6809 research outputs found
Sort by
Information and organization in public health institutes: an ontology-based modeling of the entities in the reception-analysis-report phases
No full textThe study shows that the entities at play can be analyzed within a single ontological perspective allowing us to isolate a single ontological framework for the whole organization. This facilitates the development of coherent representations of the entities and related data, and fosters the use of integrated software for data management and reasoning across the company
Wireless network federation for Smart Cities: an example of implementation in the Research Area of Pisa
No full textDemand for mobility access in the research fields is continuously increasing. Indoor wireless networks have proven results when it comes to increasing productivity, giving researchers more flexibly in real time. Extending this high-performance wireless coverage seamlessly to the outdoors is a critical requirement. With the proliferation of mobile devices and mobile workers demanding to stay connected whether they are moving inside a building or across campus. We were looking for an outdoor wireless network that provides the throughput and performance that users have become accustomed to at their offices. Smart Campus project, a campus-wide living laboratory of Smart Cities, has increased these needs introducing new kind of network devices likes IP cameras and interconnected monitoring sensors that use wireless network. This technical report describes how to federate separated wireless infrastructures belonging to different administrative domains. It is also provided the technical implementation successfully deployed at the Research Area of Pisa which can be considered as a best practice for Smart Cities projects
Optimal Charging of Electric Vehicle Fleets for a Car Sharing System with Power Sharing
No full textElectric car sharing services have been growing in popularity in the last years but operators are striving to reduce the costs of deploying and managing their charging infrastructure. Charging technologies that offer power sharing have the potential to achieve this goal but at the cost of increasing management complexity. In order to address this problem, in this work we propose an efficient optimized charging methodology that minimizes recharging costs when power sharing is used and also takes into account customer satisfaction. To this aim, we formulate the recharging problem as a two-step optimization problem, considering a realistic energy pricing scheme, and we evaluate this solution using real traces of parking times in a French station-based car sharing system. We show that significant cost savings can be achieved without impacting customer satisfaction and also reducing the strain on the grid with respect to a baseline approac
Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference ITBAM 2016
No full textThis book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, ITBAM 2016, held in Porto, Portugal, in September 2016, in conjunction with DEXA 2016.The 9 revised long papers presented together with 11 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. The papers address the following two topics: medical terminology and clinical processes and machine learning in biomedicine
Le prime elaborazioni meccanografiche dei censimenti
No full textLe conoscenze teoriche e pratiche e gli sviluppi tecnologici che negli USA portarono a fine \u27800 a un\u27elaborazione semiautomatica - detta meccanografica - dei censimenti si diffusero rapidamente in tutto il resto del mondo, soprattutto in Europa. Questi giunsero in Italia a inizio \u27900, ma solo negli anni \u2730 del secolo scorso furono fatti propri dall\u27Istituto Centrale di Statistica per elaborare meccanograficamente vari censimenti, fra cui quelli demografici. Questo articolo presenta una rassegna dei primi censimenti demografici italiani che vennero elaborati meccanograficamente, delle prime macchine da spoglio elettromeccaniche utilizzate, dell\u27organizzazione di questi lavori all\u27Istituto Centrale di Statistica negli anni che precedettero l\u27avvento dei calcolatori elettroniciLe conoscenze teoriche e pratiche e gli sviluppi tecnologici che negli USA portarono a fine \u27800 a un\u27elaborazione semiautomatica - detta meccanografica - dei censimenti si diffusero rapidamente in tutto il resto del mondo, soprattutto in Europa. Questi giunsero in Italia a inizio \u27900, ma solo negli anni \u2730 del secolo scorso furono fatti propri dall\u27Istituto Centrale di Statistica per elaborare meccanograficamente vari censimenti, fra cui quelli demografici. Questo articolo presenta una rassegna dei primi censimenti demografici italiani che vennero elaborati meccanograficamente, delle prime macchine da spoglio elettromeccaniche utilizzate, dell\u27organizzazione di questi lavori all\u27Istituto Centrale di Statistica negli anni che precedettero l\u27avvento dei calcolatori elettronic
Discovering miRNA regulatory networks in Holt-Oram Syndrome using a Zebrafish model
No full textMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that play an important role in the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. miRNAs are involved in the regulation of many biological processes such as differentiation, apoptosis, and cell proliferation. miRNAs are expressed in embryonic, postnatal, and adult hearts, and they have a key role in the regulation of gene expression during cardiovascular development and disease. Aberrant expression of miRNAs is associated with abnormal cardiac cell differentiation and dysfunction. Tbx5 is a member of the T-box gene family, which acts as transcription factor involved in the vertebrate heart development. Alteration of Tbx5 level affects the expression of hundreds of genes. Haploinsufficiency and gene duplication of Tbx5 are at the basis of the cardiac abnormalities associated with Holt?Oram syndrome (HOS). Recent data indicate that miRNAs might be an important part of the regulatory circuit through which Tbx5 controls heart development. Using high-throughput technologies, we characterized genome-widely the miRNA and mRNA expression profiles in WT- and Tbx5-depleted zebrafish embryos at two crucial developmental time points, 24 and 48 h post fertilization (hpf). We found that several miRNAs, which are potential effectors of Tbx5, are differentially expressed; some of them are already known to be involved in cardiac development and functions, such as miR-30, miR-34, miR-190, and miR-21. We performed an integrated analysis of miRNA expression data with gene expression profiles to refine computational target prediction approaches by means of the inversely correlation of miRNA?mRNA expressions, and we highlighted targets, which have roles in cardiac contractility, cardiomyocyte proliferation/apoptosis, and morphogenesis, cru- cial functions regulated by Tbx5. This approach allowed to discover complex regulatory circuits involving novel miRNAs and protein coding genes not considered before in the HOS such as miR-34a and miR-30 and their targets
