Research Projects

Lively Ageing national project [Lively ageing: una rete integrata di servizi e tecnologie per il benessere degli anziani]

Duration: 48 months

Start: December 2022

Funded by: Italian Health Ministry

Budget: 1,38 million euros

My role: Participant

The project is articulated in specific objectives: 1) define living spaces in co-housing that allow to preserve the autonomy and safety of the elderly; 2) prevent cognitive deterioration in the elderly; 3) improve the health conditions of the elderly, with particular regard to cardio-vascular risk factors; 4) set up a network of integrated social and health services trained in the conscious use of new technologies; 5) monitor, evaluate and communicate the results achieved by the operational plan.

My role will be the deployment of a digital twin for the elderly.

Ecosystem for Sustainable Transition of Emilia Romagna - ECOSISTER national project

Duration: 36 months

Start: October 2022

Funded by: National call for proposals dedicated to innovation ecosystems to be funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4, Component 2 Investment 1.4, funded from the European Union – NextGenerationEU

Budget: 112 million euros (contribution requested 110 million euros)

My role: Participant (mainly in SPOKE 4)

The project supports the ecological transition of the regional economic and social system through a process that transversally involves all sectors, technologies, and skills, combining digital transition and sustainability with work and well-being of people and protection of the environment according to the objectives of the Pact for Labor and Climate, and integrated with regional, national and European programs. The Spoke 4 - Smart mobility, housing and energy solutions for a carbon-neutral society- places at the center the relational and productive values of the territory of the Emilia-Romagna Region in which mobility, housing models and solutions aimed at climate neutrality are intended to develop a healthy and active city. Soft mobility is expressed in several forms according to research aiming at the complete accessibility to safe and inclusive infrastructures, the improvement of the collective passenger transport, the use of vehicles and systems that reduce pollution and noise. It supports the transition towards a smart and sustainable city with urban regeneration strategies.

My role, within Spoke 4, will be the deployment of a graph model of the urban multimodal transport network and application of graph data science and machine learning techniques to identify less connected areas and evaluate possible scenarios that optimize transfers, the delivery of safety urban maps based on safety conditions for cyclists with a gender perspective and development of a routing navigator tools; and the demonstration on two real case scenarios: the city of Modena and Ferrara.

Deep Learning for Urban Event Extraction from News and Social media streams

Duration: 12 months

Start: January 2022

Funded by: "Enzo Ferrari" Engineering Department (CUP E95F21001170001)

Budget: 12.000 euros

My role: Project Leader

This project aims to integrate data flows from heterogeneous sources such as newspapers and social networks. Through the use of artificial intelligence techniques we intend to extrapolate the meaning from the texts by tracing the document to an event and extracting information accompanying the events described with particular focus on 5W (who, what, when, why, where).

TRAFAIR - Understanding Traffic Flows to Improve Air quality

Duration: 30 months

Dates: November 2018 - April 2021

Funded by: INEA (EU)

Budget: 2 million euros

My role: Project Leader

The TRAFAIR project aims at achieving four main results:

1) Definition of a standard set of metadata (based and extending the ones adopted at European level and defined by FAIRMODE) able to represent urban air quality maps;

2) Provision of real time estimation on air pollution in the city on a urban scale (for providing such a service, we will use a set of low-cost air quality sensors, and combined them with measurements by the regulatory air quality stations in order to build an informative map of the different levels of pollution in the urban areas);

3) Development of a service for prediction of urban air quality based on weather forecast and traffic flows. This service make use of HPC technologies in order to compute the estimation of the diffusion of pollutants in the urban area. Since this model can be also applied on hypothetical traffic flow scenarios, in addition, it will be used as a means for simulating new hypothesis of circulation (such as changes in the urban fleet of vehicles, increase of low emission vehicles etc.) and studying the air quality impacts that will be generated;

4) Publication of an open dataset describing the urban air quality maps and the prediction maps in 6 European cities of different size on which the service will run for the duration of the project: Zaragoza (600000 inhabitants), Florence (382000), Modena (185000), Livorno (160000), Santiago de Compostela (95000), Pisa (9.000). These datasets (including metadata) will be published on catalogs harvested by the European Data Portal.

Networking about Linked Data

Duration: 12+12 months

Start: October 2019

Funded by: "Enzo Ferrari" Engineering Department

My role: Project Leader

This project aims to strengthen and increase international research links with linked data experiments in order to increase the opportunities to generate quality research products.

Re-search Alps - Research Labs in the Alpine Area

Duration: 24 months

Start: July 2017

Funded by: INEA CEF-TELECOM

My role: Task Leader of T1.1

My responsibility on this project is the leading of the collection and analysis of the available data describing the laboratories existing in the seven countries of the EU Strategy for the Alpine Region (EUSALP).

H-BOLD - Building high level visualizations on Big Open Linked Data

Duration: 24 months

Start: Jan 2018

Funded by: "Enzo Ferrari" Engineering Department

My role: Project Leader

This project aims to develop a generic tool for the exploration and multilevel analysis of Linked Open Data by addressing the challenge of managing large datasets. H-BOLD will allow an efficient multi-level exploration, offering different views at different levels of abstraction of LOD datasets that expose a SPARQL endpoint. At a glance, users will have an overview of big linked data (in the order of the millions of triple RDF) through their interaction and the dynamic adaptation of the graph representing the dataset, users might perform an incremental exploration of the dataset.

Open linked data Youth Observatory of the Emilia-Romagna Region

Duration: 1 year+ 2 years (extension)

Start: 2016

Funded by: Municipality of Modena, Italy

My role: Technical leader

The main partners of this project are the Municipality of Modena, the Emilia Romagna region and the DBGROUP of the Engineering Department "Enzo Ferrari". My role was to coordinate the discovery and the integration of relevant data sources for youth policy. I lead the first phase of searching for relevant open data sources (local, regional, national and international data sources). I coordinate the second phase that involved the use of ETL data integration systems to transform and merge the sources, and the last phase that leaded to the publication of the resulting value-added information as Linked Open Data on the Web.

KEYSTONE semantic KEYword-based Search on sTructured data sOurcEs

Duration: 2013-2017

Funded by: COST Action IC1302

My role: Participant

During the COST Action, I focused on two research topics: Linked Open Data and Topic Detection on News. I coordinated the definition of a formal method to unveil the implicit structure of a LOD dataset by building a Schema Summary that is a concise profile for the LOD source. The Schema Summary contains all the main classes and properties used within the datasets, whether they are taken from external vocabularies or not, and is conceivable as an RDFS ontology. I participated in the development of the tool LODeX that is able to make use of the Schema Summary for enabling the visualization, navigation and querying of LOD by un-skilled users. Actually, LODeX indexes more than 100 datasets. I also collaborated with Raquel Trillo Lado, from the University of Zaragoza, for detecting the main topics on multichannel publications from Italian newspapers. We study the use of multiple communication media to achieve a comprehensive overview of the information that reaches the end users. A graph analytical approach, called Keygraph, has been applied on a set of very heterogeneous documents such as the news published by 20 newspapers on several on-line channels.

Searching for a needle in mountains of data!

Duration: 2008-2010

Funded by: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena within the Bando di Ricerca Internazionale 2008

My role: Participant

NeP4B: Networked Peers For Business (FIRB 2005)

Duration: 2006-2008

Funded by: FIRB 2005 - MIUR - Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research

My role: Participant