1,720,962 research outputs found
EasyCloud: Multi-clouds made easy
No full textInteroperability between different cloud platforms is a critical requirement for letting users to smoothly switch between different cloud providers and combine their services. However, the lack of standard interfaces to access these cloud platforms may result in the vendor lock-in situation, whereby users are locked into a specific cloud provider. In this paper, we present EasyCloud, a toolkit able to effectively support the creation and usage of Multi-cloud Systems (MSs) by providing interoperability, platform independence, effective resource provisioning, and ease of use. We describe its architecture and implementation, and experimentally assess the performance of EasyCloud, and compare it to existing alternative MS toolkits that are representative of the state-of-the-art. Our results clearly show that EasyCloud is highly scalable, quite efficient, and outperforms the other alternative toolkits
An educational toolkit for teaching cloud computing
No full textIn an educational context, experimenting with a real cloud computing platform is very important to let students understand the core concepts, methodologies and technologies of cloud computing. However, API heterogeneity of cloud providers complicates the experimentation by forcing students to focus on the use of different APIs, and by hindering the jointly use of different platforms. In this paper, we present EasyCloud, a toolkit enabling the easy and effective use of different cloud platforms. In particular, we describe its features, architecture, scalability, and use in our cloud computing courses, as well as the pedagogical insights we learnt over the years
Technical Solutions for Legal Challenges: Equality of Arms in Criminal Proceedings
Full text linkThe paper focuses on how computational models and methods impact on current legal systems, and in particular, on criminal justice. While the discussion about the suitabilty of the exploitation of learning machines and Artificial Intelligence (AI) either as surveillance means and human substitutes in the judicial decision-making process is arising, the authors reflect upon the risk of using AI and algorithm-based evidence in criminal proceedings. The claim of the paper is twofold: On the one hand, we should reinterpret todays legal frameworks, e. g. the European Convention of Human Rights, shifting the attention from possible violations of the right to privacy to potential infringements on a basic fair trial feature, the Equality of Arms. On the other hand, we should aknowledge that main legal issues, triggered by the breathtaking advancements in AI, can properly be addressed mainly through technical solutions (e. g. methods for assessing the completeness and correctness of digital evidence related to mobile devices and conversations). No legal theory, which overlooks the crossover of juridical and computational expertise, will survive the present time
Temporal reasoning and query answering with preferences and probabilities for medical decision support
No full textKnowledge-based decision support systems have a long tradition within the medical area. In particular, in the last decades, many Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIG) systems have been built to provide evidence-based and knowledge-based support to physicians. Since CIGs are, by definition, devoted to the management of specific diseases, the treatment of comorbid patients constitutes a challenging task in the area, involving (i) the detection of the possible interactions between (the effects of) the actions recommended by multiple CIGs (one for each disease of the patient), (ii) the management of such interactions and, finally, (iii) the conciliation of (the recommendations of) different CIGs. This paper focuses on issue (i) above, and specifically, on an innovative approach to support interaction detection along the temporal dimension. Practically, interactions can only occur between effects that intersect in time. Therefore, interaction detection involves the representation of temporal information (temporal constraints), and temporal reasoning (to propagate such constraints). Additionally, query answering facilities are important to support physicians in the investigation of the results of temporal reasoning. Current CIG approaches that face such issues take into account only “crisp” temporal constraints, i.e., they consider all temporal constraints as equally probablepreferred. However, preferences about the temporal constraints between CIGs actions may be available, as well as knowledge about the probabilistic distribution of the effects of CIGs actions in time. Considering such additional pieces of information can provide crucial advantages, in term of the flexibility and informativeness of the support provided by the CIG system to physicians. In this paper, we propose the first homogeneous approach to represent and reason with (propagate) temporal constraints with both preferences and probabilities. We ground our approach on the widely-used Simple Temporal Problem (STP) framework, which supports temporal reasoning on temporal constraints about possible distances between events. We extend (i) the representation formalism to associate preferences andor probabilities to the possible distances, and (ii) the operations to propagate the constraints to combine also preferences and probabilities. We also (iii) provide an experimental evaluation of our approach, and (iv) propose a wide range of query-answering supports, to facilitate physicians in the analysis of the results of temporal reasoning in general, and in the temporal detection of possible interactions in particular. Finally, (v) we also show how such a temporal framework is integrated in GLARE-SSCPM, a CIG system to treat comorbid patients, and show the advantages of our approach considering a running example
Teaching cloud computing: Motivations, challenges and tools
No full textTeaching Cloud Computing is becoming crucial since this recent computing paradigm is used in many fields and it is changing the way we use the applications and the technology. As a matter of the fact, most of the applications that we use everyday through the web are based on cloud services. Unfortunately, the difficulty to set up a real testbed for students and, at the same time, the lack of an easy, open and collaborative educational material freely available make teaching Cloud Computing a hard task. In this paper we discuss the state of the art concerning teaching Cloud Computing and we propose education materials and tools that make Cloud Computing easy to use even for students/educators without any computer science skills
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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