Blockchain technology is receiving an ever-increasing attention. In this work, we present pros and cons of this technology, by taking the point of view of (IT) professionals evaluating whether to embrace this technology or not for their business. Use cases selected from a particular domain represented by the insurance sector are analyzed, and several application guidelines that can be generalized and applied to other sectors are identified

The last couple of years witnessed the explosion of two major technological revolutions, with vehicles, that started to be regarded as the next frontier for artificial intelligence and blockchain, which began to be considered by the wider public for the great changes it could bring in a number of heterogeneous domains. In order to take part in these revolutions, in this paper we show how blockchain and sensors installed on a vehicle could be combined to (semi-)automatically activate/deactivate car insurance covers in an envisaged on-demand insurance scenario. We present a prototype, which includes a mobile app and a portable electronic device to be installed onboard. The mobile app lets the driver dynamically change the status of specific insurance covers (in some cases, after pictures of the vehicle have been taken to attest its conditions). Each modification (and picture hash) is saved on the blockchain within a smart contract, in order to certify changes made (and vehicle's status). Sensors embedded in the electronic device are used to collect passengers' and vehicle's data. Data are then used to automatically modify insurance covers based on car/environment conditions and preferences set. The proposed solution could help lowering policy modification costs and limiting insurance frauds.

Computer-supported assessment tools can bring significant benefits to both students and teachers. When integrated in traditional education workflows, they may help to reduce the time required to perform the evaluation and consolidate the perception of fairness of the overall process. When integrated within on-line intelligent tutoring systems, they could provide students with a timely feedback and support self-assessment activities. The current work presents an alternative approach (and not just a \"yet-another-implementation\") to the problem of automatically evaluating technical skills needed to create 3D computer animations. Although some solutions have been reported already in the literature, their applicability is partially constrained, as they require the teaching staff to define evaluation criteria that are strictly linked to the particular animation technique being assessed. Students are forced to operate in environments where they can only perform a part of the required animation steps, by using a pre-defined set of techniques and tools. To address such limitations, the proposed system exploits shape- and time-based features extracted from the 3D point clouds (i.e., the set of data points) describing animated geometries, which are independent of the particular animation techniques used. Experimental observations collected in the evaluation of course assignments in which students were asked to recreate 3D animations of deformable meshes prepared by the teaching staff showed a good correlation between automatic and manual evaluations. Obtained results confirmed the ability of the proposed approach to cope with heterogeneous evaluation tasks in which the relevant learning outcomes can be properly considered.

Advancements in input device and sensor technologies led to the evolution of the traditional human-machine interaction paradigm based on the mouse and keyboard. Touch-, gesture- and voice-based interfaces are integrated today in a variety of applications running on consumer devices (e.g., gaming consoles and smartphones). However, to allow existing applications running on desktop computers to utilize natural interaction, significant re-design and re-coding efforts may be required. In this paper, a framework designed to transparently add multi-modal interaction capabilities to applications to which users are accustomed is presented. Experimental observations confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed framework and led to a classification of those applications that could benefit more from the availability of natural interaction modalities

The ever more complex labor world and the current economic crisis ask learners and workers to continuously update their qualification level to stay relevant on the market. Hence, education and training providers need to adjust their offer in order to cope with such evolving requirements. However, because of the huge number of variables to consider, finding the right learning content able to let an individual fill his/her competency gap may be a task hard to accomplish. In this paper we propose a semantic-based recommender system that is designed to cross heterogeneous information about learners' and workers' background as well as advertised job positions with a catalogue of online courses in order to identify the most appropriate learning resources. Experimental observations showed a good agreement between human and automatic recommendations, confirming the applicability of the emerging semantic technology to the generation of user-centered services capable to adapt to individual's learning needs

This survey of current job search and recruitment tools focuses on applying a computer-based approach to job matchmaking. The authors present a semantic-based software platform, LO-MATCH - developed in the framework of a European project on lifelong learning - that highlights future research directions. There are three related Web extras that provide supplemental material

