Danilo Montesi

• PhD in Computer Science
• Professor (Full) at University of Bologna

Background/Objectives: Due to challenges in securing hospital beds, elderly patients may face prolonged emergency department (ED) stays. Recent studies have highlighted an association between ED overnight stays (EDOSs) before admission and increased mortality. This study aimed to evaluate the potential impact of EDOSs on mortality among elderly pat...

The concept of luxury, considering it a rare and exclusive attribute, is evolving due to technological advances and the increasing influence of consumers in the market. Luxury cars have always symbolized wealth, social status, and sophistication. Recently, as technology progresses, the ability and interest to gather, store, and analyze data from th...

Background The long‐term results of web‐based behavioural intervention in non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) have not been described in patients followed in specialised centres. Aims To analyse the long‐term effectiveness of web education compared with the results achieved by a group‐based behavioural intervention in the same years 2012–201...

Sommario: 1. I dati come essenziale risorsa per lo sviluppo dell'IA in ambito sanitario.-2. La qualità dei dati.-3. Dati e processo evolutivo dell'IA. 1. I dati come essenziale risorsa per lo sviluppo dell'IA in ambito sani-tario I dati in ambito sanitario rappresentano una delle risorse primarie con cui ven-gono prese decisioni fondamentali per la...

The number of people with dementia is increasing worldwide. Two main approaches have been adopted to identify subjects with Alzheimer's disease (AD): the neuropsychological evaluation and the identification of biomarkers of AD. The first method is less invasive and easier to perform. This study assesses the psychometric properties of COGITAB, a nov...

Temporal features of text have been shown to improve clustering and organization of documents, text classification, visualization, and ranking. Temporal ranking models consider the temporal expressions found in text (e.g., “in 2021” or “last year”) as time units, rather than as keywords, to define a temporal relevance and improve ranking. This pape...

In the last decade, Social Networks (SNs) have deeply changed many aspects of society, and one of the most widespread behaviours is the sharing of pictures. However, malicious users often exploit shared pictures to create fake profiles, leading to the growth of cybercrime. Thus, keeping in mind this scenario, authorship attribution and verification...

Sharing images on Social Network (SN) platforms is one of the most widespread behaviors which may cause privacy-intrusive and illegal content to be widely distributed. Clustering the images shared through SN platforms according to the acquisition cameras embedded in smartphones is regarded as a significant task in forensic investigations of cybercr...

According to the World Health Organization, the number of people suffering from dementia worldwide will grow to 150 million by mid-century, and Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia contributing to 60%–70% of cases. The problem is compounded by the fact that current pharmacologic treatments are only symptomatic, and therapies are...

The World Health Organization estimates that 50 million people are currently living with dementia worldwide and this figure will almost triple by 2050. Current pharmacological treatments are only symptomatic, and drugs or other therapies are ineffective in slowing down or curing the neurodegenerative process at the basis of dementia. Therefore, ear...

The popularity of social networks (SNs), amplified by the ever-increasing use of smartphones, has intensified online cybercrimes. This trend has accelerated digital forensics through SNs. One of the areas that has received lots of attention is camera fingerprinting, through which each smartphone is uniquely characterized. Hence, in this paper, we c...

The original version of the book was inadvertently published with an error in the name of chapter author (Flavio Bertini) in the chapter opening page of the first chapter in Part I.

Current hierarchical embeddings are inaccurate in both reconstructing the original taxonomy and answering reachability queries over Direct Acyclic Graph. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical embedding, the Euclidean Embedding, that is correct by design due to its mathematical formulation and associated lemmas. Such embedding can be construc...

Objectives: Poor glycemic control is associated with mortality in critical patients with diabetes. The aim of the study was to assess the predicting value of stress hyperglycemia in patients with diabetes following hospital admission for sepsis. Design: Retrospective observational study. Setting: Adult, emergency department, and critical care...

In the last decade, Social Networks (SNs) have deeply changed many aspects of society, and one of the most widespread behaviours is the sharing of pictures. However, malicious users often exploit shared pictures to create fake profiles leading to the growth of cybercrime. Thus, keeping in mind this scenario, authorship attribution and verification...

