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Five years ago our department migrated from a film-based imaging environment to a PACS-based environment. We discovered that our reliance on paper tracking forms for clinical history and dictation information was hindering our practice. Integrating dictation with PACS was one of three key components we needed to free ourselves from the tyranny of paper, the other two being an online worklist and an online patient history. We discuss our evolution to a (mostly) paperless reading room environment, our implementation, general performance, and future development plans, focusing on integrated dictation.

Network immunization strategies have emerged as possible solutions to the challenges of virus propagation. In this paper, an existing interactive model is introduced and then improved in order to better characterize the way a virus spreads in email networks with different topologies. The model is used to demonstrate the effects of a number of key factors, notably nodes’ degree and betweenness. Experiments are then performed to examine how the structure of a network and human dynamics affects virus propagation. The experimental results have revealed that a virus spreads in two distinct phases and shown that the most efficient immunization strategy is the node-betweenness strategy. Moreover, those results have also explained why old virus can survive in networks nowadays from the aspects of human dynamics.

A new continuous sterilization system was designed, constructed, started up, and qualified for media sterilization for secondary metabolite cultivations, bioconversions, and enzyme production. An existing Honeywell Total Distributed Control 3000-based control system was extended using redundant High performance Process Manager controllers for 98 I/O (input/output) points. This new equipment was retrofitted into an industrial research fermentation pilot plant, designed and constructed in the early 1980s. Design strategies of this new continuous sterilizer system and the expanded control system are described and compared with the literature (including dairy and bio-waste inactivation applications) and the weaknesses of the prior installation for expected effectiveness. In addition, the reasoning behind selection of some of these improved features has been incorporated. Examples of enhancements adopted include sanitary heat exchanger (HEX) design, incorporation of a "flash" cooling HEX, on-line calculation of F(o) and R(o), and use of field I/O modules located near the vessel to permit low-cost addition of new instrumentation. Sterilizer performance also was characterized over the expected range of operating conditions. Differences between design and observed temperature, pressure, and other profiles were quantified and investigated.

The aim of the KCM (Knowledge Crunching Machine) project was to study how to speed-up Prolog, and more generally Logic Programming, through hardware support at the processor level. An experimental approach was taken, which resulted in the design and implementation of a real system, hardware and software. This short paper outlines the key features of the system as well as the main conclusions which can be drawn from the project.

Inversion of the impacted tooth is a rare condition. The purpose of this article is to review this rare condition in detail on the basis of available literature. In addition, this article also explores the various multidisciplinary approaches varying from space creation to prosthodontic rehabilitation and reimplantation to endodontic treatment for inverted impacted teeth.A very few cases of inverted and impacted third molars have been reported in the literature. We describe few rare cases of inverted impacted teeth which presented to us in the Dept. Of Oral Surgery, K.D. Dental College and Hospital over a period of 2 years approx. we report of four cases presented to us with inverted maxillary third molars (Figs. 1, 2), inverted supernumerary tooth in anterior maxilla (Figs. 3, 4).The first and second case of maxillary third molar and third case, of supernumerary tooth, the patients presented were asymptomatic, hence patient opted for conservative management and continued follow up, in the fourth case, the supernumerary tooth was removed for orthodontic reasons.On the basis of literature available, it has been noticed that related complications particularly depend on justification on whether the tooth follicle is with a pathology or is pathology-free. Pathology-free and asymptomatic cases can be treated in a conservative manner. Possible treatment protocol for impacted inversion is entirely dependent on patient's needs, findings and surgeons skills.

International audience; Network Control Systems (NAC) have been used in many industrial processes. They aim to reduce the human factor burden and efficiently handle the complex process and communication of those systems. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are used in industrial, infrastructure and facility processes (e.g. manufacturing, fabrication, oil and water pipelines, building ventilation, etc.) Like other Internet of Things (IoT) implementations, SCADA systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, therefore, a robust anomaly detection is a major requirement. However, having an accurate anomaly detection system is not an easy task, due to the difficulty to differentiate between cyber-attacks and system internal failures (e.g. hardware failures). In this paper, we present a model that detects anomaly events in a water system controlled by SCADA. Six Machine Learning techniques have been used in building and evaluating the model. The model classifies different anomaly events including hardware failures (e.g. sensor failures), sabotage and cyber-attacks (e.g. DoS and Spoofing). Unlike other detection systems, our proposed work helps in accelerating the mitigation process by notifying the operator with additional information when an anomaly occurs. This additional information includes the probability and confidence level of event(s) occurring. The model is trained and tested using a real-world dataset.

[EN] Neighbor discovery represents a first step after the deployment of wireless ad hoc networks, since the nodes that form them are equipped with limited-range radio transceivers, and they typically do not know their neighbors. In this paper two randomized neighbor discovery approaches, called CDH and CDPRR, based on collision detection for static multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks, are presented. Castalia 3.2 simulator has been used to compare our proposed protocols against two protocols chosen from the literature and used as reference: the PRR, and the Hello protocol. For the experiments, we chose five metrics: the neighbor discovery time, the number of discovered neighbors, the energy consumption, the throughput and the number of discovered neighbors versus packets sent ratio. According to the results obtained through simulation, we can conclude that our randomized proposals outperform both Hello and PRR protocols in the presence of collisions regarding all five metrics, for both one-hop and multi-hop scenarios. As novelty compared to the reference protocols, both proposals allow nodes to discover all their neighbors with probability 1, they are based on collision detection and know when to terminate the neighbor discovery process. Furthermore, qualitative comparisons of the existing protocols and the proposals are available in this paper. Moreover, CDPRR presents better results in terms of time, energy consumption and number of discovered neighbors versus packets sent ratio. We found that both proposals achieve to operate under more realistic assumptions. Furthermore, CDH does not need to know the number of nodes in the network., This work has been partially supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" in the "Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica de Excelencia, Subprograma Estatal de Generacion de Conocimiento" within the project under Grant TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P. This work has also been partially supported by European Union through the ERANETMED (Euromediterranean Cooperation through ERANET joint activities and beyond) project ERANETMED3-227 SMARTWATIR.

