IIT-CNR Consolidator Grant-funded project

The goal of CHANCES is to provide a comprehensive, multidisciplinary framework to analyze and correlate different types of datasets to perform scenario-based projections of the imminent ubiquitous transition to EVs.

EU Horizon 2020 program-funded project

E-CORRIDOR aims at providing a flexible, secure and privacy-aware framework allowing confidential, distributed and edge-enabled security services, as threat analysis and prevention as well as privacy-aware seamless access, in multimodal transport systems
The E-CORRIDOR project consortium comprises of 15 European partners across 5 EU countries.
PI: Fabio Martinelli, IIT - CNR, Pisa.

E-Corridor Home Page.

Italian Environment Minister-funded project

Study and analysis of policies, incentives and new technologies for a sustainable mobility in Pisa greater area, in the contest of home-school, home-work commuting.
In collaboration with: San Giuliano Terme Municipality, Tuscany, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, UISP, and SME (Tages, TOI srl, Kiunsys srl).
Head: Pisa municipality.

MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI)-funded project

The goal of this project is to evaluate to which extent information location privacy could affect the performance of mobility sharing applications, in terms of both transportation efficiency, namely energy and Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), and Quality of Service (QoS), namely users' waiting and riding time, and to find out if a potential trade-off exists between data privacy and data utility.
The outcome of the project might be especially useful for city authorities and policy makers to find a good compromise between the citizens' individual right to privacy, and the societal need of reducing VMT, congestion and pollution.
PI: Prof. Jinhua Zhao.

MIT JTL Urban Mobility Lab Project

Currently, passenger-matching algorithms are based upon the criterion of efficiency, namely maximizing occupancy and minimizing travel distance, while neglecting the sociological aspects of mobility sharing. In this IDSS research, we study mobility sharing from the perspective of human interactions, define and measure individuals' preferences for fellow passengers, and develop matching algorithms that respect both the transportation network optimization and the individuals' preferences (or lack of) for human interactions, in order to realize the societal benefits of interactions complementing the environmental and economic benefits of reduced congestion. .
Head: Prof. Jinhua Zhao
Project Home Page.

Web Application and Installation

IIT-CNR and the MIT Senseable City Lab reveal how carpooling can effectively abate C02 emissions in Pisa.
Stirred by advances in information and communication technologies as well as autonomous driving, sharing the work commute could help substantially reduce our carbon footprint and aid progress towards a more sustainable future. In particular, MIT Senseable City Lab and the Italian National Research Council (CNR) partnered with the City of Pisa to gain a better understanding of how Pisans move around and their attitude towards shared mobility. The data collected through the MobilitandoPisa initiative was used to build the three different traffic scenarios considered in PisaPool. The first depicts the current situation with no carpooling in place. The second scenario considers the 50% of Pisans interested in carpooling — indicating an impressive positive response. The third and more optimistic, carpooling scenario was built assuming that public policy initiatives that incentivize carpooling were implemented and that all possible car sharing opportunities were exploited.
PisaPOOL was presented at the Internet Festival, in October 2016.
Head: Paolo Santi, IIT - CNR, Pisa & MIT Senseable City Lab, Cambridge, US.
PisaPOOL Home Page.

Survey Realization and Data Analyses

A joint initiative between IIT-CNR and Pisa Municipality to understand how to improve mobility in Pisa, through new mobility paradigms and incentives.
The first step has been to issue a survey to understand how citizens move around Pisa, their attitude towards shared mobility, and asking them to contribute with their ideas and needs.
Pisa Municipality also established a Joint Table for Mobility Strategic Programming and a Technical-Scientific Coordination Groupn to identify new mobility strategies for Pisa and surroundings.
In collaboration with: Pisa Municipality, CNR, Pisa Prefecture, Pisa University, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Azienda Ospedaliero Universitaria Pisana, Azienda Sanitaria Locale, Azienda Regionale per il Diritto allo Studio Universitario, Camera di Commercio Industria Agricoltura Artigianato, Ufficio Scolastico Provinciale, Agenzia delle Entrate, INPS.
MobilitandoPisa Launch Page.

Carpooling Web Service

MobiPool is a carpooling service offered to the employees of the CNR Research Area and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, in Pisa.
The project is in collaboration with Enel Foundation, MIT Senseable City Lab - Cambridge, US, and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna - Pisa, Italy.
MobiPool is a research project with a two-fold objective: on one hand, to offer a shared mobility service that can contribute to reduce the carbon footprint of home/work community; on the other hand, to collect data that can be used to scientifically analyze the social, economical, and psychological aspects related to shared mobility.
Head: Paolo Santi, IIT - CNR, Pisa & MIT Senseable City Lab, Cambridge, US.

