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The increasing frequency and severity of forest fires necessitate early detection and rapid response to mitigate their impact. This project aims to design a cyber-physical system for early detection and rapid response to forest fires using advanced technologies. The system incorporates Internet of Things sensors and autonomous unmanned aerial and ground vehicles controlled by the robot operating system. An IoT-based wildfire detection node continuously monitors environmental conditions, enabling early fire detection. Upon fire detection, a UAV autonomously surveys the area to precisely locate the fire and can deploy an extinguishing payload or provide data for decision-making. The UAV communicates the fire’s precise location to a collaborative UGV, which autonomously reaches the designated area to support ground-based firefighters. The CPS includes a ground control station with web-based dashboards for real-time monitoring of system parameters and telemetry data from UAVs and UGVs. The article demonstrates the real-time fire detection capabilities of the proposed system using simulated forest fire scenarios. The objective is to provide a practical approach using open-source technologies for early detection and extinguishing of forest fires, with potential applications in various industries, surveillance, and precision agriculture.

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work considers Smart Personal Protective Equipment as “Intelligent Protection For The Future”. It mainly consists of electronic components that collect data about their use, the workers who wear them, and the working environment. This paper proposes a distributed solution of Smart Personal Protective Equipment for the safety monitoring of Lone Workers by adopting low-cost electronic devices. In addition to the same hazards as anyone else, Lone Workers need additional and specific systems due to the higher risk they run on a work site. To this end, the Edge-Computing paradigm can be adopted to deploy an architecture embedding wearable devices, which alerts safety managers when workers do not wear the prescribed Personal Protective Equipment and supports a fast rescue when a worker seeks help or an accidental fall is automatically detected. The proposed system is a work-in-progress which provides an architecture design to accommodate different requirements, namely the deployment difficulties at temporary and large working sites, the maintenance and connectivity recurring cost issues, the respect for the workers’ privacy, and the simplicity of use for workers and their supervisors.

During the last few years, increasing emphasis has been given to geo-education in middle and high school curricula, transforming the way certain subjects are now taught to provide students with comprehensive knowledge about dynamics and interconnections in the world, which also rely on relevant geographic information. This is the case for history, geography, the earth sciences, and other subjects. However, so far, little has been done to provide adequate learning tools that can support such an important transformation. This paper proposes the integration of advanced geospatial technology in traditional interactive learning tools as a way to describe experiences that help students understand phenomena and improve their competencies. The system is the result of a usability engineering process aimed at providing users with an effective learning experience, iteratively analysing their expectations and needs with respect to geo-referenced content. The resulting learning environment, Maps4Learning, allows users to manage content in terms of learning objects named geoLO+, which are extended with spatial and temporal components and built according to standardized metadata. The system was tested in the context of a middle school programme. A usability study was carried out to analyse the impact of geoLO+ resources in terms of perceived quality, engagement, and student learning performance, and the outcomes of the resources were compared to the outcomes of traditional teaching methods. The results were encouraging and showed that learning improvement can indeed be achieved using Maps4Learning.

In this paper, we show that the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and its increased presence within an interactive system pushes designers to rethink the way in which AI and its users interact and to highlight users’ feelings towards AI. For novice designers, it is crucial to acknowledge that both the user and artificial intelligence possess decision-making capabilities. Such a process may involve mediation between humans and artificial intelligence. This process should also consider the mutual learning that can occur between the two entities over time. Therefore, we explain how to adapt the Human-Centered Design (HCD) process to give centrality to AI as the user, further empowering the interactive system, and to adapt the interaction design to the actual capabilities, limitations, and potentialities of AI. This is to encourage designers to explore the interactions between AI and humans and focus on the potential user experience. We achieve such centrality by extracting and formalizing a new category of AI requirements. We have provocatively named this extension: “Intelligence-Centered”. A design workshop with MsC HCI students was carried out as a case study supporting this change of perspective in design.

Ambient Intelligence is a vision of daily life in which intelligent devices interact with humans to make their lives easier, and the technology is invisible. Artificial Intelligence (AI) governs this smart environment and must interact with humans to best meet their needs and demands. Although voice assistants are very popular and efficient as conversational AI, under some conditions they cannot be used. Therefore, this work proposed a complementary tactile and tangible interface to converse with AI, creating new Tactile Signs. A prototype of TactCube, a wireless cube-shaped device that can interact with AI using only the tactile sense, is presented. The hypothesis is that TactCube can be manipulated with one hand and generate a sequence of numbers that can be interpreted as a new tactile language by a neural network solution. The paper describes the initial research made to define how these sequences can be generated and demonstrates how TactCube is able to do it.