[EN] Augmented Reality (AR) has become a mainstream technology in the development of solutions for repair and maintenance operations. Although most of the AR solutions are still limited to specific contexts in industry, some consumer electronics companies have started to offer pre-packaged AR solutions as alternative to video-based tutorials (VT) for minor maintenance operations. In this paper, we present a comparative study of the acquired knowledge and user perception achieved with AR and VT solutions in some maintenance tasks of IT equipment. The results indicate that both systems help users to acquire knowledge in various aspects of equipment maintenance. Although no statistically significant differences were found between AR and VT solutions, users scored higher on the AR version in all cases. Moreover, the users explicitly preferred the AR version when evaluating three different usability and satisfaction criteria. For the AR version, a strong and significant correlation was found between the satisfaction and the achieved knowledge. Since the AR solution achieved similar learning results with higher usability scores than the video-based tutorials, these results suggest that AR solutions are the most effective approach to substitute the typical paper-based instructions in consumer electronics., This work has been supported by Spanish MINECO and EU ERDF programs under grant RTI2018-098156-B-C55.

It is more than 4 years since the 2030 agenda for sustainable development was adopted by the United Nations and its member states in September 2015. Several efforts are being made by member countries to contribute towards achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The progress which had been made over time in achieving SDGs can be monitored by measuring a set of quantifiable indicators for each of the goals. It has been seen that geospatial information plays a significant role in measuring some of the targets, hence it is relevant in the implementation of SDGs and monitoring of their progress. Synoptic view and repetitive coverage of the Earth's features and phenomenon by different satellites is a powerful and propitious technological advancement. The paper reviews robustness of Earth Observation data for continuous planning, monitoring, and evaluation of SDGs. The scientific world has made commendable progress by providing geospatial data at various spatial, spectral, radiometric, and temporal resolutions enabling usage of the data for various applications. This paper also reviews the application of big data from earth observation and citizen science data to implement SDGs with a multi-disciplinary approach. It covers literature from various academic landscapes utilizing geospatial data for mapping, monitoring, and evaluating the earth's features and phenomena as it establishes the basis of its utilization for the achievement of the SDGs.

The role of prognostics and health management is ever more prevalent with advanced techniques of estimation methods. However, data processing and remaining useful life prediction algorithms are often very different. Some difficulties in accurate prediction can be tackled by redefining raw data parameters into more meaningful and comprehensive health level indicators that will then provide performance information. Proper data processing has a significant importance on remaining useful life predictions, for example, to deal with data limitations or/and multi-regime operating conditions. The framework proposed in this paper considers a similarity-based prognostic algorithm that is fed by the use of data normalisation and filtering methods for operational trajectories of complex systems. This is combined with a data-driven prognostic technique based on feed-forward neural networks with multi-regime normalisation. In particular, the paper takes a close look at how pre-processing methods affect algorithm performance. The work presented herein shows a conceptual prognostic framework that overcomes challenges presented by short-term test datasets and that increases the prediction performance with regards to prognostic metrics. Validerad;2019;Nivå 2;2019-04-12 (johcin)

The aim of the sparse analytic hierarchy process (SAHP) problem is to rank a set of alternatives based on their utility/importance; this task is accomplished by asking human decision-makers to compare selected pairs of alternatives and to specify relative preference information, in the form of ratios of utilities. However, such an information is often affected by subjective biases or inconsistencies. Moreover, there is no general consent on the best approach to accomplish this task, and in the literature several techniques have been proposed. Finally, when more than one decision-maker is involved in the process, there is a need to provide adequate methodologies to aggregate the available information. In this view, the contribution of this paper to the SAHP body of knowledge is twofold. From one side, it develops a novel methodology to aggregate sparse data given by multiple sources of information. From another side, the paper undertakes an experimental validation of the most popular techniques to solve the SAHP problem, discussing the strength points and shortcomings of the different methodology with respect to a real case study.

[EN] This paper presents and evaluates a system that provides TV and radio services in mobility using 4G communications. The system has mainly two blocks, one on the cloud and another on the mobile vehicle. On the cloud, a DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) receiver obtains the TV/radio signal and prepares the contents to be sent through 4G. Specifically, contents are transcoded and packetized using the DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) standard. Vehicles in mobility use their 4G connectivity to receive the flows transmitted by the cloud. The key element of the system is an on-board proxy that manages the received flows and offers them to the final users in the vehicle. The proxy contains a buffer that helps reduce the number of interruptions caused by hand over effects and lack of coverage. The paper presents a comparison between a live transmission using 4G connecting the clients directly with the cloud server and a near real-time transmission based on an on-board proxy. Results prove that the use of the proxy reduces the number of interruptions considerably and, thus, improves the Quality of Experience of users at the expense of slightly increasing the delay., This work is supported by the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnologico Industrial (CDTI) from the Government of Spain under the project "Plataforma avanzada de conectividad en movilidad" (CDTI IDI-20150126) and the project "Desarrollo de nueva plataforma de entretenimiento multimedia para entornos nauticos" (CDTI TIC-20170102).

This paper identifies certain privacy threats that apply to anonymous credential systems. The focus is on timing attacks that apply even if the system is cryptographically secure. The paper provides some simple heuristics that aim to mitigate the exposure to the threats and identifies directions for further research.

