Type
SPIN-OFF
Text
Registered and Administrative Office: 4 Edoardo Orabona Street, 70125 BARI (BA)
Type: spin-off
VAT No.: 08594460720
Purpose/Description of Activities: donkeyPower s.r.l. is an academic spin-off of the Polytechnic University of Bari. Established in 2021, it develops innovative solutions for the Semantic Web of Things (SWoT), a new vision within the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which integrates two trends that have emerged and evolved in recent years: the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things (IoT). The Semantic Web was created with the aim of enabling targeted use of technically high-quality data on the Web, as well as the reuse and, above all, the automatic processing of information by intelligent software agents. The Internet of Things, on the other hand, promotes ubiquitous computing on a large scale: intelligence and information are embedded in physical objects and places characterized by heterogeneous micro-devices. Each of them carries a small amount of useful information which, when associated with that of other components, helps define knowledge for complex and unpredictable environments. The Semantic Web of Things aims to adapt technologies initially developed for the Semantic Web in order to increase the informational quality of the contents of objects in the IoT and define knowledge-based pervasive systems. The donkeyPower team is composed of computer, electronic, and management engineers with diverse and complementary skills, many years of experience in the applied research sector, and strong ties with local, national, and partly international entrepreneurship in the ICT sector. The founding partners of donkeyPower have participated as researchers in numerous public-private R&D projects, often taking on roles as consortium coordinators or node coordinators. The experience gained is applied daily in business processes, ensuring effective management and planning of activities. The continuous connection with the academic and industrial world also guarantees the spin-off primary visibility, supporting participation in new research proposals and initiating phases of experimentation and use of innovative tools and services in numerous application areas.
Products/Services: Solutions for the Semantic Web of Things In the Semantic Web of Things, Semantic Web technologies (developed to enable software agents to annotate, understand, use, and combine information on the Web) are adapted with reference to data and events generated by devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). Automatic inference and semantic matchmaking A semantic matchmaking and automatic inference engine, designed and optimized by donkeyPower for the Semantic Web of Things, makes automatic reasoning possible even on minimal hardware devices where memory and processing capacity constraints are stringent. Semantic matchmaking is an information retrieval process that supports resource discovery, event identification, decision support, and automated decision-making in a variety of scenarios. The system is compatible with the main Semantic Web technologies and protocols. Thanks to a cross-platform architecture, it supports Java Standard Edition, Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, embedded operating systems, and Web applications, enabling integration into applications developed in C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Swift, and JavaScript. Explainable machine learning for IoT New IoT applications and services are based on an intelligent understanding of the environment by leveraging data streams collected through heterogeneous sensors. Although increasingly effective, Machine Learning techniques generally do not go beyond the classification of events with opaque labels, lacking a representation that can be understood by devices and interpreted by human beings. The problem of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is at the center of attention in both research and industry, due to the growing application of artificial intelligence algorithms to make critical decisions in numerous sectors and to legislation (such as the GDPR) that protects citizens' right to know the reasons behind the results of automatic systems that process their data. Mafalda is donkeyPower's innovative framework for semantic data mining on sensor streams in pervasive contexts. By treating the typical machine learning classification problem as resource discovery through semantic matchmaking, the produced results and trained models are equipped with articulated descriptions in the standard languages of the Semantic Web, enabling a clear and rigorous explanation that justifies users' trust. Personal virtual assistants for safe driving donkeyPower has developed iDriveSafe, a mobile solution for on-board diagnostics and driving assistance for automobiles. Through the acquisition of OBD-II (On Board Diagnostics) parameters on the vehicle's operating status, the system is able to assess its state of health, classify driving style, and identify the characteristics of the road surface and traffic. By leveraging semantic matchmaking, it suggests to the driver how to reduce or even eliminate risks and achieve better performance and lower environmental impact. Location-based services The market for location-based services is growing and still has significant room for development. Current systems for searching points of interest and assisted navigation, however, are essentially based on keywords or lists of predefined categories. By leveraging the annotation of points of interest and the characterization of the user profile on a semantic basis, donkeyPower offers advanced discovery solutions for georeferenced places and services, ensuring higher precision and the possibility of refining the search based on the specific characteristics of the results found. The proposed solutions can be integrated into innovative user interfaces developed for the most widespread map rendering engines and for augmented reality devices. Home automation Current home automation ecosystems offer a low degree of interoperability and standardization. Above all, the quality of user interaction is limited, supporting only the execution of explicit commands or preconfigured scenarios, without real intelligence and adaptability to changes in context or user status. By using the most widespread standard protocols for home automation and Semantic Web technologies for the characterization of devices, services, and user profiles, donkeyPower offers solutions for intelligent monitoring of the state of the environment and the characteristics of its occupants, with dynamic orchestration of devices and subsystems of the home automation system to automatically and on-the-fly reconfigure themselves in response to any significant variation. Healthcare Through the semantic annotation of the patient's clinical profile – applied to NFC and RFID tags – and the modeling of a knowledge graph relating to the medical specialty, donkeyPower offers solutions based on semantic matchmaking processes for the discovery of the most appropriate therapies and a formally grounded explanation of the results provided. Other notable features include the identification of potential side effects and harmful interactions with treatments already being taken by the patient. The proposed solutions are suitable for computing devices with limited resources, enabling deployment not only in hospital settings but also in telemedicine, home care, first aid, and ambulance transport. Blockchain The integration of knowledge representation and automatic reasoning technologies into blockchain platforms enables donkeyPower to offer innovative solutions for supply chain management and marketplaces with open or restricted access, ensuring data integrity, process traceability, scalability, and compliance with current regulations for private companies and public administrations. The developed prototypes enable the integration of IoT devices into the blockchain and the execution of advanced smart contracts based on inference services, adaptable to specific application scenarios. Research projects and digital transformation With over ten years of experience in research projects funded at the European, national, and regional levels, the donkeyPower team provides assistance in the formalization and execution of industrial research and experimental development projects in the ICT sector. donkeyPower's core competences make it the ideal partner to lead digital transformation processes and compete in the rapidly evolving scenarios of Industry 4.0 and Artificial Intelligence.
Date of incorporation: Tuesday, 13 July, 2021
Shareholding held: 0
Duration of Poliba participation (start - end): not planned
Share Capital: € 10000,00
Financial Statements Results: there is no obligation to publish the financial statement data since the company is not owned by the University, as it is an academic spin-off that does not provide for shareholdings by Poliba
Annual fee charged to the Poliba budget: 0
Number of Poliba representatives in the Company's governing bodies: 0
Role of Poliba representatives in the Company's governing bodies: not envisaged
Total remuneration of Poliba representatives in the Company's governing bodies: 0
Appointments as company director/etc.: legal representative and chairman of the board of directors: Prof. Eng. Michele Ruta - vice-chairwoman of the board of directors: Eng. Agnese Pinto - other partners: Prof. Eng. Eugenio Di Sciascio, Prof. Eng. Floriano Scioscia, Prof. Eng. Giuseppe Loseto, Eng. Filippo Gramegna, Eng. Saverio Ieva https://www.donkeypower.it/
Total remuneration of the Company's Director: 0
Notes: Declaration on the absence of one of the causes of non-assignability of the appointment (link to the entity's website) https://www.donkeypower.it/
Declaration on the absence of one of the causes of incompatibility with the conferral of the appointment (link to the entity's website) https://www.donkeypower.it/