Interactive Installation

DriveWave is a joint collaboration between IIT-CNR and MIT Senseable City Lab. The installation demonstrates the benefits of intelligent intersections vs the use of classic and obsolete trafficlights.
The installations has been presented at the Internet Festival, in October 2014.
Head: Paolo Santi, IIT - CNR, Pisa & MIT Senseable City Lab, Cambridge, US.
DriveWave Home Page.

EU-funded project - Call identifier: CIP-ICT-PSP-2013-7

MobiWallet addresses Interoperable Fare Management solutions through four key impact areas: encouraging modal shift and facilitating ease of use of multiple transport options with a focus on handicapped or disabled users, improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption, enhanced and sustainable mobility for all users and improving cross border transportation capabilities.
Coupled with a Smartphone-based electronic payment service and enhanced travel functionalities such as personalized trip planning service, the four pilots deployed across Europe, in Santander (Spain), Tuscany (Italy), West Midlands (UK) and Novi Sad (Serbia), will demonstrate the benefits of a unified platform that can seamlessly process the payment schemes of a varied range of transport operators.
INDRA, the multinational consultancy and technology corporation, is leading the consortium of 15 companies and government bodies which, organized into the four national groups of Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and Serbia, will carry out the four pilots to test the developed solutions and validate the benefits that these technologies could have.
The expertise needed to carry out successfully each pilot is covered by all partners, each playing a significant role in the transport domain, ticketing solutions and embedded systems sectors both from the production and from the user side.
Project's coordinator: INDRA.
MobiWallet Home Page.

Italian National Interest Research Project (PRIN 2010/11).

The ArsTechnomedia project's objective is to analyze problems and design algorithms for techno-mediated social networks, such as online social networks, mobile social networks, etc. More specifically, the CNR Pisa unit will work on the analysis of opportunistic social networks, where messages are exchanged by means of short-range wireless links (e.g., WiFi and Bluetooth). We will investigate issues such as the speed of information diffusion in such networks, as well as solutions to provide innovative social networking solutions without compromising user privacy and security.
Head: Alessandro Panconesi, Università La Sapienza, Roma.

Within this project we aim to realize a platform for enabling Peer-to-Peer resource and information sharing in Wireless Mesh Community Networks. In particular, we propose a two-tier architecture, in which mobile mesh clients provide and use the shared resources, and mostly fixed mesh backbone nodes are used to assist mesh clients in locating the requested resources. The proposed platform exploits a peculiar feature of Wireless Mesh Community Networks - i.e., the availability of a wireless communication backbone - to improve network-layer efficiency and scalability of the design.
The goal of this project is to design, validate through extensive simulation, and implement on a small-scale testbed the proposed platform.
Head: Paolo Santi, IIT, CNR.

The main goal of this project is the design, analysis, software development, and the experimentation of new methods for searching, organizing and presenting unstructured information from the World Wide Web.
Head: Marco Pellegrini, IIT, CNR.
WebAlgo Group Home Page.

The VehiCong project's objective is the study of congestion in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANets). In particular, the project aims to develop:

• techniques to control congestion in a vehicular communication environment specific to the IEEE 802.11p communication protocol; and
• a vehicular network with the use of IEEE 802.11p equipped radio.

The developed techniques will be investigated and evaluated not only through simulations but also with measurements on a real VANet.

The VehiCong project has been jointly funded by Regione Toscana and Istituto di Informatica e Telematica within the POR CRO FSE 2007-2013 program. The project is in cooperation with INTECS SpA.
Head: Paolo Santi, IIT, CNR.

The main goal of this project was the design, development, analysis and experimentation of efficient and scalable algorithms for high throughput analysis of biological and genomic data, in order to help getting useful indication in a -highly competitive- timely manner.
Another goal is the development of tools that allow the visualization and the analysis of raw and processed biological data.

Tools developed:

AMIC@ - All MICroarray Clusterings @ once, an on-line tool for clustering and visualizing microarray gene expression data, with a wide range of algorithms;

TReaDS - Tandem Repeats Discovery Service, an on line tandem repeats meta search engine, which simultaneously queries multiple on line publicly available tools for finding exact, approximate, short and long tandem repeats, merging the results obtained and giving back a report, also including a global view of the results.

