Fernando Ferri

Patrizia Grifoni, Fernando Ferri, Maria Chiara Caschera et al.

The Web is becoming more and more a wide software framework on which each one can compose and use contents, software applications and services. It can offer adequate computational resources to manage the complexity implied by the use of the five senses when involved in human machine interaction. The core of the paper describes how SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) can support multimodal interaction by pushing the I/O processing and reasoning to the cloud, improving naturalness. The benefits of cloud computing for multimodal interaction have been identified by emphasizing the flexibility and scalability of a SOA, and its characteristics to provide a more holistic view of interaction according to the variety of situations and users.

Maria Chiara Caschera, Fernando Ferri, Patrizia Grifoni

This paper deals with classifying ambiguities for Multimodal Languages. It evolves the classifications and the methods of the literature on ambiguities for Natural Language and Visual Language, empirically defining an original classification of ambiguities for multimodal interaction using a linguistic perspective. This classification distinguishes between Semantic and Syntactic multimodal ambiguities and their subclasses, which are intercepted using a rule-based method implemented in a software module. The experimental results have achieved an accuracy of the obtained classification compared to the expected one, which are defined by the human judgment, of 94.6% for the semantic ambiguities classes, and 92.1% for the syntactic ambiguities classes.

Fernando Ferri, Arianna D'Ulizia, Patrizia Grifoni

Designing and building automated systems with which people can interact naturally is one of the emerging objective of Mechatronics. In this perspective multimodality and adaptivity represent focal issues, enabling users to communicate more freely and naturally with automated systems. One of the basic problem of multimodal interaction is the fusion process. Current approaches to fusion are mainly two: the former implements the multimodal fusion at dialogue management level, whereas the latter at grammar level. In this paper, we propose a multimodal attribute grammar, that provides constructions both for representing input symbols from different modalities and for modeling semantic and temporal features of multimodal input symbols, enabling the specification of multimodal languages. Moreover, an application of the proposed approach in the context of a multimodal language specification to control a driver assistance system, as robots using different integrated interaction modalities, is given.

Atta Badii, Franco Bagnoli, Balint Balazs et al.

In this paper we show the results of our studies carried out in the framework of the European Project SciCafe2.0 in the area of Participatory Engagement models. We present a methodological approach built on participative engagements models and holistic framework for problem situation clarification and solution impacts assessment. Several online platforms for social engagement have been analysed to extract the main patterns of participative engagement. We present our own experiments through the SciCafe2.0 Platform and our insights from requirements elicitation.