When moving in generic indoor environments, robotic platforms generally rely solely on information provided by onboard sensors to determine their position and orientation. However, the lack of absolute references often leads to the introduction of severe drifts in estimates computed, making autonomous operations really hard to accomplish. This paper proposes a solution to alleviate the impact of the above issues by combining two vision‐based pose estimation techniques working on relative and absolute coordinate systems, respectively. In particular, the unknown ground features in the images that are captured by the vertical camera of a mobile platform are processed by a vision‐based odometry algorithm, which is capable of estimating the relative frame‐to‐frame movements. Then, errors accumulated in the above step are corrected using artificial markers displaced at known positions in the environment. The markers are framed from time to time, which allows the robot to maintain the drifts bounded by additionally providing it with the navigation commands needed for autonomous flight. Accuracy and robustness of the designed technique are demonstrated using an off‐the‐shelf quadrotor via extensive experimental tests

In recent years, mobility of students and workers started to be considered as a way for answering skill shortages in the European labor world. However, in order to implement effective mobility practices, suitable instruments supporting transparency and readability of the outcomes of learning processes as well as of the needs of companies and employers in general have to be developed. In fact, though some instruments have been introduced (like, for instance, the European Qualification Framework, EQF, the European Credit system for Vocational Education and Training, ECVET, etc.), they are often seen as theoretical tools rather than a practical help for involved stakeholders. In this work, the results of the TIPTOE project, a transnational initiative funded by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme are illustrated. In particular, the semantic-based methodology for the construction of a European-wide profile mixing education and labor worlds perspectives in the trade sector is discussed. Furthermore, a number of tools allowing end-users to compare owned qualifications to the reference one and supporting stakeholders in the reading of national educational and occupational profiles in the EQF dimension are presented

The customer mostly chooses a product on the base of its quality, which therefore arises as the main cause of its commercial success. In a nearly axiomatic drawing, it follows that the effect of innovation is the improvement of quality, which itself becomes the aim of innovation. Even though the previous statement relates quality and innovation, it still does not explain their dynamics. To stress them, the ‘quality' concept must be analyzed in more detail. In fact, in addition to the ‘perceived quality', the quality ensured through `design, manufacturing and marketing' combined domains should be dealt with. This paper enhances this issue taking advantage of principles and models made available by control theory schemes coupled with quality function development (QFD) and best practice software modeling based on unified modeling language (UML)

With the tremendous growth of information available to end users through the Web, search engines come to play ever a more critical role. Nevertheless, because of their general-purpose approach, it is always less uncommon that obtained result sets provide a burden of useless pages. The next-generation Web architecture, represented by the Semantic Web, provides the layered architecture possibly allowing overcoming this limitation. Several search engines have been proposed, which allow increasing information retrieval accuracy by exploiting a key content of Semantic Web resources, that is, relations. However, in order to rank results, most of the existing solutions need to work on the whole annotated knowledge base. In this paper, we propose a relation-based page rank algorithm to be used in conjunction with Semantic Web search engines that simply relies on information that could be extracted from user queries and on annotated resources. Relevance is measured as the probability that a retrieved resource actually contains those relations whose existence was assumed by the user at the time of query definition

Some performance results obtained by simulating the behavior of a local area network based on the IEEE 802.5 standard are presented. The simulation model has been designed to evaluate the mean response time observed by the user of the LLC (logical link control) service, instead of measuring the turnaround time experienced by the medium access control user; i.e. the performance index is the average delay between the message generation and the receipt of the corresponding acknowledgement. Type-3 LLC service is analyzed since it appears particularly attractive in industrial LANs concerned with real-time activities and adopting reduced protocol profiles. The effect of having different priority classes for the messages in the network system has been studied. Some results that demonstrate the existence of a practical upper bound to the maximum value of the token holding time have been obtained