International audience; This paper reports on a four-year project that aims to raise the abstraction level through the use of model-driven engineering (MDE) techniques in the development of scientific applications relying on high-performance computing. The development and maintenance of high-performance scientific computing software is reputedly a complex task. This complexity results from the frequent evolutions of supercomputers and the tight coupling between software and hardware aspects. Moreover, current parallel programming approaches result in a mixing of concerns within the source code. Our approach relies on the use of MDE and consists in defining domain-specific modeling languages targeting various domain experts involved in the development of HPC applications, allowing each of them to handle their dedicated model in a both user-friendly and hardware-independent way. The different concerns are separated thanks to the use of several models as well as several modeling viewpoints on these models. Depending on the targeted execution platforms, these abstract models are translated into executable implementations by means of model transformations. To make all of these effective, we have developed a tool chain that is also presented in this paper. The approach is assessed through a multi-dimensional validation that focuses on its applicability, its expressiveness and its efficiency. To capitalize on the gained experience, we analyze some lessons learned during this project.

[EN] Commendable amount of work has been attempted in the field of Sentiment Analysis or Opinion Mining from natural language texts and Twitter texts. One of the main goals in such tasks is to assign polarities (positive or negative) to a piece of text. But, at the same time, one of the important as well as difficult issues is how to assign the degree of positivity or negativity to certain texts. The answer becomes more complex when we perform a similar task on figurative language texts collected from Twitter. Figurative language devices such as irony and sarcasm contain an intentional secondary or extended meaning hidden within the expressions. In this paper we present a novel approach to identify the degree of the sentiment (fine grained in an 11-point scale) for the figurative language texts. We used several semantic features such as sentiment and intensifiers as well as we introduced sentiment abruptness, which measures the variation of sentiment from positive to negative or vice versa. We trained our systems at multiple levels to achieve the maximum cosine similarity of 0.823 and minimum mean square error of 2.170., The work reported in this paper is supported by a grant from the project “CLIA System Phase II” funded by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), Government of India. The work of the fourth author is also supported by the SomEMBED TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P MINECO research project and by the Generalitat Valenciana under the grant ALMAPATER (PrometeoII/2014/030).

[EN] Modern data-driven spoken language systems (SLS) require manual semantic annotation for training spoken language understanding parsers. Multilingual porting of SLS demands significant manual effort and language resources, as this manual annotation has to be replicated. Crowdsourcing is an accessible and cost-effective alternative to traditional methods of collecting and annotating data. The application of crowdsourcing to simple tasks has been well investigated. However, complex tasks, like cross-language semantic annotation transfer, may generate low judgment agreement and/or poor performance. The most serious issue in cross-language porting is the absence of reference annotations in the target language; thus, crowd quality control and the evaluation of the collected annotations is difficult. In this paper we investigate targeted crowdsourcing for semantic annotation transfer that delegates to crowds a complex task such as segmenting and labeling of concepts taken from a domain ontology; and evaluation using source language annotation. To test the applicability and effectiveness of the crowdsourced annotation transfer we have considered the case of close and distant language pairs: Italian-Spanish and Italian-Greek. The corpora annotated via crowdsourcing are evaluated against source and target language expert annotations. We demonstrate that the two evaluation references (source and target) highly correlate with each other; thus, drastically reduce the need for the target language reference annotations., This research is partially funded by the EU FP7 PortDial Project No. 296170, FP7 SpeDial Project No. 611396, and Spanish contract TIN2014-54288-C4-3-R. The work presented in this paper was carried out while the author was affiliated with Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.

We consider the problem of classifying business process instances based on structural features derived from event logs. The main motivation is to provide machine learning based techniques with quick response times for interactive computer assisted root cause analysis. In particular, we create structural features from process mining such as activity and transition occurrence counts, and ordering of activities to be evaluated as potential features for classification. We show that adding such structural features increases the amount of information thus potentially increasing classification accuracy. However, there is an inherent trade-off as using too many features leads to too long run-times for machine learning classification models. One way to improve the machine learning algorithms' run-time is to only select a small number of features by a feature selection algorithm. However, the run-time required by the feature selection algorithm must also be taken into account. Also, the classification accuracy should not suffer too much from the feature selection. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, we propose and compare six different feature selection algorithms by means of an experimental setup comparing their classification accuracy and achievable response times. Second, we discuss the potential use of feature selection results for computer assisted root cause analysis as well as the properties of different types of structural features in the context of feature selection., Comment: Extended version of a paper published in the proceedings of the BPM 2017 workshops

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Various security weaknesses have been identified in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET). The paper focuses on MANET forensics whereby a third party can prove there was attack by collecting and analyzing evidence about it. The paper describes such a MANET forensics analysis method using a Bloom filter.

Image-segmentation techniques based on supervised classification generally perform well on the condition that training and test samples have the same feature distribution. However, if training and test images are acquired with different scanners or scanning parameters, their feature distributions can be very different, which can hurt the performance of such techniques. We propose a feature-space-transformation method to overcome these differences in feature distributions. Our method learns a mapping of the feature values of training voxels to values observed in images from the test scanner. This transformation is learned from unlabeled images of subjects scanned on both the training scanner and the test scanner. We evaluated our method on hippocampus segmentation on 27 images of the Harmonized Hippocampal Protocol (HarP), a heterogeneous dataset consisting of 1.5T and 3T MR images. The results showed that our feature space transformation improved the Dice overlap of segmentations obtained with an SVM classifier from 0.36 to 0.85 when only 10 atlases were used and from 0.79 to 0.85 when around 100 atlases were used.

