Purpose: As regards the assessment of the market values of properties that compose real estate portfolios, the purpose of this paper is to propose and test an automated valuation model. In particular, the method defined allows for providing for objective, reliable and “quick” valuations of the assets in the phases of periodic reviews of the property values.Design/methodology/approach: Aiming at both predictive and interpretative purposes, the method, based on multi-objective genetic algorithms to search those model expressions that simultaneously maximize the accuracy of the data and the parsimony of the mathematical functions, is applied to a sample data of office properties characterized by medium and large size, located in the city of Milan (Italy) and sold in the period between 2004 and 2015.Findings: The model obtained could be an integration of the canonical methodologies (market approach, income approach, cost approach) implemented in the assessment of the market values of properties, so as to provide an additional tool to verify the results. In particular, the inclusion of economic variables in the model is consistent with the need to reiterate the valuations, contextualizing them to the locational characteristics and to the current property cycle phase in the specific area.Practical implications: The model can be applied by all the operators involved in the periodic reviews of the values of property portfolios: from real estate funds’ insiders, in order to monitor the values obtained through the canonical approaches, to the public institutions, such as the revenue agencies, in order to ensure the fair payment of the taxes through the updating values of the properties according to the actual and current market trends.Originality/value: The method proposed can be a valid support for all public and private entities that hold significant property assets and that, for various reasons (periodic reviews of the balance sheets, sales, enhancement, investment, etc.), require cyclical updated values of the properties. The automated valuation model developed can be used for the assessment of “comparison” values with the estimates values obtained by other assessment techniques, in order to ensure a further monitoring tool of the results from the subjects involved.

Everyday life of the elderly and impaired population living in smart homes is challenging because of possible accidents that may occur due to daily activities. In such activities, persons often lean over (to reach something) and, if they not cautious, are prone to falling. To identify fall incidents, which could stochastically cause serious injuries or even death, we propose specific temporal inference models; namely, CM-I and CM-II. These models can infer a fall incident based on classification methods by exploiting wearable Internet of Things (IoT) altimeter sensors adopted by seniors. We analyzed real and synthetic data of fall and lean over incidents to test the proposed models. The results are promising for incorporating such inference models to assist healthcare for fall verification of seniors in smart homes. Specifically, the CM-II model achieved a prediction accuracy of 0.98, which is the highest accuracy when compared to other models in the literature under the McNemar’s test criterion. These models could be incorporated in wearable IoT devices to provide early warning and prediction of fall incidents to clinical doctors.

Balancing energy consumption to prolong the life of a wireless sensor network is a challenging issue for researchers. Most of the energy of a sensor node is consumed in transmitting the data from the sensor node to sink and receiving data from other sensor nodes in multi-hop transmission. That is because the energy consumption is directly proportional to the square of the distance between source and destination. While receiving the data, energy consumption is fixed but considerable. By reducing or minimizing the transmission distance and distributing energy consumption of one node to other overall performance can be improved. Chain-based routing is a novel idea to achieve the goal where each sensor node receives data from one sensor node and transmits it to only one nearest neighbor node in the same chain. Making a single chain of all node balance the energy consumption but creates a considerable delay in data transmission. In this paper, a hybrid energy-efficient scheme combining the chain and tree-based routings has been proposed. The Catenarian-Trim Medley (CTM) routing protocol has been implemented to optimize the transmission distance and energy consumption balancing.

This paper proposes a novel social media relevance feedback algorithm, based on multimedia content power (MCP). The algorithm estimates in a recursive manner, the similarity measure. This is accomplished by using a set of relevant/irrelevant samples, which are provided by the user, in order to adjust the system's response. In particular, the similarity measure is expressed in a parametric form of functional components. Another innovative point has to do with the estimation of MCP, which measures the influence of files over social media users. Toward this direction, user interactions (e.g., comments, likes, and shares) indicate that the file is influencing to them. The algorithm takes into consideration both the visual characteristics of multimedia files and their influence to retrieve information. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme offers several merits and future work is also discussed.