Learning semantics, which is intended as a way to provide digital learning resources with a meaning and make them processable by machines by mimicking human reasoning, is changing the way teaching and learning processes are being carried out. Through semantic processing, a machine could act as a personal assistant at the service of learners, trainers and other actors involved in the education context, and could help them to address knowledge-intensive problems, encompassing the creation, management and personalization of learning paths, the identification of suitable learning resources, the automatic grading of assignments and exams, etc. This paper aims to draft an overall picture of learning semantics, by illustrating enabling technologies, providing hints on how a semantic system for learning could be realized, presenting relevant application scenarios, showing expected benefits, discussing challenges and threats and outlining possible solutions.

Brain injury can cause a variety of physical effects and cognitive deficits. Although it has not yet been systematically adopted in clinical settings, virtual reality promises to be an excellent therapeutic tool for regaining both locomotor and neurological capacities. This work presents the design and implementation of VR2 (Virtual Reality Rehabilitation), a customizable rehabilitation framework intended to enable the creation of motivating rehabilitation scenarios based on an ecologically valid semi-immersive system. Following the implementation phase, a study to test the acceptability of VR2 in a group of subjects with cerebral lesions was conducted to investigate the usability of the framework. The group consisted of 11 people from 22 to 70 years of age, who were divided into two groups depending on the chronicity of disorder. The adequacy of the interface between patient and system was verified through questionnaires containing subjective questions, which revealed good overall acceptance and enjoyment of the tool. Moreover, to obtain early results useful for tuning the overall system in preparation for rigorous clinical trials, a set of preliminary cognitive tests concerning the rehabilitation protocol was conducted within the same group. Although the preliminary findings are promising and reveal a positive trend in neurocognitive investigations, the system should undergo clinical trials before being used in real clinical settings.

The technological development that has taken place over recent years has affected the way that the Web is exploited by users. In fact, a user is no longer seen as a mere observer; instead, he or she actively takes part in the production of new knowledge, which is then made available to other users. In this scenario, which is characterized by ever-growing information, new approaches (e.g., based on semantic technologies) for processing large amounts of content must be developed. Other sectors, including education and learning, as well as job seeking and hiring activities, could benefit from the exploitation of tools that can be developed within the Semantic Web initiative. As a consequence of the use of semantic technologies, learners could find more efficient training paths that provide them with their missing areas of competence and training institutes could analyze and modify existing qualifications according to a market's requirements, while companies could effectively identify the best candidates for a given job, not only within national boundaries but also worldwide. This study aims to present an overview of recent research in the field of semantic technologies applied to education and job-seeking contexts. Issues that are related to students' and workers' mobility, job seeking and hiring and the improvement of qualification offers will be analyzed and compared, by distinguishing three fields of research: knowledge base creation, the development of strategies for the integration of heterogeneous systems and the definition of inference rules, and the identification of methodologies for the visualization of qualification outcomes and curricula

Welcome message from the Student Research Symposium Chairs at IEEE COMPSAC 2017

The ability to plan a training path fulfilling working needs plays a key role, when it comes to finding the desired job. Nonetheless, in a dynamic scenario characterized by frequent technological innovations and economic changes, as the present one, getting a clear picture of the requirements of the world of work could become difficult, as it would imply performing a deep periodic evaluation of available job offers, and matching them with own previous experience. Intelligent systems able to automatically match résumés with job offers already exist, but they are mostly targeted to recruiters, instead of learners. This work aims at filling this gap, by presenting a system for comparing learners' acquirements - expressed in terms of learning outcomes - with companies requirements. The proposed system relies on semantics for processing natural language texts and exploits bar charts to visualize learning outcomes and their levels in order to quickly depict similarities and differences between résumés and job offers. An evaluation, conducted on 50 volunteers, underlined the added value of the system.

