Artificial Intelligence Methods for Smart Cities

In recent years, the concept of smart cities has garnered increasing attention as urban areas grapple with the challenges of population growth, resource management, and infrastructure optimization [...].

A Blockchain-Based Distributed Paradigm to Secure Localization Services

In recent decades, modern societies are experiencing an increasing adoption of interconnected smart devices. This revolution involves not only canonical devices such as smartphones and tablets, but also simple objects like light bulbs. Named the Internet of Things (IoT), this ever-growing scenario offers enormous opportunities in many areas of modern society, especially if joined by other emerging technologies such as, for example, the blockchain. Indeed, the latter allows users to certify transactions publicly, without relying on central authorities or intermediaries. This work aims to exploit the scenario above by proposing a novel blockchain-based distributed paradigm to secure localization services, here named the Internet of Entities (IoE). It represents a mechanism for the reliable localization of people and things, and it exploits the increasing number of existing wireless devices and blockchain-based distributed ledger technologies. Moreover, unlike most of the canonical localization approaches, it is strongly oriented towards the protection of the users’ privacy. Finally, its implementation requires minimal efforts since it employs the existing infrastructures and devices, thus giving life to a new and wide data environment, exploitable in many domains, such as e-health, smart cities, and smart mobility.

Event detection in finance using hierarchical clustering algorithms on news and tweets

In the current age of overwhelming information and massive production of textual data on the Web, Event Detection has become an increasingly important task in various application domains. Several research branches have been developed to tackle the problem from different perspectives, including Natural Language Processing and Big Data analysis, with the goal of providing valuable resources to support decision-making in a wide variety of fields. In this paper, we propose a real-time domain-specific clustering-based event-detection approach that integrates textual information coming, on one hand, from traditional newswires and, on the other hand, from microblogging platforms. The goal of the implemented pipeline is twofold: (i) providing insights to the user about the relevant events that are reported in the press on a daily basis; (ii) alerting the user about potentially important and impactful events, referred to as hot events, for some specific tasks or domains of interest. The algorithm identifies clusters of related news stories published by globally renowned press sources, which guarantee authoritative, noise-free information about current affairs; subsequently, the content extracted from microblogs is associated to the clusters in order to gain an assessment of the relevance of the event in the public opinion. To identify the events of a day d we create the lexicon by looking at news articles and stock data of previous days up to d-1 Although the approach can be extended to a variety of domains (e.g. politics, economy, sports), we hereby present a specific implementation in the financial sector. We validated our solution through a qualitative and quantitative evaluation, performed on the Dow Jones' Data, News and Analytics dataset, on a stream of messages extracted from the microblogging platform Stocktwits, and on the Standard & Poor's 500 index time-series. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in extracting meaningful information from real-world events and in spotting hot events in the financial sphere. An added value of the evaluation is given by the visual inspection of a selected number of significant real-world events, starting from the Brexit Referendum and reaching until the recent outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.