COBOL: COmmunity-Based Organized Littering

Littering is a major problem that threatens the environment, society, and economy. Keep track, monitor and regularly clean littering sites can be a crucial problem that involves public authorities, municipalities, companies, and citizens. So far approaches have not well leveraged the knowledge and capabilities that derive from the federation of multiple communities, such as cities, public bodies, and organizations. In this paper, we describe the COBOL project, a National PRIN (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) PNRR (Piano Nazionale Ripresa e Resilienza) project funded by the Italian MUR (Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca) in 2023. The project aims to definite a flexible framework for managing the waste disposal process through a federated learning architecture that collects and integrates the reports (e.g., annotated pictures and user feedback) shared by the communities involved in the waste disposal process. To deliver an advanced waste disposal service based on the direct participation of citizens, COBOL also integrates Model-Driven Engineering principles, Computer Vision techniques, and Self-Adaptation mechanisms. Early results show that reports can be effectively collected and processed with COBOL.