Drone-based delivery of goods could become a reality in the near future, as witnessed by the increasing successful experiences in both research and commercial fields. In this paper, a prototype system exploiting a do it yourself quad copter drone for delivering products is proposed. On the one hand, the hardware choices made in order to limit risks arising from autonomous delivery are presented. On the other hand, a framework for orders placement and shipment is shown. The advantages of a system like the one described in this paper are mainly related to an increased delivery speed, especially in urban contexts with traffic, to the possibility to make deliveries in areas usually difficult to be reached, and to the drone's ability to autonomously carry out consignments. A practical use case, in which the proposed system is used for delivering drugs (an application in which the need to quickly receive the good might be particularly important) is shown. Nevertheless, the proposed prototype could be employed in other contexts, such as take-away deliveries, product shipments, registered mail consignments, etc

The availability of annotated multimedia contents is a crucial requirement for a number of applications. In the context of education it could support the automatic summarization of recorded lessons or the retrieval of learning material. In the field of entertainment, it could serve to recommend audio and video resources based on user's attitudes. In this work, a framework supporting video viewing experience augmentation on mobile devices by means of image- and text-based annotations extracted on-demand from Wikipedia is presented. Speech recognition is exploited to periodically get text snaps from the audio track of the video currently displayed on the mobile device, while query-by-images is used to generate a text summary of extracted video frames. Keywords obtained are treated by semantic techniques to find named entities associated with the multimedia contents, which are then superimposed to the video and displayed to the user in a synchronized way. Promising results obtained with a prototype implementation showed the feasibility of the proposed solution, which could be possibly combined with other systems, e.g., providing information about user's location, preferences, etc. to build up more sophisticated context-aware applications

This paper presents a new architecture supporting the development of enhanced reading applications. It exploits the thin-client paradigm to let the authors produce interactive components to be embedded in today e-books, thus enriching text contents with focused and customized graphics widgets generated from the interface of existing programs running in remote

Students and learners mobility is more and more becoming a praxis. Nonetheless, despite the legislative efforts carried out by the European Commission, devoted to the definition of standards for describing qualifications, the comparison of qualifications contents, for instance in the phases of identification of more suitable training to attend abroad, or during the recognition of prior learning, still requires a considerable amount of efforts and time. This difficulty could be mainly attributed to the fact that qualification contents are usually expressed heterogeneously. In this work, a way to tackle this heterogeneity, by relying on a semantic thesaurus for graphically displaying main similarities and dissimilarities among qualifications is presented. By means of such representation, users could quickly become aware of the main characteristics of a training course, with respect to the others, without having to read all the textual information related to them

This work describes the \"CSCT Living Lab\", where a new approach to learning, based on computational thinking and inquiry-based science, is practiced and shaped. Ten high schools, together with seven technical institutions and other three, chosen among vocational ones, have been involved. All these members, represented by teachers interested in joining the process, gave life to the lab, where enhanced scenarios for learning are planned, implemented and traced. An abstraction model is also proposed, to promote a collaborative learning context for teachers and students, derived from effective experiences carried out at University and Politecnico di Torino. A specific example, coming from process control domain, is described to show part of the scenario adopted to make inter-disciplinary learning a sustainable and effective experience

In this paper, a framework allowing to extend the applicability of natural user interaction techniques to existing programs is presented. Body gestures captured by a depth camera are mapped to application commands, and a wide set of common desktop applications can be controlled without any code rewriting

The Project PP&S100, Problem Posing & Solving, is part of a set of initiatives promoted by the General Directorate of the Italian Ministry of Education, Research and University, for supporting the many innovations that have recently affected curricula at the upper secondary level. Main goals of the project include strengthening computer science culture and enhancing its role as a scientific discipline; founding education processes on logics, mathematics and computer science weaved together to pursue an interdisciplinary scenario, building a culture of \"problem posing and solving\" by investing across a broad disciplinary group of subjects, ensuring growth of computer science based training of trainers and practicing activities within specific social networks and virtual learning environment to share learning materials, teaching supplies, mentoring and self-evaluation. This work presents a hierarchical conceptual model for \"Computational Thinking\" assumed by PP&S100, formalized according to the outcomes shown by information systems courses held at the Politecnico di Torino and validated using Process Control as an information system instance

