I’m a researcher of the Ubiquitous
Internet Group of IIT-CNR in
Pisa. I joined the group in 2003, starting my PhD in Information
Engineering (in collaboration with the University of Pisa) on
middleware solutions for mobile ad hoc networks.
My research activity is still in the framework of Mobile and Pervasive Computing with particular attention to networking, middleware and applications' issues. I'm particularly interested in designing and developing real solutions for mobile devices that have strong social impact both on single users and the entire society. Due to technical limitations demonstrated by research and experimental analysis on mobile ad hoc networks, the research group decided to move our studies on a new networking paradigm able to reflect the human behavior, moving around by carrying his/her mobile devices. I'm talking about opportunistic networks, in which mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablet PCs) exploit users' mobility and consequent devices' encounters to establish new communication opportunities and data exchange, In this scenario, Internet connectivity represents only an additional communication opportunity.
The group cover several research issues in this field: forwarding protocols, human mobility models, opportunistic computing, resource sharing, opportunistic sensing and Mobile Social Network applications.
In this area my research focuses on the design and development of a middleware platform able to provide common context- and social-aware functionality for the efficient development of Mobile Social Network applications (MSN). MSN represents a general definition for mobile applications designed to support the users' need to generate and share contents (anywhere and anytime) in order to improve their perception of the surrounding environment and their quality of life. To this aim, they need a common definition of context, involving information related to single users (e.g., personal profiles, habits and needs), their social behaviour (i.e., virtual and physical social interactions), to physical devices (e.g., available resources, connectivities, services), and efficient resoning techniques. These features have been integrated in a single software framework called CAMEO: Context-Aware MiddlEware for Opportunistic MSN.
You can find more details on research topics and projects here.
%MSN embraces several application domains (e.g., healthcare, well-being, social support, environmental monitoring, personal and collective awareness) that represent the motivation and the final goal of current SMART CITIES initiatives.
