Technologies
Events
Upcoming events
Latest publications
Welcome!
The goal of the ICT4G group is looking at novel ways of using technology to foster economic and social development, often targeting areas characterized by a low penetration of ICT. With “low penetration of ICT”, we not only refer to developing countries, but also to societies with significant and tangible gaps.
Our society is demonstrating a growing need to measure development not only in terms of profit, but also in terms of fairness, support to the community, reduction of the externalities to help build a better world for future generations. ICTs can and should have a significant role in supporting communities and making this social collaboration process more efficient and more transparent.
Concerning research directions, the unit is implementing and experimenting solutions to foster development through social collaboration. The longer term problem we are trying to tackle is understanding what processes and what tools can best promote ICT-mediated collaboration and mobilize and support the implementation of global-scale changes. The approach we take is bottom up, developing and experimenting solutions in specific applicative domains.
From the applicative point of view we are focusing on web and mobile applications to promote efficient allocation of resources and trigger virtuous behaviors by imitation. Along this line of development BringFood. In Italy, about 149 kilograms of food are wasted per person, per year. BringFood simplifies food donations, thus helping people redistributing food excess, give access to people in need and, in the process, help allocate resources more efficiently.
A second line of development focuses on tools to empower citizens and decentralize the process of evaluation of procurement indicators. In this line of development the activities in collaboration with the Maputo Living Lab and the World Bank. Among the problems to tackle here, aspects related to trust and data reliability.
Finally the unit strongly believes in “capability building” and “awareness” as tools to foster development. For these reason it is the promoter of the Summer School of ICTs in Mozambique, during which selected students of the Mozambican Universities are trained in mobile and web development. In Trentino, the group is the organizer of Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon,. The event allows local students to work on solutions which can have a positive impact for developing countries. The hackathon is becoming a tool to improve the skills of students and raise awareness on development issues.
Projects
NEWS AND EVENTS
A Semantics Aware Tool for Managing and Controlling Projects
Mon, 07/16/2012 - 15:41 — fralongoA lot of effort has been spent to appropriately support project managers in the different phases of a
project's lifecycle. Consider for instance the wide amount of tools available to support the definition
of a Gantt Chart. As the IT support grows, the number of tools available to project manager’s
increases. Project managers now can use tools to draw Gantt chart, web applications to store
documents, databases to store effort spent and budget data, etc. However there is little integration
between these tools and the coherence between the data represented in the various tools is the
responsibility of the project manager. To overcome the gap and to integrate, there are basically two
approaches: the first moves towards the creation of a monolithic application supporting all phases of
project management. This approach however has proved difficult to achieve in different sectors. The
second is it that of providing lighter weight components and applications that can be integrated
together. This is something we can achieve, for instance, by creating applications with robust APIs,
such as those generated by component-based frameworks such as Rails. A preliminary step,
however, is investigating how these concepts can be put into practice.
The goals of this thesis thus are: i) investigate how a proper (semantically-rich) representation of
the data of a plan can help provide a more integrated tool chain to support project management
activities. ii) experiment with an application developed in RoR, a framework that provides a robust
API. This thesis hence proposes a tool to facilitate project management and contributes:
a) The implementation of a prototype fulfilling goal defined in i) and ii).
b) Its application to automatically generate a document repository for a project whose structure
is derived from that of the Gantt chart of the project, a first step towards the integration of
certain essential activities of project planning with some of those required during project
execution.
Keywords: Project Manamgement,Component Based Framework, Management Tool, Semantics,
Project Planning, Project Execution, Document Repository,
RHoK recap
Wed, 06/13/2012 - 15:27 — fralongoThe international event RhoK of 2nd-3rd June, have been included 25 events located in 14 countries. The volunteers involved have been 905 and they have developed 138 solution starting from 132 problem definitions.
In Trento the event has involved 33 participants from several nations.
The range of problems we worked on have been wide. In particular have been investigated these five problems:
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Moving food (with a Bring The Food possible expansion - BTF+)
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Ffilter - tool for screening open data for private/sensitive information before publication
Trento Rise and Banco Alimentare (the Italian Food Bank) have been envolved at RHoK as domain experts on food waste and sustainability.
Trento Rise is the Italian node of the European Institute of Technology and it offered its experts to help participants in planning for sustainability of their solutions.
Banco Alimentare presented the problems of food waste in Italy and assisted the participants who choosed challenges related to food security/waste.
They are talking about us:
Links:
RHoK Global June 2012
Wed, 06/13/2012 - 15:09 — fralongoRHoK is coming back to Trento!
The fifth global Random Hacks of Kindness event will bring big change. This edition will be more focused on (but not limited to) problems related to food waste and food security. The food wasted by Europe every year is equal to the amount of food needed to end World Hunger. We are inviting NGOs and ONLUS to submit challenges to stimulate the development of new applications to help alleviate suffering.
Our group is again organizing the event that will take place in FBK on June 2-3. Subject matter experts are invited to submit problems and technologists, coders, hackers and people interested are all invited to participate to the event.
Please register through EventBrite using the widget below.