Big Data is today both an emerging research area and a real present and future demand. High Performance Computing (HPC) Centers cannot neglect this fact and have to be reshaped to fulfill this need. In this paper we share our experience of upgrading a HPC Center at Politecnico di Torino, originally designed and deployed in 2010. We believe that this issue could be common to some other existing \"general purpose\" HPC centers where, at least in the short term, the possibility to start from scratch a new Big Data HPC center cannot be afforded but a balanced upgrade of the existing system has to be preferred

After an era of \"personal-computers-only\", supercomputing facilities and services are coming back to Universities to support research activities and computationally intensive simulations, but with some important differences with respect to the past. Besides the technological issues, while in the seventies-eighties the scene was dominated by mainframes, managed by skilled system managers and most of times used by operators with good computer expertise, today, the widespread and pervasive use of computers has lead to a completely different scenario. The demand for computation resources is emerging from a wide variety of areas and disciplines and mostly by users with basic expertise in computers, who however most of times request to have full control of the computation resources. Within this picture and especially at University level, High Performance Computing (HPC) has emerged as a good tradeoff to meet the different demands, and at the same offering good services at reasonable setup and maintenance costs. Traditionally, HPC has been and is being mostly used in support to applied research, but more recently some questions have emerged: - How much is it reasonable to offer HPC also to some teaching activities? What are the problems, advantages, and drawbacks? Is this the \"right\" way or should HPC resources be directed to research only? At Politecnico di Torino we tried to respond to these questions and started a test project called HPC-4-teaching. In this paper we present the results achieved by this project on a small set of courses during one full academic year

Recently a new process to treat med-wastes close to the production sites has been settled-up. The process consists first in a smart collection of med-wastes at the hospitals. Then, med-wastes are grinded and sterilised in an apparatus called ma.ster.waste. The product of the ma.ster.waste, the so-called fluff (sterile and fluffy particles), possesses an average LHV of 25.3 MJ kg-1. Preliminary lab studies demonstrated the feasibility of transforming the fluff into a syngas with an average LHV of 15 MJ Nm- 3. The so-produced syngas can be directly fed to SOFC units, or it can be further transformed into hydrogen through specific CO clean-up processes for feeding PEMFC units for the production of clean energy

Citizens' mobility and employability are receiving ever more attention by the European legislation. Various instruments have been defined to overcome lexical and semantic differences in the descriptions of qualifications, résumés and job profiles. However, the above differences still represent a significant constraint when abilities of non-European people have to be validated either for education and training or occupation purposes. In this work, a web platform that exploits semantic technologies to address such heterogeneity issues is presented. The platform allows migrants to annotate their knowledge, skills and competences in a shared format based on the European tools. The resulting knowledge base is then used to enable the automatic matchmaking of job seekers' abilities with companies' needs. The platform can additionally be used to support students and workers in the identification of their competence gap with respect to a given education or occupation opportunity, so that to personalize their further training

In recent years there has been an increasing effort in investigating integrated solutions to reduce energy consumption levels in different domains. In this perspective, tools thought as a support for the simulation and experimentation of energy saving strategies could constitute a valid help both in the design and validation phases. Within the above scenario, this paper presents a framework for monitoring, simulating and controlling energy-aware street lighting systems capable of optimizing their energy consumption levels based on environmental conditions and established lighting policies. The devised system allows operators to visually inspect (and control) the power saving impact of specific dimming rules in both monitored and simulated environments through the use of advanced 3D vision and interaction capabilities. In fact, a virtual interface is able to recreate the lighting effect within digital city environments, which can be explored by using immersive stereoscopic techniques. Moreover, natural user interfaces based on the recognition of user gestures and poses and voice commands are exploited to improve virtual navigation of the lighting infrastructures. By addressing all the presented aspects, the proposed system aims at constituting an effective tool to develop and analyze energy saving solutions in the domain of (but not necessarily limited to) future public street lighting.