When Traditional Ontologies are not Enough: Modelling and Visualizing Dynamic Ontologies in Semantic-Based Access to Texts
No full textThe work described in this paper came about as a result of reflections made within the ?Clavius on the web? Project, which studied the correspondence between the Jesuit mathematician and also astronomer and some important scientists of his century, such as Galileo and Brahe. One of the main aims of the project is to make it possible for students and scholars to access the texts on a semantic basis, in order to allow a deeper understanding of the often complex content, they convey.Texts are often the unique source that scholars have at their disposal in order to be able to reconstruct and more completely understand the past author?s thought.In order for technology to come to the aid of scholars in this effort, the concepts evoked within the text, as well as the terms representing these concepts need to 1) have a structured organization 2) be explicitly and univocally represented and 3) be defined through the relationships that unite them. In order to achieve this, we chose to adopt an ontology based model, as ontologies are a de facto standard for knowledge representation.Interestingly, the choice to use ontologies raised some issues, also with regard to theoretical aspects: indeed, standard ontological formalisms usually static and crisp proved to be inadequate in modelling the complexity of the knowledge conveyed by the analysed texts. As a result, more refined models as well as appropriate graphical representations needed to be introduced so that computers would be able to process these ontologies and visualize them in a way that students and scholars could understand and work with them
Self-optimising Decentralised Service Placement in Heterogeneous Cloud Federation
No full textClouds have been relevant business drivers and computationalbackends for a wide range of applications, includingIoT, e-health, data analytics. To match the complex needs ofsuch comprehensive set of different kinds of applications, inrecent times there is an emerging need for new paradigmsand forms of Clouds, organised according to a federated, heterogeneousand distributed structure. To exploit heterogeneityand localisation, in order to enhance the overall performances,ensure energy efficiency, reduce costs for resource providers andin the meantime enhance the user experience, proper serviceplacement solutions are required. However, conducting efficientdeployments in such a scenario is complex due to the dynamicnature of applications, resources, users. As a consequence, therethe a need for scalable, distributed, adaptive, context-awaresolutions characterised by high-efficiency and reduced overhead.We propose a highly distributed, self-adaptive solution aimed atoptimising the overall deployment of cloud services by means ofpoint-to-point interactions occurring among clouds and cloudletsbelonging to the same federation. The contribution of this paperis the definition of a service exchange mechanism, its Markovchainbased modelling and thorough experimental evaluation
Learning games for the cognitively impaired people
No full textLearning environments have been profoundly reshaped by pervasive technology. New educational methodologies take full advantage of ICT in a mobile customized user-friendly environment, to support learning and stimulate individuals? potential. Unfortunately, technology-enhanced learning tools are not often designed with accessibility in mind, although they can greatly benefit the personal empowerment and inclusion of special-needs people. To address this gap, a Web platform has been created for delivering accessible games to people with Down syndrome. Since personalization, orderliness and positive reinforcement are crucial to learning in these subjects, the platform offers a personalized safe environment for learning, conforming to behavioral analysis principles. Learning analytics are incorporated in the platform for easy monitoring of student progress via Web interfaces. The participatory design driving the development of the learning platform allowed the customization of the games? discriminative stimuli, difficulty levels and reinforcement, as well as the creation of a game ?engine? to easily set up new personalized exercises. These customization features make the game platform usable by a larger audience, including individuals with learning difficulties and autism
Practical Privacy Preserving Medical Diagnosis using Homomorphic Encryption
No full textThe use of remote services offered by cloud providers have been popular in the last lustrum. Services allow users to store remote files, or to analyze data for several purposes, like health-care or message analysis. However, when personal data are sent to the Cloud, users may lose privacy on the data-content, and on the other side cloud providers may use those data for their own businesses. In this paper, we present our solution to analyze users? health-data directly into the Cloud while preserving users? privacy. Our solution make use of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to protect users? data during the analysis. In particular, we developed a mobile application that offload users? data into the Cloud, and a Fully Homomorphic Encryption algorithm that processes those data without leaking any information to the Cloud provider. Performed empirical tests show that our FHE algorithm is able to evaluate users? data in reasonable time proving the feasibility of this emerging way of private-data evaluation