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) refer to the sustainable management, protection and use of nature to mitigate risks and to preserve ecosystems, demonstrating environmental, social and economic benefits. The goal of the OPERANDUM project is to provide a science-based assessment of the usability and effectiveness of NBS. The assessment is complex consid...

As part of H2020 OPERANDUM project, a multi-dimensional, open and user-friendly platform is being developed, named OPERANDUM Geospatial Information Knowledge Platform (GeoIKP), which enables stakeholders and end-users to improve their knowledge of nature-based solutions (NBS) as a long-term and sustainable measure for mitigation and reduction of fl...

During the past decades, risk assessment experienced increasing interest in social science but also natural science and other disciplines. At the same time, risk reduction and mitigation gained in interest from local to global level due to the shift from reactive to proactive management. Hazard and risk assessment have been approached on different...

Social networks have become an indispensable part of everyday life by providing users with different types of interaction. However, sharing different types of data, such as text, image, video and etc., on social networks, gives rise to user privacy concerns and risks, while the user is not aware of that. In this chapter, we show how the images shar...

Background: The burden of sepsis represents a global health care problem. We aimed to assess the case fatality rate (CFR) and its predictors in subjects with sepsis admitted to a general Italian hospital from 2009 to 2016, stratified by risk score. Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of all sepsis-related hospitalizations after Emerge...

Background: The burden of sepsis represents a global health care problem. We aimed to assess the case fatality rate (CFR) and its predictors in subjects with sepsis admitted to a general Italian hospital from 2009 to 2016, stratified by risk score.Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of all sepsis-related hospitalizations after Emergency...

Hydro-meteorological hazards (HMHs) have had a strong impact on human societies and ecosystems. Their impact is projected to be exacerbated by future climate scenarios. HMHs cataloguing is an effective tool to evaluate their associated risks and plan appropriate remediation strategies. However, factors linked to HMHs origin and triggers remain unce...

A Unicode homoglyph is one of two or more characters with shapes that appear very similar to the human observer. If used in social media posts, homoglyphs allow users to implement an efficient method for hiding text information, turning anyone's post into a potential carrier of hidden messages.

Background The burden of sepsis represents a global health care problem. We aimed to assess the case fatality rate (CFR) and its predictors in subjects with sepsis admitted to a general Italian hospital from 2009 to 2016, stratified by risk score. Methods We performed a retrospective analysis of all sepsis-related hospitalizations after Emergency D...

The current online digital world, consisting of thousands of newspapers, blogs, social media, and cloud file sharing services, is providing easy and unlimited access to a large treasure of text contents. Making copies of these text contents is simple and virtually costless. As a result, producers and owners of text content are interested in the pro...

Clustering the images shared through Social Network (SN) platforms according to the acquisition cameras embedded in smartphones is regarded as a significant task in forensic investigations of cybercrimes. The Sensor Pattern Noise (SPN) caused by camera sensor imperfections during the manufacturing process can be extracted from the images and used t...

A fundamental problem in Social Network Analysis is how to move from single-layer to multi-layer, which provide a holistic view. User profiles resolution has received considerable attention since it allows to match users on different online social networks (OSNs). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has focused on nesting operation for...

In the last decades, Social Networks (SNs) have deeply changed interactions and habits of the users that are also prone to create more than one profile on the same SN. On the flip side, fake profiles (i.e., impersonating profiles), have become a considerable problem in digital investigations. In this paper, we propose a method for user profiles res...

Despite the growing popularity of techniques related to graph summarization, a general operator for the flexible nesting of graphs is still missing. We propose a novel nested graph data model and a powerful graph nesting operator. In contrast to existing approaches, our approach is able to summarize vertices and paths among vertex groups within a s...

One of the important problems in the domain of network science is the community detection. In the past, various topological based community detection algorithms have been proposed. Recently, researchers have taken into account at- tributes of the nodes while proposing community detection algorithms. In this work, we investigate if the nodes in a co...

