Our research activity consists in investigating innovative techniques for enriching the user experience by means of the use of technology in different environments (home, work, social, mobility). Our research includes the creation of prototypes for experimenting and evaluating innovative interactive applications empowered by network communications.
Research Focus
The research activity is positioned in the context of the Future Internet by developing context sensitive and responsive environments enabled by different networked infrastructures. The scope of the research is that of identifying best ways for humans to interact with networked media, computers, environments and other individuals, based on their changing contexts, locations and roles across their daily life activities. In this sense, the research is carried out from two different perspectives:
- From the Net to the Users
by personalizing interactivity: In the future, the internet will be more strongly integrated between the virtual and the physical environments. Given the enormous amount of information sources and content that will be available (order of trillions), the challenge will be to develop mechanisms for selecting and providing only what is relevant in a certain context and in the right format and time. The research activity on this field will explore information generated from both worlds: 1) the pervasive physical devices and sensors and 2) from virtual sources in the net (multimedia) for personalizing information according to users needs, availability of resources and other contextual criteria, A special focus will be given to potential applications in the field of entertainment and healthcare domains. - From the Users to the Net
by enabling creativity – Users are becoming and will become every time more creators of content rather than only consumers of it. However content creation in the future will move beyond the production of media in the way it is today (text, audio and video) to other much richer forms of content augmented with more interactive affordances and temporal and spatial attributes. Examples of this will be the creation of media associated to physical “things” in pervasive environments and its usage between networked communities and distributed users. In this context, MISE future research will include the development of mechanisms to integrate physical and virtual worlds through the Internet in order to allow experiencing remote presence, collaboration and co-creation through more tangible interactions with media through different platforms such as the net, iDTV, etc..
The research activity in this topic includes the identification and analysis of data from multiple sensing sources for defining different elements of the context such as presence, location, identity, availability of resources, connectivity means and other environmental constraints for the interaction and provisioning of contextualized services. The research activity in this topic focuses on the use of different wireless technologies such as blue-tooth, wi-fi, gsm, gps, uwb for estimating contexts, locations and interactive affordances
In User Centered Design, the end-users represent the main component of the context. In this sense, it is of paramount importance to identify the actual (and future) users activities in order to provide them with more proactive and useful interactivity. Our research on activity detection, persues the use of different wireless techniques based on non-intrusive user monitoring like passive and active rfid, users presence and device usage in proximity of different wireless networks, etc. This approach intentds to be complementary to other activity detection approaches based on more intrusive technologies like video and audio monitoring.
As a result of the enhanced capabilities the Future Internet will bring to interactive systems, the different communities will be provided with more sophisticated means of interaction that will connect the real and virtual worlds. Additionally, users will expect to be provided with means for customizing and personalizing interaction with media and with other users. This will open the possibility to a new set of users experiences that will transform the current way people interact with other people, with digitalized content and with the real world. The researach activity in this direction will study how to evolve current research on user centric media to make it compatible with the challenges of the future internet