Model driven design for embedded systems

Questo lavoro di tesi si focalizza sulla modellazione di sistemi software in grado far interagire piattaforme elettroniche differenti tra loro.

Continuous innovation in food and beverage packaging design. Progetto di tutorial per lo studio di nuove forme di contenitore in PET.

Mi sono occupato di confezionamento di bevande, un settore che utilizza largamente il PET. Il progetto di tesi consiste in un processo che serve a ideare nuove forme di contenitore in PET attraverso strumenti di ricerca e innovazione.

Model-driven Usability: alcuni approcci e un prototipo.

Questa tesi si occupa degli aspetti di usabilità nell'interazione degli utenti con le applicazioni, usando le tecniche di generazione automatica della Model-Driven Architecture. Viene prodotto un generatore di applicazioni model-driven, basato su un modello di progettazione Goal-Oriented, con risultati apprezzabili nel fornire all'utente un'interazione dinamica con l'applicazione prodotta.

Frame-driven Extraction of Linked Data and Ontologies from Text

Ontology design and population -core aspects of semantic technologies- re- cently have become fields of great interest due to the increasing need of domain-specific knowledge bases that can boost the use of Semantic Web. For building such knowledge resources, the state of the art tools for ontology design require a lot of human work. Producing meaningful schemas and populating them with domain-specific data is in fact a very difficult and time-consuming task. Even more if the task consists in modelling knowledge at a web scale. The primary aim of this work is to investigate a novel and flexible method- ology for automatically learning ontology from textual data, lightening the human workload required for conceptualizing domain-specific knowledge and populating an extracted schema with real data, speeding up the whole ontology production process. Here computational linguistics plays a fundamental role, from automati- cally identifying facts from natural language and extracting frame of relations among recognized entities, to producing linked data with which extending existing knowledge bases or creating new ones. In the state of the art, automatic ontology learning systems are mainly based on plain-pipelined linguistics classifiers performing tasks such as Named Entity recognition, Entity resolution, Taxonomy and Relation extraction [11]. These approaches present some weaknesses, specially in capturing struc- tures through which the meaning of complex concepts is expressed [24]. Humans, in fact, tend to organize knowledge in well-defined patterns, which include participant entities and meaningful relations linking entities with each other. In literature, these structures have been called Semantic Frames by Fill- 6 Introduction more [20], or more recently as Knowledge Patterns [23]. Some NLP studies has recently shown the possibility of performing more accurate deep parsing with the ability of logically understanding the structure of discourse [7]. In this work, some of these technologies have been investigated and em- ployed to produce accurate ontology schemas. The long-term goal is to collect large amounts of semantically structured information from the web of crowds, through an automated process, in order to identify and investigate the cognitive patterns used by human to organize their knowledge.

Engineering Concurrent and Event-driven Web Apps: An Agent-Oriented Approach based on the simpAL Language

Web is constantly evolving, thanks to the 2.0 transition, HTML5 new features and the coming of cloud-computing, the gap between Web and traditional desktop applications is tailing off. Web-apps are more and more widespread and bring several benefits compared to traditional ones. On the other hand reference technologies, JavaScript primarly, are not keeping pace, so a paradim shift is taking place in Web programming, and so many new languages and technologies are coming out. First objective of this thesis is to survey the reference and state-of-art technologies for client-side Web programming focusing in particular on what concerns concurrency and asynchronous programming. Taking into account the problems that affect existing technologies, we finally design simpAL-web, an innovative approach to tackle Web-apps development, based on the Agent-oriented programming abstraction and the simpAL language. == Versione in italiano: Il Web è in continua evoluzione, grazie alla transizione verso il 2.0, alle nuove funzionalità introdotte con HTML5 ed all’avvento del cloud-computing, il divario tra le applicazioni Web e quelle desktop tradizionali va assottigliandosi. Le Web-apps sono sempre più diffuse e presentano diversi vantaggi rispetto a quelle tradizionali. D’altra parte le tecnologie di riferimento, JavaScript in primis, non stanno tenendo il passo, motivo per cui la programmazione Web sta andando incontro ad un cambio di paradigma e nuovi linguaggi e tecnologie stanno spuntando sempre più numerosi. Primo obiettivo di questa tesi è di passare al vaglio le tecnologie di riferimento ed allo stato dell’arte per quel che riguarda la programmmazione Web client-side, porgendo particolare attenzione agli aspetti inerenti la concorrenza e la programmazione asincrona. Considerando i principali problemi di cui soffrono le attuali tecnologie passeremo infine alla progettazione di simpAL-web, un approccio innovativo con cui affrontare lo sviluppo di Web-apps basato sulla programmazione orientata agli Agenti e sul linguaggio simpAL.