A side channel attack (SCA) is a serious attack on the implementation of cryptosystems, which can break the secret key using side channel information such as timing, power consumption, etc. Recently, Boneh et al. showed that SSL is vulnerable to SCA if the attacker gets access to the local network of the server. Therefore, public-key infrastructure eventually becomes a target of SCA. In this paper, we investigate the security of RSA cryptosystem using the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) in the sense of SCA. Novak first proposed a simple power analysis (SPA) against the CRT part using the difference of message modulo p and modulo q. In this paper, we apply Novak’s attack to the other CRT-based cryptosystems, namely Multi-Prime RSA, Multi-Exponent RSA, Rabin cryptosystem, and HIME(R) cryptosystem. Novak-type attack strictly depends on how to implement the CRT. We examine the operations related to CRT of these cryptosystems, and show that an extended Novak-type attack is effective on them. Moreover, we present a novel attack called zero-multiplication attack. The attacker tries to guess the secret prime by producing ciphertexts that cause a multiplication with zero during the decryption, which is easily detected by power analysis. Our experimental result shows that the timing with the zero multiplication is reduced about 10% from the standard one. Finally, we propose countermeasures against these attacks. The proposed countermeasures are based on the ciphertext blinding, but they require no inversion operation. The overhead of the proposed scheme is only about 1–5% of the whole decryption if the bit length of modulus is 1,024.

In Crypto 2000 and 2003, Lenstra-Verheul and Rubin- Silverberg proposed XTR public key system and torus based public key cryptosystem CEILIDH, respectively. The common main idea of XTR and CEILIDH is to shorten the bandwidth of transmission data. Due to the contribution of Granger et al., that is the comparison result of the performance of CEILIDH and XTR, XTR is an excellent alternative to either RSA or ECC in some applications, where computational power and memory capacity are both very limited, such as smart-cards. Among the family of XTR algorithm, Improved XTR Single Exponentiation (XTR-ISE) is the most efficient one, which computes single exponentiation. However, there are few papers investigating the side channel attacks of XTR-ISE, even though the memory constraint devices suffer most from vulnerability to side channel attacks. Chung-Hasan and Page-Stam tried to analyze XTR-ISE with the known simple power analysis, but unfortunately their approach were not practically feasible. Recently, Han et al. proposed new collision attack on it with analysis complexity O(240) when the key size is 160-bit. In this paper we analyze XTR-ISE from other point of view, namely differential power analysis (DPA). One straightforward result is that XTR-ISE can be free from the original DPA. However, a non-trivial result is that an enhancing DPA proposed in this paper threatens XTR-ISE. Furthermore, we show several weak points of the structure of XTR-ISE. From our simulation results, we show the proposed attack requires about 584 times queries to DPA_Oracle to detect the whole 160-bit secret value. This result shows that XTR-ISE is vulnerable to the proposed enhancing DPA.

[EN] Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced new applications and environments. Smart Home provides new ways of communication and service consumption. In addition, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning have improved different services and tasks by automatizing them. In this field, reinforcement learning (RL) provides an unsupervised way to learn from the environment. In this paper, a new intelligent system based on RL and deep learning is proposed for Smart Home environments to guarantee good levels of QoE, focused on multimedia services. This system is aimed to reduce the impact on user experience when the classifying system achieves a low accuracy. The experiments performed show that the deep learning model proposed achieves better accuracy than the KNN algorithm and that the RL system increases the QoE of the user up to 3.8 on a scale of 10., This work has been partially supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" in the "Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica de Excelencia, Subprograma Estatal de Generacion de Conocimiento" within the project under Grant TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P. This work has also been partially founded by the Universitat Polite`cnica de Vale`ncia through the postdoctoral PAID-10-20 program.

Service-oriented computing is a promising computing paradigm which facilitates the composition of loosely coupled and adaptable applications. Unfortunately, this new paradigm does not lend itself easily to traditional software engineering methods and principles due to the decentralised nature of software services. The goal of this paper is to identify a set of engineering activities that can be used to develop adaptable service-based applications. Rather than focusing on the entire service-based application development life-cycle, this paper will focus on adaptation-specific processes and activities and map them to an existing high-level service-based application development life-cycle. Existing software engineering literature as well as research results from service engineering research is reviewed for relevant activities. The result is an adaptation framework that can guide software engineers in developing adaptable service-based applications. © 2013 Springer-Verlag London.

To evaluate the feasibility of an iPad-based documented patient briefing for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) examinations. A standard briefing sheet and questionnaire for a MRI scan was converted from paper form into an iPad application. Twenty patients, who had been referred for an MRI scan, were briefed about the examination in paper form as well as via the iPad application before performing the MRI scan. Time each patient needed for the briefing and the number of questions that came up were documented. Patients’ acceptance of the electronic briefing was assessed using a questionnaire. The mean processing time was 2.36 min (range 0.58 to 09.35 min., standard deviation ±2.05 min) for the paper-based briefing and 4.15 min (range 1.56 to 13.48 min, SD ± 2.36 min) for the app-based briefing. Concerning technical aspects, patients asked two questions during the app-based briefing; no questions arose during the paper-based briefing. Six patients preferred electronic briefing and four patients, the paper-based form. No patient preferred the electronic form with additional multimedial information. Eight participants did not mind which briefing version was used; two participants did not express their preference at all. Our experiences showed that electronic briefing using an iPad is feasible and has the potential to become a user-friendly alternative to the conventional paper-based approach. Owing to the broad range of the results, a follow-up study will seek to determine the influencing factors on processing time and other potential questions.

This paper reports on research, the aim of which has been to investigate the use of virtual manufacturing and data mining techniques to automate the identification of manufacturing process time estimating relationships that form the basis of product and process cost models. Such models provide information that is critical to all stages of the product development process and to ensuring that development of cost-effective product design and production methods. Use of virtual manufacturing models and data mining techniques enables the majority of the activities involved in the cost model development process to be automated. Hence, reducing the time and effort required, reducing the current high level of reliance on expert judgment and enabling higher levels of cost detail to be estimated. The research reported, therefore, focuses on the use of virtual manufacturing to generate datasets which are then analysed using data mining to identify suitable cost models for manufacturing processes. Part I, of this two-part paper, describes the development of a model development methodology that makes use of virtual manufacturing models and data mining techniques and uses case study data to validate this methodology. Part II will then examine in detail the effectiveness of alternative data mining algorithms in terms of their ability to develop relationships that are (1) representative of the real causal relationships that exist and (2) provide a high level of estimating accuracy.