BioAlgo Group Home Page.

Italian National Interest Research Project (PRIN 2008), approved on January, the 20th 2010, prot. n. 3 /Ric./2010.

Emerging communication networks are characterized by decentralization, autonomy, and general lack of coordination, wireless access, heterogeneity.
The combination of uncoordination and wireless access requires:

1. modeling and analyzing the consequences of the autonomous users behaviour on the network performance;
2. accounting for specific features imposed by the dynamic nature of these networks (e.g., users mobility, wireless medium, unreliable connectivity, etc.);
3. investigating the influence of the different degrees of users social knowledge on users behaviour when analyzing items 1) and 2) above, and, consequently, on the system performance and on the induced mobility patterns and network topology.

The COGENT project's objectives are:

• to provide a rigorous algorithmic study on the effect of autonomic non-cooperative user behaviour on the performance of large-scale uncoordinated networks, and to study strategies/solutions to discourage non-cooperativeness;
• to explore the impact of node mobility/dynamicity on such uncoordinated networks, by adopting a foundational algorithmic approach in order to provide analytical solutions that exploit node mobility to optimize network performances;
• to consider in the proposed solutions the effects of social relationships.

Head: Michele Flammini, Computer Science Department, Università de L'Aquila.

The VPH NoE is a project which aims to help support and progress European research in biomedical modelling and simulation of the human body. This will improve our ability to predict, diagnose and treat disease, and have a dramatic impact on the future of healthcare, the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.
Head: Peter Coveney, University College London, and Peter Kohl, University of Oxford.
VPH NoE Home Page.

Within the domain of "Intelligent Transport Systems" IPERMOB proposes a multi-tier approach for developing an Information System for urban mobility.
IPERMOB proposes a new generation of integrated systems based on the optimization and inter-operability of the chain formed by:

1. data collection systems;
2. aggregation, management, and on-line control systems;
3. off-line systems aiming at infrastructure planning;
4. information systems targeted to citizen and municipality to handle and rule the vehicle mobility.

Specifically IPERMOB proposes low-cost wireless technology (WSN) and image processing techniques to estimate traffic-related information.
In IPERMOB vehicular networks (IEEE 802.11a/p) will be interoperated with WSN (IEEE 802.15.4) and connected to a centralized database through wide band 5 GHz link (IEEE 802.11h).
As tested, IPERMOB will provide real-time information about parking availability and vehicle flows on the landside of the International Airport of Tuscany (Pisa).
Head: Paolo Pagano, ReTiS, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento.
IPERMOB Project Home Page.

Ph.D. Thesis Project.
The main goal of this project was the evaluation of personalization in searching the Web. In particular, we modeled and designed P I S A, a Personalized Information Search Assistant which provides the user with a highly personalized information space where she can create, manage and organize folders, and manage documents retrieved by the system into her folders to best fit her needs. Furthermore, P I S A offers different mechanisms to search the Web, and the possibility of personalizing the result delivery and visualization.
Dept. of Information Engineering, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento.
Advisor: Umberto Straccia, ISTI, CNR.

The main goal of this project is to address the issue of automated distributed search in the context of the Semantic Web, where we assume that an agent may have access to a large number of heterogeneous, distributed and possibly ontology-based information sources.
Head: Umberto Straccia, ISTI, CNR.

This project extends peer-to-peer communication networks to better support formation of virtual communities in wide area computer networks. Virtual communities bring together individuals with similar interests, but the difficulty of forming them and sustaining critical mass discourages communities that serve small populations or compete with existing communities. Large-scale peer-to-peer networks offer the possibility of self-organizing communities, in which nodes recognize and create relatively stable connections to other nodes with similar interests.
The solution includes nodes that learn about their network neighborhoods, nodes that offer partial (and competing) directory services, new methods of routing messages efficiently in peer-to-peer networks, more accurate methods of making resource selection decisions in environments containing many resources, and a utility-theoretic model for decision-making by individual nodes that incorporate multiple task requirements (e.g., cost, accuracy, and reliability).The scientific results will be more robust and efficient peer-to-peer networks, new techniques for forming virtual communities, and a better understanding of how complex peer-to-peer networks work.
Head: Jamie Callan, LTI, CMU.
Peer to Peer Project Home Page.

