0000000000015237

AUTHOR

Pietro Cottone

Gaining insight by structural knowledge extraction

The availability of increasingly larger and more complex datasets has boosted the demand for systems able to analyze them automatically. The design and implementation of effective systems requires coding knowledge about the application domain inside the system itself; however, the designer is expected to intuitively grasp the most relevant features of the raw data as a. preliminary step. In this paper we propose a framework to get useful insight about a set of complex data, and we claim that a shift in perspective may be of help to tackle with the unaddressed goal of representing knowledge by means of the structure inferred from the collected samples. We will present a formulation of knowle…

research product

Structural Knowledge Extraction from Mobility Data

Knowledge extraction has traditionally represented one of the most interesting challenges in AI; in recent years, however, the availability of large collections of data has increased the awareness that “measuring” does not seamlessly translate into “understanding”, and that more data does not entail more knowledge. We propose here a formulation of knowledge extraction in terms of Grammatical Inference (GI), an inductive process able to select the best grammar consistent with the samples. The aim is to let models emerge from data themselves, while inference is turned into a search problem in the space of consistent grammars, induced by samples, given proper generalization operators. We will …

research product

User Activity Recognition for Energy Saving in Smart Homes

Abstract Energy demand in typical home environments accounts for a significant fraction of the overall consumption in industrialized countries. In such context, the heterogeneity of the involved devices, and the non negligible influence of the human factor make the optimization of energy use a challenging task; effective automated approaches must take into account basic information about users, such as the prediction of their course of actions. Our proposal consists in learning customized structural models for common user activities for predicting the trend of energy consumption; the approach aims to lower energy demand in the proximity of predicted peak loads so as to keep the overall cons…

research product

Your friends mention It. What about visiting it? A mobile social-based sightseeing application

In this short poster paper, we present an application for suggesting attractions to be visited by users, based on social signal processing techniques.

research product

User Activity Recognition via Kinect in an Ambient Intelligence Scenario

The availability of an ever-increasing kind of cheap, unobtrusive, sensing devices has stressed the need for new approaches to merge raw measurements in order to realize what is happening in the monitored environment. Ambient Intelligence (AmI) techniques exploit information about the environment state to adapt the environment itself to the users’ preferences. Even if traditional sensors allow a rough understanding of the users’ preferences, ad-hoc sensors are required to obtain a deeper comprehension of users’ habits and activities. In this paper we propose a framework to recognize users’ activities via a depth and RGB camera device, namely the Microsoft Kinect. The proposed approach takes…

research product

Motion sensors for activity recognition in an ambient-intelligence scenario

In recent years, Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has attracted a number of researchers due to the widespread diffusion of unobtrusive sensing devices. The availability of such a great amount of acquired data has driven the interest of the scientific community in producing novel methods for combining raw measurements in order to understand what is happening in the monitored scenario. Moreover, due the primary role of the end user, an additional requirement of any AmI system is to maintain a high level of pervasiveness. In this paper we propose a method for recognizing human activities by means of a time of flight (ToF) depth and RGB camera device, namely Microsoft Kinect. The proposed approach is…

research product

A machine learning approach for user localization exploiting connectivity data

The growing popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs) has boosted research on cheaper and more pervasive localization systems, typically relying on such monitoring equipment as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which allow to re-use the same instrumentation both for monitoring and for localization without requiring lengthy off-line training. This work addresses the localization problem, exploiting knowledge acquired in sample environments, and extensible to areas not considered in advance. Localization is turned into a learning problem, solved by a statistical algorithm. Additionally, parameter tuning is fully automated thanks to its formulation as an optimization problem based only on co…

research product

Gl-learning

In this paper, we present a new open-source software library, Gl-learning, for grammatical inference. The rise of new application scenarios in recent years has required optimized methods to address knowledge extraction from huge amounts of data and to model highly complex systems. Our library implements the main state-of-the-art algorithms in the grammatical inference field (RPNI, EDSM, L*), redesigned through the OpenMP library for a parallel execution that drastically decreases execution times. To our best knowledge, it is also the first comprehensive library including a noise tolerance learning algorithm, such as Blue*, that significantly broadens the range of the potential application s…

research product

A Structural Approach to Infer Recurrent Relations in Data

Extracting knowledge from a great amount of collected data has been a key problem in Artificial Intelligence during the last decades. In this context, the word "knowledge" refers to the non trivial new relations not easily deducible from the observation of the data. Several approaches have been used to accomplish this task, ranging from statistical to structural methods, often heavily dependent on the particular problem of interest. In this work we propose a system for knowledge extraction that exploits the power of an ontology approach. Ontology is used to describe, organise and discover new knowledge. To show the effectiveness of our system in extracting and generalising the knowledge emb…

research product