OPERATIVE UNIT

Institute for Informatics and Telematics

CNR-IIT | Pisa

CNR-IIT is composed by two research labs: the Ubiquitous Internet Lab (UI) and the Cyber Intelligence Lab (CI). 

UI Research Unit activities are focused on the Future Internet design and evaluation, blending advanced networking solutions with BigData analytics and AI methods. UI researchers feature a broad expertise in the design, modelling, performance evaluation through analysis, simulation and experiments of innovative pervasive mobile computing paradigms and protocols. UI researchers are actively working on Research Infrastructure projects at the European level. Notably, they lead the national node of the ESFRI SLICES Research Infrastructure (Roadmap 2021) which is focused on supporting the community of ICT researchers in all the areas of Digital Infrastructure (including future Internet). In this framework, UI is part of the H2020 SLICES-DS (Design Study) and SLICES-SC (Support Communities) projects. UI members are actively participating in relevant expert groups at the national and Communities) projects. UI members are actively participating in relevant expert groups at the national and European levels including the NetWorld Europe ETP. On the topics of pervasive computing and networking, UI participates in the Horizon Europe REA4DY project (2022-25) where it develops edge data management solutions for Industry 4.0. Prior expertise on the topic have been developed in a series of FP7 and H2020 projects, including AUTOWARE, MOTO, SCAMPI, EINS, SOCIALNETS, RECOGNITION, EU-MESH. In the area of BigData Analytics and AI, UI leads the EU CHIST-ERA SAI (Social Explainable AI) project (2021-24), and participates in the HumaneAI-Net and Human Centered AI Masters Projects. UI develops methods to derive data-driven models of the human behaviour, and novel decentralised analytics solutions suitable for edge and pervasive networking environments. 

The CI Research Unit has gained an outstanding expertise in social media intelligence by working on projects that heavily rely on NLP, deep learning and big data processing. CI was part of a consortium for the analysis of the 2018 Italian political elections through social media content, building a high-throughput ingestion system and offering analysis services on spam bot detection of fake user accounts. CI is part of the permanent team of the EU Lab on Big Data Analytics and Social Mining and of the EU-funded SoBigData++ Research Infrastructure project. In this context, CI is responsible for the “Social Media Observatory and crowd-sensing design integration”, which is aimed at developing a set of tools and services to facilitate the creation of listening campaigns over specific topics on social media.

TNA Offer

The TNA projects can be related to the various activities carried out at CNR-IIT.

  • Study of the dynamics of opinion polarization to examine how social media and peers influence the formation and polarization of opinions among users. We use existing models of opinion dynamics (e.g., Friedkin-Johnsen) to simulate how opinions evolve under different social network structures. We investigate how social media can amplify or mitigate polarization, and how polarization can affect the structure of social networks.
  • Design of efficient decentralized AI methods, working in the full cloud-to-edge continuum, to create human-centric AI exploiting data where they are generated, as well as collaborative ways of extracting knowledge from them. Develop resource-efficient pervasive AI methods, optimizing the use of resources available at the involved devices, in terms of energy, storage, computing.
  • Study of the impact of cognitive constraints on how users interact online (Twitter, Reddit, etc.) through the ego network model and Dunbar's social brain hypothesis. Signed ego network model (where social relationships can be positive or negative)  and its applications (community detection, link prediction, etc.).
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