A Virtual Lab on Big Data
Many of Simona's research activities on Big Data Analytics, related Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence techniques have a direct impact on the technological tranfer in the industrial context. Collaborations on these topics with students, researchers and pratictioners are always welcome. Project thesis for bachelor, master and PhD are also available. The technologies we exploit involve microservices architectures, Apache Spark, MongoDB, Neo4J, Apache Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Redux.
Decision Support for Precision Medicine
Precision Medicine aims to design individualized strategies for diagnostic or therapeutic decision-making, based on different types of information coming from cellular components, diseases and pnehotypes. It allows scientists and clinicians to understand which therapeutic and preventive approaches to a specific illness can work effectively in subgroups of patients, based on their genetic make-up, lifestyle, and environmental factors. The diffusion of high-throughput, next-generation sequencing and mass spectrometry technologies has led to fast accumulation of omics data, which can be used to enable Precision Medicine in practice. However, several challenges are still open, notably among which the design of suitable tools for knowledge exctraction and recommendation from very large amounts of omics data. Related activities in the lab are in collaboration with the innovative startup Kazaam Lab s.r.l..
Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is the most representative example of how much the advertising landscape is evolving: it includes email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, display and mobile advertising. As an example, social media contents shared by users of Online Social Networks involve specific information that can serve as the basis for personalized advertising and the recommendation of services and products targeted to those users. Also, digital signage advertising collects digital signs that display image, video, and motion-graphic advertising content to a given audience.
Smart Environments
Cities represent suitable contexts for the design and development of solutions based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which make accessible the challenges for a sustainable technological advancement toward a “smart” planning and organization of resources and data. On the other hand, digital revolution has radically changed the way of living by introducing not only new ways to collect information, but also new techniques for their analysis and processing. Ubiquitous computing can be defined as a new computing strategy such that computers are implicitly integrated into the daily actions of users, who are frequently in contact with electronic equipment such as personal computers, smartphones, bracelets, refrigerators and even glasses. At the base of the ubiquitous computing we find new network infrastructures, operating systems, sensors, microprocessors, all supporting the idea of surrounding ourselves with computers and software constantly active to provide assistance based on daily activities and according to our interests. Data produced by users and their devices, in the “Internet of Things” (IoT) field, and by the digital urban infrastructures, in the smart city area, therefore require solid technologies that provide a great deal of information, in order to detect, aggregate and extract novel information useful to support decisions and to improve the experience of each user.