Cloud computing is regarded to as an impressive technology, as software and hardware resources become invisible to the users (they \"fade\" in the cloud), and they replaced by services. In this sense, cloud computing can be considered as an evolution of former virtualization approaches, with service providers delivering on-demand access to various back-end frameworks and front-end applications. This approach requires to strongly trust these providers, as users are forced to give up control on programs and data that were previously hosted on their machines. A possible way to alleviate this drawback could be to enable users \"participate\" to the cloud with their own applications, thus creating \"personal\" clouds, which could be even shared with other users. In this paper, we present a prototype implementation of the above idea, which consists of a framework that allows today's applications to be put into the cloud by exploiting user interface automation and accessibility information embedded in modern window-based graphics toolkits

La mobilità di lavoratori e studenti rappresenta oggi un obiettivo di primaria importanza, in particolare nel contesto della istruzione e formazione professionale. Ciononostante, sebbene a livello Europeo siano stati sviluppati alcuni importanti strumenti a supporto della mobilità, esistono tuttora significative barriere che ostacolano la realizzazione di una concreto spazio comune del lavoro e dell'educazione. Una possibilità per superare le suddette limitazioni consiste nella creazione di profili professionali con validità trans-nazionale o trans-settoriale, che possano essere utilizzati dagli organismi di formazione e dagli attori di riferimento dei diversi settori economici per il raccordo tra qualifiche nazionali, regionali o settoriali. In questo lavoro viene illustrata una metodologia che sfrutta un approccio derivato da web semantico basato su ontologie e tassonomie per identificare un profilo comune Europeo nel settore del commercio e per raccordare singoli profili e qualifiche al Quadro Europeo delle Qualifiche a supporto della crescita di un mondo della formazione efficacemente connesso a quello del lavoro in una reale dimensione Europea

La realizzazione di reti per illuminazione stradale basate su tecnologie innovative e su soluzioni di monitoraggio e controllo intelligenti può indubbiamente contribuire ad una gestione più razionale ed efficiente delle risorse energetiche. In questo lavoro viene presentata una piattaforma software basata su soluzioni web e su tecniche di computer grafica e realtà virtuale progettata per la simulazione e la supervisione remota di infrastrutture pubbliche di illuminazione basate su punti luce a LED intelligenti in uno scenario di città digitale

The labor market is today characterized by a marked competitiveness. The ability to accurately choose the right education and training paths leading to the acquisition of the right competences required for a given job position, as well as the capability to properly select human resources based on precise job requirements are becoming more and more key factors to success. Nevertheless, the comparison of education opportunities generally requires a manual analysis of huge qualification descriptions and course syllabi, whereas staff selection (or job seeking activities) often relies on non-automated processes mainly based on an extensive check of applicants' curriculum vitae (or of possible job offers). The above tasks are extremely time consuming and, given the large amount of information to be considered, they also risk to provide unsatisfactory results. In this paper, the above issues are addressed in the perspective of semantic technologies. In particular, a webbased application is presented, which exploits ontological descriptions and tag cloud-based visualization strategies to generate a direct representation of the overlap between learners' needs and existing education and training paths, as well as between job seekers' profiles and company requirements. This way, potential users are provided with an effective support for matching job and study offers with corresponding demands

Students and workers mobility in the European scenario represents today a big challenge. During the last years, several initiatives have been carried out to deal with the above picture, being the European Qualication Framework (EQF), a common architecture for describing qualications, one of the most signicant. In parallel, several research activities were established with the aim of exploiting semantic technologies for qualication comparison in the context of human resources acquisition. In this paper, the EQF specications are applied in a practical scenario to develop a ranking algorithm allowing for qualication comparison on the basis of knowledge, skill and competence concepts, potentially aimed at supporting European employers during the recruitment phases