A recent American Medical Association report highlighted failures in communication of abnormal test results as an important but understudied facet of improving safety in ambulatory care.1 Because many outpatient test results are not life-threatening and don’t require verbal communication, health information technology (IT) has potential to reliably transmit result information in the fragmented outpatient setting. Thus, few will disagree that communication of abnormal test results is an obvious context where advantages of health IT will be observed. In this issue of JGIM, Callen et al. report the results of a timely systematic review of 19 studies that documented quantitative evidence of test results not followed up in ambulatory settings.2 They found wide variation in abnormal results lacking follow-up: 7 % to 62 % for laboratory, and 1 % to 36 % for imaging tests. Although evidence of the effectiveness of electronic test management systems was limited, there was a general trend towards improved follow-up in electronic systems. In another article in this issue, El-Kareh et al. discuss the results of a randomized controlled trial that put electronic communication to the test. The authors studied the effectiveness of sending microbiology test result alerts via a secure, internal e-mail system to clinicians when results were finalized post-discharge.3 They found better documented evidence of appropriate follow-up within 3 days in the intervention group (28 % vs. 13 % in controls). Neither group’s laboratory follow-up rate was particularly encouraging. On the bright side, both studies used distinctly different research approaches to reach similar conclusions, i.e., application of information and communication technologies, such as electronic health records (EHRs) with alerting capability, can increase the likelihood of appropriate test result follow-up. In paper-based systems, evaluating evidence of follow-up is itself challenging. On the other hand, both articles remind us that using EHR-based technology by itself does not entirely solve the problem of failure to follow up test results. Callen et al., as well as others, have made a strong case for addressing these failures based on safety implications. Additionally, Stage 2 meaningful EHR use (slated for implementation in 2014) includes laboratory test result reporting criteria. Time is now ripe for novel approaches to understand and improve this complex problem. The use of technology in the complex healthcare system must take into context the social environment where technology is embedded. For example, Callen et al. found lack of clear policies and procedures in relation to test result follow-up. We previously identified ambiguity of responsibility for test result follow-up to be a key factor in failure to follow up abnormal results.4 Several EHRs now use asynchronous alert notifications to transmit results, but providers often receive many other types of notifications in their electronic in-box. We found that primary care providers (PCPs) receive a mean of 57 alerts a day in an integrated delivery system’s EHR, all with new information they need to process and/or act upon.5 Important information about abnormal results might get buried among other alerts. To help understand the complexities involved with electronic communication of test results and facilitate progress in developing multifaceted solutions, a “sociotechnical” approach is needed. In our work, we use an eight-dimension sociotechnical model to study both problems and solutions related to safe and effective EHR implementation and use.6 In the sections below, we illustrate the usefulness of this model by discussing each of its eight dimensions, as applied to issues raised by the two studies. We also take the liberty of making several recommendations that might be useful to reduce failures in test result follow-up in EHR-based systems. Hardware/Software: To maintain superiority over paper, EHRs must be configured to ensure that results are reported to the correct provider in a timely fashion. Thus, all test orders should be placed via a Computer-based Provider Order Entry (CPOE) system. Orders should be transmitted in a coded format to the entity performing the test, and the transmission should occur via a two-way system-to-system interface that can send orders and receive results. Otherwise, results might not make it back into the EHR in a form that allows clinical decision support interventions (e.g., alert for abnormal creatinine will not fire while entering an order for metformin). Clinical Content: Results should be stored as structured/coded data to facilitate reporting and tracking of results. This feature enabled El-Kareh and colleagues to extract results from the EHR, and can facilitate result-tracking functions. Institutions must also define standardized result categories and definitions (e.g., critical, normal, etc.) to facilitate prioritization and reporting. For instance, certain levels of abnormalities can be flagged in the EHR for more immediate action based on urgency. Care should be taken to avoid flagging borderline or clinically insignificant results as urgent. User Interface: A poor user interface can lead providers to miss critical information. EHRs should have result review screens that ensure that all critical information is displayed on one screen (i.e., no scrolling is required) and all columns are sufficiently wide to allow users to see all pertinent information. In addition, users should be able to sort, or filter, results by date, type, patient, or urgency.7 Personnel: Providers should be trained to process their alerts in a timely manner and document follow-up and communication of results to patients in the EHR. Poor documentation is widely prevalent and might be one reason to explain the low follow-up rates reported in El-Kareh et al.’s study. Workflow/Communication: Institutions must avoid partial use of EHRs for test result management (i.e., results or notes, but not both, available electronically8), because this leads to a higher risk of test result follow-up failures. Workflows related to certain high-risk areas (tests ordered by residents, part-time physicians, emergency deparment physicians; send-out tests; and post-discharge results) must be well-defined. This process should include creation of back-up procedures (including use of surrogates) and fail-safe escalation systems to safeguard against results “falling through the cracks”. To what extent this was done, if at all, in the El-Kareh study is unclear, and thus a seemingly straightforward technological intervention might not have reached its full potential. Additionally, practices must create robust processes to send both normal and abnormal test results to patients. In the Veterans’ Health Administration (VA), providers can generate letters though EHR templates, which are then sent to patients through centralized mailing facilities. Many institutions use web-based portals to make results accessible to patients, and some directly notify patients bypassing provider review. Whether the latter approach reduces follow-up failures is unclear.9 Internal Organizational Policies, Procedures, Culture and Environment: Responsibility for test result follow-up is an under-recognized and underemphasized contributory factor in follow-up failures. Responsibility should always be clear, and can be delegated to someone as long as that procedure is clear to both parties. It is unclear how physicians in the El-Kareh study perceived their test result follow-up responsibilities; many that did not answer the survey or follow up appropriately might have attributed this responsibility to someone else (e.g., inpatient physician thought that the PCP was responsible post-discharge). We also recommend that all institutions/clinics should have an annually updated, written policy on all aspects of test result management (e.g., provider notification, patient notification, follow-up responsibilities).10 This document should define processes and procedures for test result communication, including which results are critical and need verbal communication. Institutions should also maintain updated contact information for all providers and patients. Some of the e-mail alerts sent by the investigators might not have reached the study physicians. External Rules and Regulations: In 2009, the VA released a policy directive requiring communication of all test results to patients within 14 calendar days after the test result is available to the ordering practitioner. To the best of our knowledge, there are no other federal or state policies giving guidance on definitions and measurement of timeliness of test result follow-up. Measurement and Monitoring: The VA is now instituting a measurement system for test results follow-up, and we encourage other institutions to do the same. Logs of test result values, alerts, and provider acknowledgment of alert receipt (results review) could be used for this purpose. However, acknowledgment of a test result receipt does not guarantee that the follow-up action has taken place;4 alternative measurement systems should be in place to monitor test result follow-up.

