Sentiment analysis, social networks analysis, and social media sensing are becoming important tools to extract meaningful information from text, adopted in several contexts, ranging from social interactions, touristic activities, shopping and e-commerce, to name a few. In particular, the current CoVid-19 quarantine the world is witnessing has shown the potential of such tools as a way to monitor and understand people’s mood and feelings, in a time where people are resorting, more than ever, to social networks to engage and communicate with others. Indeed, when performing social network content analysis, privacy is a major concern. On the one hand, privacy issues and international laws and acts drive such analysis (e.g., GDPR), with the aim of protecting persons’ privacy and security. On the other hand, these can limit somehow such activities. Hence, a precise and accurate identification of the strategies to adopt should be done to balance privacy issues and sentiment analysis activities. Taking into account the requirements of a Urban Innovation Action project, which is based on the active involvement of citizens, this work aims to describe limitations and potentialities of social networks monitoring and analysis to understand users’ mood about the project actions adopted in the city of Ravenna (in Italy) to improve specific districts.

Indoor wayfinding systems are still presenting challenges and open issues in providing accurate directions while navigating complex and large buildings. When considering users who are experiencing any kind of vision loss, these issues can become really serious to tackle. To facilitate users (both visually impaired people and people without disabilities) in navigating an indoor environment, we designed and implemented a pervasive system taking advantage of the beacon technology and an accessible mobile application. In this paper, we present the system design issues and implementation challenges we addressed to provide user-friendly services in indoor contexts, exploiting the Proximity technique.

UniOn is an application for smartphone and tablets developed within ILOCALAPP (www.ilocalapp.eu ), a European project coordinated by the University of Bologna. UniOn exists in four versions, one for each city involved in the project (Bologna, Coimbra, Poznan and Rovaniemi), and it is meant to foster the incidental learning of the language and the culture related to the city (respectively, Italian, Portuguese, Polish and Finnish). The fruition and the understanding of the contents (reading, listening, etc.) directly in the places let the users get in touch with aspects of language and culture in an implicit, non intentional way. UniOn has been created to cope with the specific needs of international students living a mobility experience, but it has become soon an interesting tool also for other typologies of travellers (high-school students, university students coming from other cities, tourists, migrants). In this article we will illustrate the main app features and its development based on a user-centred design approach. We will focus upon the Bologna version of the app to show how the app is being used, and how both the city and the users' experience of the city play a crucial role.

This paper presents the user-centered design methodologies applied in the ILOCALAPP project, with the aim of designing and developing a mobile application which applies the incidental learning paradigm in the field of foreign cultures and languages. Such methodologies are strongly based on stakeholders' consultations, by involving potential end-users in a dialogue that plays a crucial role in identifying users' needs and expectations. Results of such methodologies application are presented in this paper and are at the basis of the current stage of the project: the development of the mobile application.