A driving force behind the new applications is empowering individuals in order to promote awareness and overall quality of life. The Web is the core technology at the heart of this process. Like the press and other media, the Web has expanded the knowledge base that everyone can access, revolutionizing the way we live and becoming the most frequently used tool for learning, reporting, informing, working, and socializing. With the increasing pervasiveness of mobile devices, the Web has the potential to enable anyone to easily provide useful information, although important risks still exist, such as information control by a few big stakeholders.
The WAFI group (http://wafi.iit.cnr.it/) investigates various Web-related research challenges (big data, multiculturalism, usability, social sensing, digital divide, open linked data, etc.) putting the individual at the center of the design, with the aim of improving life quality. The group implements innovative solutions in applicative areas: from crime prevention (FP7 Caper: http://www.fp7-caper.eu/, [7]; DG JUSTICE Cassandra), detecting social alerts (Social Sensing: http://socialsensing.it/, [4]) and promotion of tourism-cultural heritage (Clavius on the Web: http://claviusontheweb.it/, [2]; GeoMemories: http://www.geomemories.org/, [1]; FP7 OpeNER: http://www.opener-project.eu/, [6]) to cognitive tele-rehabilitation and eLearning support for special needs users (MIUR Città Educante: http://www.cittaeducante.it/, PAR-FAS ABCD SW: http://abcd.iit.cnr.it/, [3], [5]).
[1] Abrate, M., Bacciu, C., Hast, A., Marchetti, A., Minutoli, S., Tesconi, M.: A Platform for Visualizing Historical, Environmental and Geospatial Changes in the Italian Landscape, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2013
[2] Abrate, M., Del Grosso, A. M., Giovannetti, E., Lo Duca, A., Luzzi, D., Mancini, L., Marchetti, A., Pedretti, I., Piccini, S.: Sharing Cultural Heritage: the Clavius on the Web Project, 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2014
[3] Artoni, S., Buzzi, M.C., Buzzi, M., Pelagatti, S., Senette, C.: Technology-enhanced discriminative programs for children with autism. PervasiveHealth 2014: 331-334
[4] Avvenuti, M., Cresci, S., Marchetti, A., Meletti, C., Tesconi, M.: EARS (Earthquake Alert and Report System): a real time decision support system for earthquake crisis management, ACM SIGKDD (KDD'14)
[5] Buzzi, M.C., Buzzi, M., Leporini, B., Trujillo, A.: Designing a text entry multimodal keypad for blind users of touchscreen mobile phones. ASSETS 2014: 131-136
[6] Cresci, S., D'Errico, A., Gazzè, D., Lo Duca, A., Marchetti, A., Tesconi, M.: Tour-pedia: a Web Application for Sentiment Visualization in Tourism Domain, LREC 2014 Workshop
[7] Gazzè, D., La Polla, M.N., Marchetti, A., Tesconi, M., Aliprandi, C., De Luca, A.E., Di Pietro, G., Raffaelli, M.: Crawling and Analysing Facebook for Intelligence Purposes, FOSINT 2014
Focus