows content acquisition and publication. Published content is automatically analyzed and stored on our server with semantic annotations based on the user's context and content, for further semantic search. We describe how and why we migrated from a triple-tags technology to semantics, hoping for related Linked Data.

Application Platforms and related APIs are becoming the foundations for emerging eco-systems of online applications/services. End-users are more and more choosing devices and services based on the available offers in the respective eco-system. Attracting and retaining application developers and end-users to a networked platform is nowadays more and more depending on the features available to developers in the form of APIs and (e.g. cloud-based) execution environments rather than on the actual portfolio of services. The

Telecommunication and Internet services are constantly subject to changes, seeking the customer's full satisfaction. Enriching these services with innovative approaches such as context-aware, mobile, adaptable and interactive mechanisms, enables users to experience a variety of personalized services seamlessly across different platforms and technologies. In this sense, advertising is not exception, especially if we consider that it will become the enabler for future next generation services. This paper, therefore presents an architectural approach to address advertising solutions across different technologies and platforms, enriching the overall user quality of experience. Moreover, by over viewing the current advertising market scenario it provides the vision to overcome the established advertising paradigms focusing on key points like user privacy protection and social networks integration.