Preferences are a central concept of decision making. Preference models are needed in decision-support systems such as web-based recommender systems, in automated problem solvers such as configurators, and in multi-agent scenarios where we need to combine preferences given by several agents.

Natural language processing provides technologies for the analysis and processing of text documents.  These techniques can be exploited in applications such as question answering, information extraction from documents, and text summarization and translation. Core research is being conducted in the following areas:

• natural language parsing

• semantic parsing

• part-of-speech tagging

People: Giorgio Satta (contact person)

High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms feature many processors sharing a fast communication medium and a deep memory hierarchy. Selecting a good abstract machine model for algorithm design on these platforms requires striking the right tradeoff between the largely conflicting goals of usability (ease of design and analysis), effectiveness (predictable performance on the actualÊ machines), and portability (effectiveness across machines). Some specific research themes pursued are the following:

To harness the performance potential of today's complex computing platforms, applications have to be optimized in several dimensions, such as number of operations, parallelism, access to the memory system, communication among processing nodes. Computer science methodologies are fruitfully combined with domain specific knowledge in various areas of scientific and technical computing. Examples:

• Developing biomechanical tools which allow a better understanding of the impact of training programs or clinical interventions on people's suffering of diabetes, stroke, rheumatic diseases, Parkinson's disease, flat or cavus foot, maxillary transverse discrepancy, fragile X syndrome
• Developing markerless motion capture software application able to collect data also underwater
• Developing systems for simultaneous acquisition of motion capture, ground reaction forces and plantar pressure data during gait

• Corneal nerve images from confocal microscopy: segmentation of nerve structures, estimation of clinical parameters, such as tortuosity, nerve density, etc. Composition of several images into large mosaic images.

• Corneal epithelium images from confocal and specular microscopy: segmentation of cell contours, estimation of clinical parameters cell density, pleomorphism, polymegethism.