Special Session 8

SPECIAL SESSION #8

Roberto Vergallo

University of Salento, Italy

• roberto.vergallo@unisalento.it

The newest generation of digital technologies, including virtual reality enhancements, blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), Non Fungible Tokens (NFT), and augmented reality, have been hailed as the future of business management. The framework for Web3, the third major iteration of the Internet that is decentralized for more security and customization, is made up of these technologies. Together with artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), the Web3 has become an emerging technology for many applications and use cases that deeply change our daily lives, for example gaming, social, art and media. The connection of these virtual experiences is sometime referred to as the Metaverse. The Metaverse is also present on augmented and mixed reality (AR/MR) hardware, which promote socially driven immersive content overlaid on the real world.

Despite the growing popularity of the Web3, the concept is still unclear to many. As the next stage of the Internet, Web3, and therefore the Metaverse, is still in its early stages. New technologies are continuously enhancing the Metaverse/Web3 environment, and new research efforts are needed to understand the capabilities and the limitation of these technologies.

This special session aims to gather new papers reporting both new methodologies and specific application cases in the field of Web3 in different contexts like gaming, entertainment, art, healthcare, fashion and retail, public sector, social media and education.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• AR/MR and Web3
• IoT and Web3
• AI and Web3
• Edge computing for Web3
• Crypto Metaverse projects
• Web3 applications
• Web3 standardizations
• Hardware and infrastructure implementation for Web3
• Metaverse economy
• Smart contracts and DAOs in the Metaverse
• NFT, digital assets and tokens
• Media and entertainment in the Metaverse
• Art market
• Cultural heritage on the Web3
• Banking and fintech in the Metaverse
• Semantic computing and services in Web3
• Web3 and Environmental sustainability
• Ethical Web3: values and standards

Roberto Vergallo is a software engineer and researcher at University of Salento (Unisalento - Italy).
He graduated cum laude in Computer Engineering at Unisalento in 2010, and received his Ph.D. in 2015. Since 2007 he has been working on several research projects in Unisalento involving the design and development of middleware for IoT architectures. He is a contributor for the Fosstrak open source RFID platform. He is the inventor of WoX, a Cloud platform for the Internet of Things. During his PhD, he worked as research visitor at the SMERC Lab (Smart Grid Energy Research Center), University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2013 he received a special award from BMW for his research activity in the automotive field. He is co-founder of VidyaSoft srl, a spin-off company of Salento University which received different grants and awards from the banking industry. In Vidyasoft, he is head of the R&D unit. Thanks to his research, Vidyasoft raised 200k€ from the banking industry.
His current research topics focuses on the use of AI, IoT and DLT to improve the customer experience in the banking sector. As a side research activity, he is investigating on the environmental sustainability of software. He is the Unisalento reference for the Green Software Foundation. He is CPOC for the AWS Education program in Unisalento. He is teacher in 2 courses at the Faculty of Engineering in Salento University. Currently he is supervisor for 15 thesis (bachelor and master degree).