In this work, we explore the role of augmented reality as a meta-user interface, with particular reference to its applications for interactive fitting room systems and the impact on the related shopping experience. Starting from literature and existing systems, we synthesized a set of nine interaction design patterns to develop AR fitting rooms and to support the shopping experience. The patterns were evaluated through a focus group with possible stakeholders with the aim of evaluating and envisioning the effects on the shopping experience. The focus group analysis shows as a result that the shopping experience related to an AR fitting room based on the proposed patterns is influenced by three main factors, namely: the perception of the utility, the ability to generate interest and curiosity, and the perceived comfort of the interaction and environment in which the system is installed. As a further result, the study shows that the patterns can successfully support these factors, but some elements that emerged from the focus group should be more investigated and taken into consideration by the designers.

The use of Unmanned Aerial Systems, commonly called drones, is growing enormously today. Applications that can benefit from the use of fleets of drones and a related human–machine interface are emerging to ensure better performance and reliability. In particular, a fleet of drones can become a valuable tool for monitoring a wide area and transmitting relevant information to the ground control station. We present a human–machine interface for a Ground Control Station used to remotely operate a fleet of drones, in a collaborative setting, by a team of multiple operators. In such a collaborative setting, a major interface design challenge has been to maximize the Team Situation Awareness, shifting the focus from the individual operator to the entire group decision-makers. We were especially interested in testing the hypothesis that shared displays may improve the team situation awareness and hence the overall performance. The experimental study we present shows that there is no difference in performance between shared and non-shared displays. However, in trials when unexpected events occurred, teams using shared displays-maintained good performance whereas in teams using non-shared displays performance reduced. In particular, in case of unexpected situations, operators are able to safely bring more drones home, maintaining a higher level of team situational awareness.

In the last decade, there has been a growing awareness that the involvement of citizens in decision making can produce an immediate and positive impact on actions to be taken, as they are the real owners of knowledge about the place where they live. By collecting and geolocating data through smartphones and the Internet, citizens in fact can help decision makers both create sharable spatio-temporal information about objects and phenomena and interpret territorial dynamics. However, although such a role has been definitely recognized, the lack of a homogeneous paradigm for structuring the sensing process, managing the geo big data produced and handling services makes it difficult to exploit such a potentiality. In this paper, we describe a citizen-centric approach conceived to build territorial knowledge useful to provide decision makers with a timely and reliable picture of the status of a given territory. In particular, a visual representation of geospatial knowledge is described, which summaries context-sensitive information about a territory and its citizens, thus improving the land monitoring tasks. An information system, SAFE, is finally presented, which consists of a Web and a mobile component to manage citizen supplied data to be integrated for building reliable dynamic scenarios.

When trying to compose services that are developed according to different standards, interoperability issues arise that are often faced by developing ad-hoc solutions. A typical example is represented by the composition of W3C and OGC services, which were developed more or less concurrently by independent organizations. In such a context, developing a wrapper that abstracts as much as possible the inner details and logic of a wrapped service well embraces the low-coupled nature of the general Service Oriented Computing paradigm. This paper focuses on the proper management of geospatial metadata into a W3C-based environment and is based on the development of a wrapper that exposes OGC functionality in a W3C-compliant way, thus overcoming the technical differences between the two types of services. To efficiently accomplish this task, a flexible, wrapper-based, and standard-compliant mechanism for metadata retrieval is proposed that avoids the use of third-party entities. The proposal exploits the scalable and adaptable nature of the WS-Metadata (Web Services Metadata) specification.

Negli ultimi anni il connubio mobile entertainment e social network ha attirato un notevole interesse da parte dispecifici settori che, nonostante le criticità del momento, hanno deciso di investire nella realizzazione di ambienti esoluzioni di intrattenimento/divertimento, un fattore chiave alla base del miglioramento della tecnologia. Link2U: augmenting social networks on mobile devices Nowadays, modern mobile devices have become real person-al computers that increase the ability of building/extending existing applications by combining several technologies such as camera, GPS, 3D graphics and permanent Internet connec-tion. The resulting integration of such technologies allows to run complex applications, such as augmented reality and Social Networks. The goal of our current research is to support mobile users’ daily activities, by developing advanced solutions which take into account principles of human-computer interac-tion and usability. In this paper we propose to exploit the potential of the aug-mented reality and the ability to communicate of social net-works to create a mobile social network, where each commu-nity user may exploit advanced location based services, such as navigation through a two dimensional map, exploration of an area through a camera mode, and identification of points of interest embedded in an augmented reality environment.