Smart cities face the challenge of combining sustainable national welfare with high living standards. In the last decades, life expectancy increased globally, leading to various age-related issues in almost all developed countries. Frailty affects elderly who are experiencing daily life limitations due to cognitive and functional impairments and re...

One of the most shared content in Social Media (SM) is text, making it vulnerable to copy and authorship misappropriation. Due to the low data noise, watermark embedding is very hard. This problem is exacerbated in the context of SM, where the amount of data in a single message can be extremely small, like in Twitter. Firstly, in this paper we inve...

In supervised learning algorithms for text classification the text content is usually represented using the frequencies of the words it contains, ignoring their semantic and their relationships. Words within temporal expressions such as “ today ” or “ last February ” are particularly affected by this simplification: the same expression can have a d...

The temporal dimension of a text document defines the temporal scope of its narrated event. This temporal dimension acquires more importance in corpora created along several years of production, such as digital libraries. Temporal aspects of text have been the subject of many researches with specific tasks, notably information retrieval and event d...

In the graph database literature the term "join" does not refer to an operator combining two graphs, but involves path traversal queries over a single graph. Current languages express binary joins through the combination of path traversal queries with graph creation operations. Such solution proves to be not efficient. In this paper we introduce a...

A common problem in social network analysis is the presence of missing data. This problem has been extensively investigated in single-layer networks, that is, considering one network at a time. However, in multilayer networks, in which a holistic view of multiple networks is taken, the problem has not been specifically studied. In this work, we tak...

In the graph database literature the term "join" does not refer to an operator used to merge two graphs. In particular, a counterpart of the relational join is not present in existing graph query languages, and consequently no efficient algorithms have been developed for this operator. This paper provides two main contributions. First, we define a...

Multilayer Analysis of Online Illicit Marketplaces

Digital watermarking has become crucially important in authentication and copyright protection of the digital contents, since more and more data are daily generated and shared online through digital archives, blogs and social networks. Out of all, text watermarking is a more difficult task in comparison to other media watermarking. Text cannot be a...

We rethink and extend the concepts of position and role in a network, basing them on various well-known measures that were not previously associated with these concepts, such as geodesic distance and modularity. The effectiveness of our new role and position detection algorithms is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively, on synthetic and r...

Life expectancy increases globally and brings out several challenges in almost all developed countries all around the world. Early screening allows to carry out policies to prevent adverse age-related events and to better distribute the associated financial burden on social and healthcare systems. One of the main issues correlated to a longer lifes...

In recent years, social networks (SNs) have revolutionized many aspects of society. The wide variety of available platforms meets almost every kind of users’ needs: socialization, professional connections and image sharing, to name a few. Smartphones have brought vital change in user’s behaviour towards sharing of multimedia content on online SNs....

Digital platforms are not only seizing growth, but they are also redefining the internet economy in such a way that it upsets the current competition landscape. In this article, we discuss various aspects of digital platforms. By highlighting the traits that differ digital platforms from conventional business models, we aim to show that these new u...

An important part of textual information around the world contains some kind of geographic features. User queries with geographic references are becoming very common and human expectations from a search engine are even higher. Although several works have been focused on this area, the interpretation of the geographic information in order to better...

This schematic note has been written as a follow up of the presentation on “Big Data + Society: A Data Driven Life” (Montesi, 2015) for the conference on “Competition in the Digital Age” held last June in Norwich, UK. During and after the conference I received several questions made by economist, lawyers, academics and regulators. An attempt is mad...

In recent years, the spread of smartphones has attributed to changes in the user behaviour with respect to multimedia content sharing on online social networks (SNs). One noticeable behaviour is taking pictures using smartphone cameras and sharing them with friends through online social platforms. On the downside, this has contributed to the growth...

In the last decade or so the process of digitization of society has resulted in the generation of massive amounts of data. The data being generated, linked and shared through humans (and soon machines) is often referred as big data. In this talk, I will discuss the impact of big data on society. Broadly, we cover three aspects. First, I will mentio...

