Most expert projections indicate that in 2030, there will be over one billion people aged 60 or over. The vast majority of them prefer to spend their last years at home, and almost a third of them live alone. This creates a growing need for technology-based solutions capable of helping older people to live independently in their places. Despite the wealth of solutions proposed for this general problem, there are very few support systems that can be reproduced on a larger scale. In this study, we propose a method to monitor the activity of the elderly living alone and detect deviations from the previous activity patterns based on the idea that the residential living environment can be modeled as a collection of behaviorally significant places located arbitrarily in a generic space. Then we use virtual pheromones—a concept defined in our previous work—to create images of the pheromone distribution maps, which describe the spatiotemporal evolution of the interactions between the user and the environment. We propose a method to detect deviations from the activity routines based on a simple statistical analysis of the resulting images. By applying this method on two public activity recognition datasets, we found that the system is capable of detecting both singular deviations and slow-deviating trends from the previous activity routine of the monitored persons.

It is difficult to measure something we cannot clearly define. No wonder that, for the over 100 definitions of the creativity proposed in the literature, there are almost as many scales and assessment tools. Most of these instruments have been designed for research purposes, and are difficult to apply and score, especially in the educational environment. Not to mention that they are expensive. The research described in this paper is aimed to develop a free, fast, and easy to use software tool for the assessment of creativity in the educational context. To this purpose, we have designed a new scale with 20 items, based on a novel approach focusing on detecting the factors known to block the creativity, like stereotypical thinking, and social conformity. The user input is collected through a web based interface, and the actual interpretation of the results is automated by means of a fuzzy logic algorithm. The proposed solution is interesting because it can be easily integrated in almost any e-learning platform, or used as a stand-alone tool for tracing the evolution of the students involved in courses for the development of creative thinking skills, and also for possible other applications.

Nowadays globalized society and knowledge-based economy need people with creative thinking in all areas (engineering, medicine, art, entrepreneurship, and education). Thus, current studies are turning their attention to find new ways to stimulate creativity over individual or groups. In the present research, we hypothesized that the creativity can be enhanced if it is used social interaction abilities for knowledge sharing and collaboration. We present a collaborative application that provides users with an environment where they can share ideas and they can collaborate to choose those ideas that are most suitable for the intended use. This application provides to users a shared, web-based platform to enhance creativity. In this platform, users are gathered in a Social Group in which they can share ideas, comments, documents and links around. This application is part of a physical environment which provides users a number of tools to stimulate their creativity. If problems arise in the creative process, then the application provides facilities for a coordinator who can use different methods to unlock brainstorming progression.

No abstract

Abstract:Discovered in the context of a research about insects, stigmergy -the indirect coordination mechanism that allows ant colonies to achieve intelligent behavior -has been extensively studied with the aim to create artificial, ant-like agents. Although stigmergic behavior has been also identified in human collectivities, there are relatively few reports about technological solutions that facilitate the emergence of such interactions between people. This paper proposes the concept of virtual pheromones, defined as engrams created by the agents not in the environment, but in a representation thereof -a map, and outlines several use cases, wherein pheromones embedded in maps are the key element for inducing stigmergic behavior in human multi-agent systems. Without proposing a theoretic generalization, this paper aims to emphasize the broad range of possible technological applications of human stigmergy, and, maybe, to mark a new starting point for a more in-depth study of this topic.

This paper describes a simple solution to create self-organization of the educational content in learning networks by enabling stigmergic interactions between learners. For this purpose, the learning objects have been associated with a special type of metadata, based on the concept of "virtual pheromones". By accessing the learning objects, users create trails of virtual pheromones, which are interpreted as an implicit recommendation for other learners to use those objects. The resulting system operates as a simple recommender system based on collaborative filtering in ad-hoc learning networks. We also suggest the possibility to implement such system in a P2P file sharing environment, as a solution to improve the sustainability of open education systems.

No abstract

Although very few robots actually go to Mars, we continue to design these machines as if they were organisms operating in a totally unknown and hostile environment. In fact, in most situations, the environment is not only predictable, but it can also be manipulated so that the missions of the autonomous robot may be supported, by including sensors, actuators, computing and communication equipment. One of the most convenient ways to manipulate the environment is to deploy a number of RFID devices, capable of storing a variety of digital data, aimed to provide autonomous robots with valuable navigation information. As a result, the on-board equipment can be significantly reduced, along with the power requirements, and the overall cost of the robots. While the vast majority of the applications of the RFID technology for robot control are related to robot localization and mapping, this paper presents an experiment aimed to demonstrate the possibility of using RFID tags for path following.