Committee and Biographies - IEEE IoT Vertical and Topical Summit for Tourism

Olivia Menaguale, Art Historian

Olivia MENAGUALE is an art historian and virtual archaeologist, whose lifelong passion in her studies and career, over the last 30 years, has been to improve the communications and access to Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Europe and the US, working alongside experts in technology from digital photo-archives to the financial art world, from audio-video guides to 3D reconstructions. She has worked alongside national and local governments, superintendencies, art experts, archaeologists, collectors and auction houses, and in projects for museums to historical and archaeological sites, from theme parks to government committees, from art exhibitions to world expos. As Chair of IEEE IoT for Tourism and Cultural Heritage, she is pioneering a multidisciplinary approach creating innovative synergies between technology, tourism and cultural heritage in order to create and promote a new global standard and business and economic growth.

https://wfiot2021.iot.ieee.org/tourism-and-cultural-heritage/https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/academia/kaleidoscope/2021/Pages/special-session-1.aspx

Olivia Menaguale received a Doctorate in Modern Literature, with a specialisation in Art History at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy), with 1st class honours 110/110 Cum Laude.

Merging her knowledge and skills in art history and archaeology with technology, she has developed projects to research and provide access to art, both onsite and virtually offsite. She started in the early 1990s, with the development and management of a financial photographic database on works of art that pass at auction called “I-on-Art”. It was commercialised and used by art collectors, auction houses and museums, internationally. This led to two pioneering digitisation projects, in London and New York, for the world’s two largest art history photo-archives of a total of more than 3.5 million annotated photos held at the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute (London, UK) and the at Frick Museum & Art Reference Library (New York, NY, USA).

Since then, Olivia Menaguale has led and been involved in other digital projects, including the 3D reconstruction of ancient Rome – in collaboration with the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA, USA), UCLA (Los Angeles, CA, USA), and the Italian Ministry of Culture. This remains the largest 3D model of any historical site. In 2008, Google Inc. (Mountainview, CA, USA) partnered the project, and together launched the first historical city, “Ancient Rome” on Google Earth which could be flown over in 24 languages and was explored by 78 million people worldwide in the first week of going public.

Some other projects she has led, include the creation of a mini theme park on the Colosseum called “Rewind Rome” for tourists visiting the City of Rome; and a 3D CAVE inside the historical site of Pompeii offering the 2.5 visiting visitors with a 360° fully immersive reconstruction of a bustling street in 64 A.D. before the eruption.
Olivia also led the team to create and manage the world’s first audio-video guide for a historical site, at the Colosseum in 2006. This service, providing over 100 minutes of videos, photographic explanatory materials and narration, is still offered to the 4 million visitors to the site today, available in 9 languages.

Due to her unique knowledge and experience in bringing together the very differing worlds of technology with art history and archaeology, she has represented her home country Italy, in state missions, such as to the Middle East with the former Italian President, On. Napolitano, and in curating an Old Master Exhibition on Italian Art at the 2015 World Expo in Milan (Italy). She has also taught a series of lectures on art and technology at the Università di Roma La Sapienza in Rome (Italy), called “I mestieri dell’arte” (“The jobs of the art world” which was then published under Electa (Mondadori).

Role: General Chair

Michele Nitti, University of Cagliari (Italy)

Michele Nitti (Member, IEEE) is an Assistant Professor with the University of Cagliari, Italy, since 2015. In 2013, he was a visiting student with the Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His main research interests are in architecture and services for the Internet of Things, particularly in the creation of a network infrastructure to allow the objects to organize themselves according to a social structure (Social Internet of Things). He served as a Technical Program Chair for various international conferences, such as IEEE BMSB 2017 and IEEE IoT V&T Summit 2020, and workshops, such as IEEE ICCCS 2019 and IEEE GIoTS 2020. He is currently a Member of the Editorial Board for the IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Computer Networks (Elsevier), and MDPI IoT and the Co-Founder of an academic spin-off (GreenShare s.r.l.) which works in the mobility sector.