A common problem in social network analysis is the presence of missing data. This problem has been extensively investigated in single layer networks, that is, considering one network at a time. However, in multilayer networks, in which a holistic view of multiple networks is taken, the problem has not been specifically studied, and results for sing...

There is an inherent presence of communities in online social networks. These communities can be defined based on i) link structure or ii) the attributes of individuals. Attributes can indicate as interests in specific topics, like science-fiction books or romantic movies, or more in general their explicit affiliation to a group inside the network....

The task of assigning classification codes to short medical text is a hard text classification problem, especially when the set of possible codes is as big as the ICD-9-CM set. The problem, which has been only partially tamed for a subset of ICD-9-CM, becomes even harder in real world applications, where the labeled data are scarce and noisy. In th...

Several systems can be modeled as sets of interconnected networks or networks with multiple types of connections, here generally called multilayer networks. Spreading processes such as information propagation among users of online social networks, or the diffusion of pathogens among individuals through their contact network, are fundamental phenome...

The ways in which an innovation (e.g., new behaviour, idea, technology, product) diffuses among people can determine its success or failure. In this paper, we address the problem of diffusion of innovations over multiplex social networks where the neighbours of a person belong to one or multiple networks (or layers) such as friends, families, or co...

Several systems can be modeled as sets of interdependent networks where each network contains distinct nodes. Diffusion processes like the spreading of a disease or the propagation of information constitute fundamental phenomena occurring over such coupled networks. In this paper we propose a new concept of multidimensional epidemic threshold chara...

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is an established discipline for the study of groups of individuals with applications in several areas, like economics, information science, organizational studies and psychology. In the last fifteen years the exponential growth of online Social Network Sites (SNSs) , like Facebook, QQ and Twitter has provided a new ch...

A basic problem in the analysis of social networks is missing data. When a network model does not accurately capture all the actors or relationships in the social system under study, measures computed on the network and ultimately the final outcomes of the analysis can be severely distorted. For this reason, researchers in social network analysis h...

Several systems can be modelled as sets of interdependent networks or networks with multiple types of connections, here generally called multilayer networks. Diffusion processes like the propagation of information or the spreading of diseases are fundamental phenomena occurring in these networks. However, while the study of diffusion processes in s...

Documents and queries are rich in temporal features, both at the meta-level and at the content-level. We exploit this information to define temporal scope similarities between documents and queries in metric spaces. Our experiments show that the proposed metrics can be very effective for modeling the relevance for different search tasks, and provid...

In the last decade, various social platforms have been introduced on the web. Due to their specific orientation (friendship, professional connections, image sharing, etc.) users often join multiple networks. An important problem across these networks is the resolution of users profiles. That is, to identify if set of user profiles from different ne...

The management of legal domains is gaining great importance in the context of data management. In fact, the geographical distribution of data as implied -- for example -- by cloud-based services requires that the legal restrictions and obligations are to be taken into account whenever data circulates across different legal domains. In this paper, w...

Due to the large amount of social network data produced at an ever growing speed and their complex nature, recent works have addressed the problem of efficiently querying such data according to social, temporal or spatial dimensions. In this work we propose a data model that keeps into account all these dimensions and we compare different approache...

Predictions of uprising or falling trends are helpful in different scenarios in which users have to deal with huge amount of information in a timely manner ,such as during financial analysis. This temporal aspect in various cases of data analysis requires novel data mining techniques. Assuming that a given set of data, e.g. web news, contains infor...

Introduction: Pre-injury antithrombotic therapy might influence the outcome of subjects with head injuries and positive computed tomography (CT) scans. We aimed to determine the potential risk of pre-injury antiplatelet drug use on short- and long-term outcome of head injured subjects admitted to emergency departments (EDs) in Italy for extended o...

A relevant feature of Social Network Sites is their ability to propagate units of information and create large distributed conversations. This phenomenon is particularly relevant because of the speed of information propagation, which is known to be much faster than within traditional media, and because of the very large amount of people that can po...