In the last decade, the Internet paradigm has been evolving toward a new frontier with the emergence of ubiquitous and pervasive systems, including wireless sensor networks, ad hoc networks, RFID systems, and wireless embedded systems. In fact, while the initial purpose of the Internet was to interconnect computers to share digital data at large scale, the current tendency is to enable ubiquitous and pervasive computing to control everything anytime and at a large scale. This new paradigm has given rise to a new generation of networked systems, commonly known as Internet-of-Things or Cyber-Physical Systems. The research community has actively investigated the underlying challenges pertaining to these systems, as they fundamentally differ from the classical problems due to their inherent constraints. This special issue presents six papers covering various topics in personal and ubiquitous computing. The first paper entitled ‘‘RiSeG: A Ring Based Secure Group Communication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks’’ deals with security in ubiquitous systems. The paper presents a new approach for secure group management in wireless sensor networks. The proposed approach is based on a logical ring architecture, which permits to alleviate the group controller’s task in updating the group key. The proposed scheme also provides backward and forward secrecy, addresses the node compromise attack, and gives a solution to detect and eliminate the compromised nodes. The authors evaluated their scheme in terms of storage, computation, and communication costs and compared its behavior against the Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) scheme. It has been shown that RiSeG requires less storage cost and reduces computation and communication costs at the Group Controller as compared with LKH. The paper goes beyond theoretical work and proposes a realworld implementation, which first proved that RiSeG is applicable to WSNs and also showed that the performance results in terms of execution time, energy consumption, and memory consumption are satisfactory. The second paper entitled ‘‘Stability routing with constrained path length for improved routability in dynamic MANETs’’ addresses the problem of enhancing the routing validity in mobile wireless multi hop ad hoc networks. In proactive routing, routes are established and updated periodically and consequently loose their pertinence as time tics away from the start of their updating instants. Authors argue that routability, defined as the validity of established routes, stands among the most centric metric impacting the network efficiency. Indeed, in dynamic networks, traffic routed through invalid routes not only amounts to a waste of valuable resources but will never be delivered to its destination. In the quest of improving routability in dynamic networks, the authors considered a two-constrained QoS routing problem with one superlative constraint and one comparative constraint. In its general form, this is an NP hard problem. The authors proposed a novel exact algorithm and then instantiated the problem to solve the optimal integer weight-constrained path length A. Belghith (&) University of Manouba, Manouba, Tunisia e-mail: abdelfattah.belghith@ensi.rnu.tn

Evolutionary computation has been little, but steadily, used in the CAD community during the past 20 years. Nowadays, due to their overwhelming complexity, significant steps in the validation of microprocessors must be performed on silicon, i.e., running experiments on physical devices after tape-out. The scenario created new space for innovative heuristics. This paper shows a methodology based on an evolutionary algorithm that can be used to devise assembly programs suitable for a range of on-silicon activities. The paper describes how to take into account complex hardware characteristics and architectural details. The experimental evaluation performed on two high-end Intel microprocessors demonstrates the potentiality of this line of research.

In this paper we present a tunneling solution for multimedia conferencing in Next Generation Networks (NGNs). In particular, we focus on the problems restrictive Firewalls, Proxies and Network Address Translation entities may introduce in multimedia sessions over the Internet, and the need for HTTP-based tunneling when the standard conferencing protocols fail to travel across the network. The paper describes the client-server architecture we devised to achieve an HTTP-based tunneling of the several protocols involved in multimedia conferencing, explaining advantages and drawbacks of the proposed solution. Furthermore, we describe the additional efforts we needed to devote to the standard HTTP tunneling approach in order to let conferencing-related protocols work with it. Finally we exploit our standard XCON-compliant Meetecho conferencing platform as a complete implementation of our proposal, presenting the reader with some experimental results.

The exchange of design models in the design and construction industry is evolving away from 2-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) and paper towards semantically-rich 3-dimensional digital models. This approach, known as Building Information Modelling (BIM), is anticipated to become the primary means of information exchange between the various parties involved in construction projects. From a technical perspective, the domain represents an interesting study in model-based interoperability, since the models are large and complex, and the industry is one in which collaboration is a vital part of business. In this paper, we present our experiences with issues of model-based interoperability in exchanging building information models between various tools, and in implementing tools which consume BIM models, particularly using the industry standard IFC data modelling format. We report on the successes and challenges in these endeavours, as the industry endeavours to move further towards fully digitised information exchange.