Students' mobility is a relevant topic but, while in Higher Education transfers between Universities are a praxis, in Vocational Educational and Training are still a declaration of intent. The main obstacles are basically related to the heterogeneity of national qualification systems, and to the lack for definitive transparency measures. Although several European instruments are being introduced in this perspective (like the European Qualification Framework), the internationalization process is still in a preliminary phase. In this paper, a methodology exploiting formal descriptions for supporting the creation of mutual understanding and for defining transnational referencing rules is defined. Rules, developed by actors involved in VET provision, are then applied to a knowledge base hosting annotated national qualifications to experiment qualification comparison and to measure competence gap

This work presents the methodology used to leverage ontologies for the vocational education & training (VET) domain under an European context.The ontology use provides a means to tackle the problem of information integration of the qualification systems on each country, allowing a common data access. The project involved qualification systems at post-secondary non-academic level of diverse EU countries, formalizing their profiles, activities, competences, learning outcomes, etc. In particular, the Dutch system is used as study case

In this paper an agri-food traceability system based on public key cryptography and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is proposed. In order to guarantee safety in food, an efficient tracking and tracing system is required. RFID devices allow recording all useful information for traceability directly on the commodity. The security issues are discussed and two different methods based on public cryptography are proposed and evaluated. The first algorithm uses a nested RSA based structure to improve security, while the second also provides authenticity of data. An experimental analysis demonstrated that the proposed system is well suitable on PDAs too

The present work describes the work carried out in the EU LdV HELeN Projec regarding the use of web ontologies as a way to tackle the qualification systems? integration for enabling transparency and mobility of students at European level. Qualification systems at post-secondary non-academic level of nine EU countries have been formalized in terms of profile, activities, competences, learning outcomes, etc. first using UML for a human-readable model and then using OWL for a machine-processable one. In addition, concrete qualification profiles have been used as study case to validate the ontology correctness

This work presents the use of ontologies as a way to tackle the problem of integration of qualification systems in order to enable the transparency and mobility of students at European level. For this, qualification systems at post-secondary non-academic levels of nine EU countries have been formalized in terms of profile, activities, competences, learning outcomes, etc., first using UML for a human-readable model and then using OWL for a machine-processable one. In addition, concrete qualification profiles have been used as a case study to check the models' correctness

The design of accurate in silico cancer models capable of quantitatively predicting tumor growth is an important goal in cancer research today. Mesoscopic models have shown great promise in this scenario; however, their use is often inhibited by the difficulty in correctly assigning parameter values. In this paper, enabled by an extremely computationally efficient mesoscopic model, we propose a Genetic Algorithms' (GAs) approach to the exploration of parameter space. Analysis of the results suggest that this novel application of GAs to tumor growth models both facilitates the attribution of parameter values to the fitting of experimental data and, more importantly, lends insight to the role played by the different parameters in regulating the tumor model growth.

Demand-responsive transport services are systems that assign users ' specific transport requests to different vehicles enabled to fulfill the required service. In order to contain costs, maximize profits or get a higher service level, different planning algorithms have been described in literature. In our work we propose a multi-agent architecture, which adopts a mixed planning model. This model is an integration of centralized and negotiation based decision-making approaches. The advantage of using this model respect to a centralized approach is that the estimation of the uti1ir) function is avoided (the client is involved in the final decision by means of a negotiation process). The model advantages a complete decentralized approach in giving results that are not so far from the optimum for the whole system.

In this paper the design and development of a low-cost homecare architecture for remote patient telemetry built upon a Java-based embedded computer is presented. The proposed architecture has been validated by experiencing real-time ECG monitoring by means of desktop PCs equipped with Web browsers, Personal Digital Assistants and WAP-enabled GSM/GPRS mobile phones. The modular approach followed in the development of the home station allows additional medical devices to be easily integrated to fulfil the requirements of heterogeneous homecare scenarios. We expect that the availability of such a low-cost telemedicine device will contribute to further extend healthcare reach to the homecare environment.