In this paper we introduce and experimentally compare alternative algorithms to join uncertain relations. Different algorithms are based on specific principles, e.g., sorting, indexing, or building intermediate relational tables to apply traditional approaches. As a consequence their performance is affected by different features of the input data,...

In this article we introduce a novel search paradigm for microblogging sites resulting from the intersection of Information Retrieval and Social Network Analysis (SNA). This approach is based on a formal model of on-line conversations and a set of ranking measures including SNA centrality metrics, time-related conversational metrics and other speci...

The process of retrieving conversations from social network sites differs from traditional Web information retrieval because it involves human communication aspects, like the degree of interest in the conversation explicitly or implicitly expressed by the interacting people and their influence/popularity. Our demo allows users to include these aspe...

One of the current challenges in the field of data mining is to develop techniques to analyze uncertain data. Among these techniques, in this paper we focus on decision tree classifiers. In particular, we introduce a new data structure that can be used to represent multiple decision trees generated from uncertain datasets.

Microblogging sites allow users to post short messages online, offering a reliable way to communicate and to spread information quickly and efficiently; moreover, they can host complex conversational activities. The objectives of this paper are to model how breaking news circulate in a microblogging network, to identify relevant patterns of news pr...

One of the most interesting and still not completely understood phenomena happening in Social Network Sites is their ability to spread (or not) units of information which may aggregate to form large distributed conversations. In this paper we present the result of an empirical study on a Large Social Database (LSD) aimed at measuring the factors en...

In the last few years, uncertainty management has come to be recognized as a fundamental aspect of data integration. It is now accepted that it may not be possible to remove uncertainty generated during data integration processes and that uncertainty in itself may represent a source of relevant information. Several issues, such as the aggregation o...

In this paper we describe a demo concerning the management of uncertain schemata. Many works have studied the problem of representing uncertainty on attribute values or tuples, like the fact that a value is 10 with probability .3 or 20 with probability .7, leading to the implementation of probabilistic database management systems. In our demo we de...

Social Network Sites can be seen as very large information repositories containing millions of text messages usually organized into complex networks involving users interacting with each other at spe- cific times. In this paper we discuss how traditional information retrieval techniques can be extended to deal with these social aspects. In partic-...

The clean representation of recursive queries enabled by Datalog makes it a strong candidate to be used as the reference query language for social network data management. In this extended abstract we try to identify the capabilities that should be provided by a language for the manipulation of social data.

In this paper we present a report on the data quality of a medical database containing clinical and administrative data from hospitals and private clinics in the Bologna district area. In particular, we have analyzed the database according to several data quality dimensions, identifying a number of issues (e.g., inaccuracies and incompleteness) tha...

In this paper we introduce the problem of managing uncertainty on the schema of a relational database. We formalize this problem using a possible world semantics, identify the challenges posed by the co-existence of many alternative schemata, and define some basic properties of a system with uncertain schemata. Finally, we describe a query rewritin...

The design of business processes involves the usage of modeling languages, tools and methodologies. In this paper we highlight and address a relevant limitation of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN): its weak data representation capabilities. In particular, we extend it with data-specific constructs derived from existing data modeling no...

In this paper we present a modeling methodology for BPMN, the standard notation for the representation of business processes. Our methodology simplifies the development of collaborative BPMN diagrams, enabling the automated creation of skeleton process diagrams representing complex choreographies. To evaluate and tune the methodology, we have devel...

Grid systems focus on the sharing and coordination of a large number of geographically- dispersed resources among different communities of users. Such systems require the capability of associating users requests to the actual resources. This capability should consider a high number of similar resources and different perceptions of users satisfactio...

In this poster paper we present a methodology, named chorda, for the modeling of business processes with BPMN. Our methodology focuses on the peculiar features of this notation: its ability to illustrate different levels of abstraction, its support for both orchestration and choreography, and the representation of data flows. In particular, this la...

XQuery Full-Text is the proposed standard language for querying XML documents using either standard or full-text conditions; while full-text conditions can have a boolean or a ranked semantics, standard conditions must be satisfied for an element to be returned. This paper proposes a more general formal model that considers structural, value-based...