Role: Techincal Program Chair

Marco Martalò, University of Cagliari (Italy)

Marco Martalò was born in Galatina (LE), Italy, in June 1981. He received the “Laurea” degree (3-year program) and the “Laurea Specialistica” (3+2 year program) degree (summa cum laude) in telecommunications engineering in 2003 and 2005, respectively, from the University of Parma, Italy. In 2009 he received the Ph.D. degree in information technologies from the University of Parma, Italy.,Since January 2009, he is a Post-Doc researcher at the Information Engineering Department of the University of Parma, Italy. From October 2007 to March 2008, he was a “Visiting Scholar” at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, collaborating with the Laboratory of Algorithmic Research in Network Information, directed by Professor Christina Fragouli. He is a member of the Information Engineering Department of the University of Parma, Italy, of the Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (WASN) Laboratory.,He is coauthor of the book Sensor Networks with IEEE 802.15.4 Systems: Distributed Processing, MAC, and Connectivity (Springer, 2011). Dr. Martalò was a corecipient of a “best student paper award” (with his tutor Dr. Gianluigi Ferrari) at the 2006 International Workshop on Wireless Ad hoc Networks (IWWAN’06). He has been a TPC member of the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2011), the International Workshop on Performance Methodologies and Tools for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNPERF 2009) and the International Conference on Advances in Satellite and Space Communications (SPACOMM 2009–2010). He also serves as reviewer for many international journals and conferences.

Role: Panel Discussion Chair

Charalampos Z. Patrikakis, University of West Attica (Greece)

Charalampos Z. Patrikakis is a Professor at the Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering of the University of West Attica on the Design and Implementation of Interconnected Electronic Systems and Services, with emphasis on data collection and processing. He has been an adjunct lecturer at the National Technical University of Athens and the Agricultural University of Athens, while he has worked for 20 years as a researcher at various laboratories of the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems, the National Technical University of Athens and the Agricultural University of Athens. He is currently the Director of CoNSeRT (Computer Networks & Services Research laboraTory) of the University of West Attica, which researches on Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing and Networking, Web and Internet of Things and Blockchain technologies and for the design and implementation of mobile and network applications and services. He is also the Director of the MSc Program “Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning” offered jointly by the Dept of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Dept of Industrial Design and Production Engineering of UniWA. His research experience includes participation in in over 50 research projects, from which in more than 20 he has been involved as technical coordinator or principal researcher. He has over 200 publications in chapters of books, international journals and conferences, and has 2 contributions in national legislation. He has been a member of the editorial committee of more than 60 issues in international journals and conferences, and has acted as editor in the publication of special issues of international journals, conference proceedings volumes and coedited three books. E is currently the Associate Editor in Chief of the IEEE IT Professional Magazine, responsible for Special Issues, and a senior member of IEEE, a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, and counselor of the IEEE Student Branch of the University of West Attica.

Role: Panel co-Chair

Claudio Marche, University of Cagliari (Italy)

Claudio Marche received the M.Sc. degree in telecommunication engineering with full marks in 2018 from the University of Cagliari. Since graduation, he has been working as Researcher in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Cagliari, in the MCLab research group. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Cagliari. His current research interests include Internet of Things (IoT), Social Internet of Things (SIoT) and Trustworthiness for IoT

Role: Publication Chair

Giulia Carosi, Les Roches (Switzerland)

A Rome native, Giulia graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a bachelor of arts in Fashion Management and a master degree in Management and Marketing for Luxury Tourism from Les Roches Marbella.

She acquired experience over the past couple of years by working as a marketing content creator with John Lewis and as a PR and marketing assistant for events and activities hosted in Nottingham. To deepen her understanding of human and consumer behaviour she’s currently taking a psychology online course at Yale University. Alongside her academic life, she is an ambassador for Song-Taaba, a non-profit organisation which provides education and builds schools and hospitals in Congo and Burkina Faso, and for Siddheshwar Vaidyakiya Sanstha, a charitable trust looking to provide quality healthcare provisions rural and urban areas of India.

Role: PR Chair

Luigi Serreli, University of Cagliari (Italy)

Luigi Serreli is a Ph.D. student in Electronic and Computer engineering at the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the University of Cagliari (Italy). He holds a B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and a M.Sc. in Internet engineering at the University of Cagliari, discussing the thesis “A generative Adversarial Network (GAN) Fingerprint approach over LTE”.

Role: Web Chair