Crowded environments have always been of fundamental importance for charismatic people willing to communicate their view. An artist, a politician, anyone with leadership qualities, who’s capable of charismatic interaction, might want to enrich his communication skills during a public event by fully involving the participants. Likewise, people at concerts or at the stadium might themselves dream of delivering messages with strong emotional impact, deep ethical content, or profound sense of membership. Public gatherings also represent for companies great opportunities for delivering advertisement messages. As soon as we assume that all of them possess a smartphone, they can be thought of as pixels of a Human Screen (HS). As such, it can be regarded as a truly new computer peripheral, where one can deliver any visual information. Anyone can feel the emotion of supporting an important message while acting as a single pixel. No matter they are in a theatre, seated at the stadium, or standing in a square, people with smartphones can act as pixels of a human screen, that can support any kind of imaginable computational process, including old fashionable video games. The research on HS is carried out at the University of Siena with the purpose of finalizing implementations of the described idea, which consists of delivering appropriate mobile apps along with the mobiles interface running on the application server. We foresee a worldwide service for anyone who is interested in using HS technologies in a public event.

Get a glimpse

Social face

In the eyeblink that has elapsed since the turn of the millennium, the lives of those of us who work with information have been utterly transformed. Pretty much all we need to know is on the web; if not today, then tomorrow. It’s where we learn and play, shop and do business, keep up with old friends and meet new ones … if you want to know more have a look at

Web Dragons:

Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology

Morgan Kauffman 2007

 written with Ian Witten & Teresa Numerico

Originally, it was just an assignment in my corse of artificial intelligence. The assignment was supposed to focus on the problem of allocating a set of words onto a given  crossword scheme … then it became something more … solve crosswords from clues exactly like humans do using pensil and rubber on the train or near the fireplace. With Marco Ernandes and Giovanni Angelini, we launched the man-machine crossword challenge, that resembles somehow the celebrated chess man-machine competition. Have a look at the WebCrowproject and what people reported about this crazy challenge …

Program cracks crosswords. By Federica Castellani. news@ nature.com (October 4, 2004). “It’s a boon for puzzle addicts and a small leap forward for artificial intelligence: a computer program that can solve crosswords in any language. The program, called Web Crow, reads crossword clues, surfs the web for the answers and fits them into the puzzle