The main objective of CYCLADES was to develop advanced Internet accessible services to support scholars both individually and as members of networked communities when interacting with large interdisciplinary electronic archives. CYCLADES aimed at supporting the transition of archive systems into genuine building blocks of a transformed scholarly communication model by developing a set of leading-edge technologies providing innovative methods for information access, dissemination, sharing and collaborative work. The proposed open archives environment consists of two components: the archives and the services. The former have been developed by the Open Archives initiative (OAi). CYCLADES has bases the development of the service environment on these specifications. In particular, a core set of cross-archive value-added services have been developed to constitute a federation of independent but interoperable services. The Service Environment provide OAI compliant functionality.
Head: Umberto Straccia, ISTI, CNR.
Cycaldes Project Home Page.

Scholnet aimed at developing a digital library test-bed to support networked scholarly communities. In addition to traditional digital library services, the digital library provides support for non-textual data types, hypermedia annotation, cross-language search and retrieval, and personalized information gathering. This test-bed has been used to demonstrate how an enhanced digital library can enable members of a networked scholarly community to learn from, contribute to, and collectively build upon the community's discipline-oriented digital collections. Scholnet has been built as an extension of the ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library (ETRDL).
Head: Costantino Thanos, ISTI, CNR.

Master Thesis Project.
"Design and Development of a Meta-Search Engine", Laurea Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy, Dec. 2000.
Advisor: Umberto Straccia, ISTI, CNR.

:: Researcher at the research department Algorithms and Computational Mathematics, at the Institute for Informatics and Telematics (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - IIT), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.
Head: Paola Favati, IIT, CNR, Pisa.

:: Visiting Research Scientist at the JTL Urban Mobility Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.

:: Visiting Researcher at the Senseable City Lab, MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.
Head: Carlo Ratti, MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.

:: Visiting Scholar at the BarabásiLab - Center for Complex Networks Research, Northeastern University - Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Head: Albert Lásló Barabási, Northeastern University, Boston, MA - USA.

:: Research associate of the WebAlgo Group, at the Institute for Informatics and Telematics (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - IIT), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.
Coordinator: Marco Pallegrini, IIT, CNR, Pisa.

:: Research associate of the BioAlgo Group, at the Institute for Informatics and Telematics (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - IIT), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.
Coordinators: Mauro Leoncini, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy, and Marco Pallegrini, IIT, CNR, Pisa.

:: Research associate at the Networked Multimedia Information Systems Laboratory (NeMIS), at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione "A. Faedo" - ISTI), National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - CNR) - Pisa, Italy.
Supervisor: Umberto Straccia.

:: Part of the Distributed Information Retrieval Group at the Language Technologies Institute (LTI), School of Computer Science (SCS) Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) - Pittsburgh, USA.
Position: Visiting PhD Student.
Supervisor: Jamie Callan.

:: Fabio Duarte
Senseable City Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA
&& Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Parana, Curitiba, Brazil.

:: Federico Librino
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Francesca Martelli
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Carlo Ratti
Senseable City Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.

:: Giovanni Resta
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Paolo Santi
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy
&& Senseable City Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.

:: Tianyu Su
Harvard University - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.

:: Dajiang Suo
MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.

:: Hongmou Zhang
JTL Urban Mobility Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.

:: Jinuha Zhao
JTL Urban Mobility Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts - USA.

:: Alessandro Franchini
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Pisa - Pisa, Italy.

:: Federico Librino
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Francesca Martelli
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Giovanni Resta
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Paolo Santi
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Marco Volpetti
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Pisa - Pisa, Italy.

:: Simone Burresi
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Pisa - Pisa, Italy.

:: Claudia Canali
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Laura Galluccio
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica e delle Telecomunicazioni, Università degli Studi di Catania - Catania, Italy.

:: Giacomo Morabito
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica e delle Telecomunicazioni, Università degli Studi di Catania - Catania, Italy.

:: Sergio Palazzo
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica e delle Telecomunicazioni, Università degli Studi di Catania - Catania, Italy.

:: Marco Pellegrini
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Paolo Santi
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Jamie Callan
Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, USA.

:: Filippo Geraci
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Mauro Leoncini
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Modena, Italy.

:: Manuela Montangero
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Modena, Italy.

:: Marco Pellegrini
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Marco Pellegrini
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.

:: Alessio Vecchio
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università degli Studi di Pisa - Pisa, Italy.

:: Jamie Callan
Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, USA.

:: Umberto Straccia
Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Pisa, Italy.