Despite the promising start, Electronic Commerce has not taken off mostly because of security issues with the communication infrastructures that are popping up threateningly undermining the perceived trustworthiness in Electronic Commerce. Some Internet security issues, like malware, phishing, pharming are well known to the Internet community. Such issues are being, however, transferred to the telephone networks thanks to the symbiotic relation between the two worlds. Such an interconnection is becoming so pervasive that we can really start thinking about a unique network, which, in this paper, we refer to as the Interphonet. The main goal of this paper is to analyze some of the Internet security issues that are being transferred to the Interphonet and also to identify new security issues of the Interphonet. In particular we will discuss about mobile phones malware and identity theft, phishing with SMS, telephone pharming, untraceability of phone calls that use VoIP and Caller ID spoofing. We will also briefly discuss about countermeasures.

A large number of papers on verifiable electronic voting that have appeared in the literature in recent years have relied heavily on the availability of an append-only web bulletin board . Despite this widespread requirement, however, the notion of an append-only web bulletin board remains somewhat vague, and no method of constructing such a bulletin board has been proposed. This paper fills the gap. We identify the required properties of an append-only web bulletin board, and introduce the concept of certified publishing of messages to the board. We show how such a board can be constructed in order to satisfy the properties we have identified. Finally, we consider how to extend the scheme to make the web bulletin board robust and able to offer assurance to writers of the inclusion of their messages. Although the work presented here has been inspired and motivated by the requirements of electronic voting systems, the web bulletin board is sufficiently general to allow use in other contexts.

The emerging all-IP mobile network infrastructures based on 3rd Generation IP Multimedia Subsystem philosophy are characterised by radio access technology independence and ubiquitous connectivity for mobile users. Currently, great focus is being devoted to security issues since most of the security threats presently affecting the public Internet domain, and the upcoming ones as well, are going to be suffered by mobile users in the years to come. While a great deal of research activity, together with standardisation efforts and experimentations, is carried out on mechanisms for signalling protection, very few integrated frameworks for real-time multimedia data protection have been proposed in a context of IP Multimedia Subsystem, and even fewer experimental results based on testbeds are available. In this paper, after a general overview of the security issues arising in an advanced IP Multimedia Subsystem scenario, a comprehensive infrastructure for real-time multimedia data protection, based on the adoption of the Secure Real-Time Protocol, is proposed; then, the development of a testbed incorporating such functionalities, including mechanisms for key management and cryptographic context transfer, and allowing the setup of Secure Real-Time Protocol sessions is presented; finally, experimental results are provided together with quantitative assessments and comparisons of system performances for audio sessions with and without the adoption of the Secure Real-Time Protocol framework.

In order to be able to evaluate beforehand the impact of a strategical or tactical move, decision makers need reliable previsional systems. What-if analysis satisfies this need by enabling users to simulate and inspect the behavior of a complex system under some given hypotheses. A crucial issue in the design of what-if applications in the context of business intelligence is to find an adequate formalism to conceptually express the underlying simulation model. In this experience paper we report on how this can be accomplished by extending UML 2 with a set of stereotypes. Our proposal is centered on the use of activity diagrams enriched with object flows, aimed at expressing functional, dynamic, and static aspects in an integrated fashion. The paper is completed by examples taken from a real case study in the commercial area.

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the following road sign parameters: height, dimensions, visibility distance and partial occlusions. This work belongs to a framework whose main applications involve road sign maintenance, driver assistance, and inventory systems. From this paper we suggest a multisensory system composed from two cameras, a GPS receiver, and a distance measurement device,all of them installed in a car. The process consists of several steps which include road sign detection, recognition and tracking , and road signs parameters estimation. From some trigonometric properties, and a camera model, the information provided by the tracking subsystem and the distance measurement sensors, we estimate the road signs parameters.Results show that the described calculation methodology offers a correct estimation for all types of traffic signs.

In this paper we propose some extensions of the business process modeling notation (BPMN) to be able to evaluate the overall cost of business process diagrams. The BPMN is very expressive, and a general treatment of this problem is very complex. Therefore, it seems reasonable to define classes of business process diagrams capturing real processes and to develop efficient analysis methods for these classes. In the paper we define some relevant subsets of the BPMN, extend them with the concept of cost, and provide computational models for each class, in most cases reducing them to existing problems for which efficient solutions already exist.

Combining expressiveness and plainness in the design of web documents is a difficult task. Validation languages are very powerful and designers are tempted to over-design specifications. This paper discusses an offbeat approach: describing any structured content of any document by only using a very small set of patterns, regardless of the format and layout of that document. The paper sketches out a formal analysis of some patterns, based on grammars and language theory. The study has been performed on XML languages and DTDs and has a twofold goal: coding empirical patterns in a formal representation, and discussing their completeness.

The aim of this paper is the comparison of the document classification method based on distance analysis (cluster analysis) and based on coefficients of similarity (Salton's method). We are interested if the received groups of documents are identical (similar) and if new cases are similarly classificated. Getting the positive results will give us the basis to use the method based on coefficients of similarity to classify the set of rules. Classification based on the coefficient of similarity is used to create documentation structural based and retrieval in search engines. The cluster analysis is used to facts and rules classification in knowledge base. It seems that using the mechanism based on the coefficient of similarity can be very comfortable to inference's process. Our paper includes the first issue, it means the comparison of the rules's process classification based on the cluster analysis method and Salton's method.

Feature selection is the process of identifying relevant features in the dataset and discarding everything else as irrelevant and redundant. Since feature selection reduces the dimensionality of the data, it enables the learning algorithms to operate more effectively and rapidly. In some cases, classification performance can be improved; in other instances, the obtained classifier is more compact and can be easily interpreted. There is much work done on feature selection methods for creating ensemble of classifiers. Thus, these works examine how feature selection can help ensemble of classifiers to gain diversity. This paper examines a different direction, i.e. whether ensemble methodology can be used for improving feature selection performance. In this paper we present a general framework for creating several feature subsets and then combine them into a single subset. Theoretical and empirical results presented in this paper validate the hypothesis that this approach can help finding a better feature subset.