A novel neural network-based technique for segmentation of single-channel magnetic resonance images is presented. The segmentation of single-channel magnetic resonance images is a daunting task due to the relatively little information available at each pixel site. The proposed algorithm is based on unsupervised clustering by means of a Kohonen Self-Organizing Map: unsupervised segmentation algorithms are highly desirable in order to eliminate intra- and interobserver variability. Particular attention has been devoted to the choice of suitable features, in order to ensure an accurate and reliable segmentation: in particular, a feature set extracted from the neighborhood of each pixel has been evaluated. The proposed technique has been tested on simulated magnetic resonance images to assess its stability against the presence of noise and intensity inhomogeneities. Moreover, it has been tested on real magnetic resonance images of both volunteers and brain tumor patients. The preliminary results presented make the proposed technique a promising alternative for the segmentation of single-channel magnetic resonance images and encourage further investigation.

In this paper, a mobile teleconsultation system based on the use of a PDA is presented. The proposed architecture has been evaluated both over a low bandwidth GPRS public network well-suited for remote emergency diagnosis and in a broad-band WLAN IEEE 802.11 environment suitable for in-hospital care management. The simulation studies with radiological images and ECG signals shows the effectiveness of such a solution in both an interactive and an off-line scenario

In this paper, a mobile teleconsultation system based on the use of a PDA is presented. The proposed architecture has been evaluated both over a low bandwidth GPRS public network well-suited for remote emergency diagnosis and in a broad-band WLAN IEEE 802.11 environment suitable for in-hospital care management. The simulation studies with radiological images and ECG signals shows the effectiveness of such a solution in both an interactive and an off-line scenario.

In recent years, virtual reality has shown all its potential in a large spectrum of applications: training, simulation, CAD, and so on. Although existing technologies allow the creation of immersive virtual reality browsing experiences, little has been devoted to applying this new tool to electronic commerce (e-commerce) since almost all e-commerce web sites present products in a 2D on-line catalog. In this paper we present 3D-dvshop, a dynamic 3D virtual shop: a user can build his or her own shop, choosing a set of products that will be dynamically placed in a collection of specially created \"rooms\". The use of technologies such as VRML and Java allows full 3D interaction with products. In this way, the browsing experience can be more natural, attractive, realistic, and fun

The SPIN extension presented in this article is meant as a way to facilitate the modeling and verification of object-oriented programs. It provides means for the formal representation of some run-time mechanisms intensively used in OO software, such as dynamic object creation and deletion, virtual function calls, etc. This article presents a number of language extensions along with their implementation in SPIN. We carried out a number of experiments and found out that an important expressibility gain can be achieved with at most a small loss of performance.

The Java language enables the development of concurrent and distributed software through the concepts of thread and remote method invocation (RMI). It is known that developing concurrent and distributed software is a challenging task, mainly because of potential concurrency errors such as deadlocks and livelocks. One promising way to help the designer bl this task is providing static analysis tools that can detect such errors in the source code, as documented in the rich literature on static analysis of Ada tasking programs. This paper extends the approach followed for Ada tasking programs to the new Java language, providing formal models for the main thread synchronization primitives offered by the language. The formalism used is Promela, the input language of the model checker SPIN, which is based on extended communicating finite state machines and provides an efficient analysis algorithm

A study of the throughput and time characteristics of double-ring networks is presented, assuming that the two channels are used for balancing the traffic (when both are working) and for synchronous traffic generated according to a generic but periodic pattern. In addition, reconfiguration using portions of both rings to circumvent faulty elements in a double ring network is shown to be equivalent to the single ring configuration already studied. Examples of applications of the results are also illustrated

International Journal of Mini and Microcomputers

International Journal of Mini and Microcomputers