The curse of dimensionality is a well known but not entirely well-understood phenomena. Too much data, in terms of the number of input variables, is not always a good thing. This is especially true when the problem involves unsupervised learning or supervised learning with unbalanced data (many negative observations but minimal positive observations). This paper addresses two issues involving high dimensional data: The first issue explores the behavior of kernels in high dimensional data. It is shown that variance, especially when contributed by meaningless noisy variables, confounds learning methods. The second part of this paper illustrates methods to overcome dimensionality problems with unsupervised learning utilizing subspace models. The modeling approach involves novelty detection with the one-class SVM.

This paper presents the development of an Internet server controller based intelligent maintenance system for products. It also discusses on how to develop products and manufacturing systems using Internet-based intelligent technologies and how to ensure the product quality, coordinate the activities, reduce costs and change maintenance practice from breakdown reaction to breakdown prevention. In the paper, an integrated approach using hardware and software agents (watchdog agent) is proposed to develop the Internet server controller based integrated intelligent maintenance system. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by developing a real system for the washing machine.

Internet accessibility for the visually impaired community is still an open issue. Guidelines have been issued by the W3C consortium to help web designers to improve web site accessibility. However several studies show that a significant percentage of web page creators are still ignoring the proposed guidelines. Several tools are now available, general purpose, or web specific, to help visually impaired readers. But is reading a web page enough? Regular sighted users are able to scan a web page for a particular piece of information at high speeds. Shouldn't visually impaired readers have the same chance? This paper discusses some features already implemented to improve accessibility and presents a user feedback report regarding the AudioBrowser, a talking browser. Based on the user feedback the paper also suggests some avenues for future work in order to make talking browsers and screen readers compatible., The research reported in here was supported by SNRIP (The Portuguese National Secretariat of Rehabilitation and Integration for the Disabled) under program CITE 2001, and also FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) and POSI/2001 (Operational Program for the Information Society) with funds partly awarded by FEDER.

Due to the heterogeneous nature of web services, interoperability is a crucial aspect, and this interoperability has not only a data aspect (ontologies) but also a process aspect. To ensure correctness of e-business processes, some kind of transaction support (e.g. WS-TXM) is necessary but not sufficient. In this paper, we define correctness in terms of contract compliance. Being contract-guided, e-business processes require a contract-dependent transaction protocol that can be represented as a set of formally specified agreements and obligations between participants. In current standards and frameworks, contract-based interoperability is only referred to, but not specified in details. This paper contributes to contract-based interoperability in the following aspects: for the first time it classifies characteristics for various degrees (levels) of contract-based interoperability, and it provides formal definitions of basic support operations - check and lock.

In this paper we report on some research activities in the ATLAS team in Nantes and the GOOD OLD AI research group in Belgrade in the domain of model-based engineering. We start from the idea that a convenient organization of various technical spaces in three “metamodeling” layers offers a convenient working environment. The main message of this paper is that it is possible to consider software engineering and ontology engineering as two similarly organized areas, based on different metametamodels (M3-level). Consequently, building bridges between these spaces at the M3-level seems to offer some significant advantages that will be discussed in the paper.

The paper deals with the new challenges and the roles of metada and metainformation in the area of text/data mining in the area of statistics. In the first part, the paper is presenting some basic characteristics of the contemporary statistical information systems from the point of view of the needs for utilization of metadata and data/text mining. As it is well known, modern statistical systems are characterized by an enormous amounts of various statistical data what requires also specific methods and technologies for their processing. In the second part the mutual relations between metadata and metainformation are analysed and some conclusions and recommendations for the further research and development in that problem areas are presented.

In this paper is presented the overall process and the basic conclusions of a comparison study, which was applied in the framework of NEMIS project regarding text mining tools. The basic stages of the overall comparison process are described, together with the specified evaluation criteria. Finally, the main conclusions of the particular study constitute the last chapter of the paper.

This paper introduces our method for automatic Schankian-like scripts retrieval from the Internet resources and its preliminary results which might be interesting for Social Sciences researchers. We describe the first module of our system, which is supposed to automatically retrieve commonsensical knowledge from the Web resources by using web-mining techniques. It retrieves minimal “object — action — action” scripts which show humans’ common activities changing due the origin of a webpage author. Such data can be used in fields of economics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, sociology or in language education. By this paper we would like to make NLP researchers notice the potential of commonsense retrieval and encourage them to consider creating such tools for their languages.

The paper presents an attempt at the construction of a wide scale parser for English based on Inductive Learning and limited resources. The parser loosely preserves the shift-reduce scheme, enriched with powerful actions, and a compound Decision Tree instead of the decision table. The attempt originates directly from Hermjakob’s ideas [3], but an important goal was to analyse possible extensions to a wide scale solution. Several supporting heuristics, as well as the overview of the development process and experiments, are described in the paper.

In the paper an approach to the construction of rule-based morphosyntactic tagger for Polish is proposed. The core of the tagger are modules of rules (classification systems), acquired from the IPI PAN corpus by application of Genetic Algorithms. Each module is specialised in making decisions concerning different parts of a tag (a structure of attributes). The acquired rules are combined with linguistic rules made by hand and memory-based rules acquired also from the corpus. The construction of the tagger and experiments concerning its properties are also presented in the paper.

The paper describes new automatic service intended for using telephone directory inquiries without human-operator. We propose to use the automatic speech recognition system for answering the queries of the users. The information about firms and organizations can be taken from the electronic catalogue “Yellow Pages of Saint-Petersburg” located in the Internet and regularly updated with new information. During development such system for Russian language there are sufficient problems, connected with complex structure of word-formation of Russian language. The developed speech recognition system SIRIUS has one additional level of Russian language representation - morphemic level. As a result the size of vocabulary and time for speech processing are significantly decreased. Also the dialogue model for voice control of electronic catalogue “Yellow Pages” is presented in the paper. The first experimental results allow to say about good perspectives of development of telephone speech recognizer for large vocabulary for Russian.