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High-Utility Itemset Mining (HUIM) is a relevant data mining task. The goal is to discover recurrent combinations of items characterized by high profit from transactional datasets. HUIM has a wide range of applications among which market basket analysis and service profiling. Based on the observation that items can be clustered into domain-specific categories, a parallel research issue is generalized itemset mining. It entails generating correlations among data items at multiple abstraction levels. The extraction of multiple-level patterns affords new insights into the analyzed data from different viewpoints. This paper aims at discovering a novel pattern that combines the expressiveness of generalized and High-Utility itemsets. According to a user-defined taxonomy items are first aggregated into semantically related categories. Then, a new type of pattern, namely the Generalized High-utility Itemset (GHUI), is extracted. It represents a combinations of items at different granularity levels characterized by high profit (utility). While profitable combinations of item categories provide interesting high-level information, GHUIs at lower abstraction levels represent more specific correlations among profitable items. A single-phase algorithm is proposed to efficiently discover utility itemsets at multiple abstraction levels. The experiments, which were performed on both real and synthetic data, demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed approach.

Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) is a declarative model for concurrency where agents interact by telling and asking constraints (pieces of information) in a shared store. Some previous works have developed (approximated) declarative debuggers for CCP languages. However, the task of debugging concurrent programs remains difficult. In this paper we define a dynamic slicer for CCP and we show it to be a useful companion tool for the existing debugging techniques. Our technique starts by considering a partial computation (a trace) that shows the presence of bugs. Often, the quantity of information in such a trace is overwhelming, and the user gets easily lost, since she cannot focus on the sources of the bugs. Our slicer allows for marking part of the state of the computation and assists the user to eliminate most of the redundant information in order to highlight the errors. We show that this technique can be tailored to timed variants of CCP. We also develop a prototypical implementation freely available for making experiments., Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 26th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2016), Edinburgh, Scotland UK, 6-8 September 2016 (arXiv:1608.02534)

This Special Issue includes extended versions of selected papers from the XII Jornadas de Ingeniería Telemática (JITEL 2015), that took place in Palma, Spain, from October 14th to 16th, 2015. These papers underwent a rigorous review process, ensuring that they present enough new material so as to be considered original contributions while avoiding self-plagiarism.

The use of network technology to provide online courses is the latest trend in the training and development industry and has been defined as the “e-Learning revolution”. On the other hand, Online Social Networks (OSNs) represent today an effective possibility to have common and easy-to-use platforms for supporting e-Learning activities. However, as underlined by previous studies, many of the proposed e-Learning systems can result in confusion and decrease the learner’s interest. In this paper, we introduce the possibility to form e-Learning classes in the context of OSNs. At the best of our knowledge, any of the approaches proposed in the past considers the evolution of on-line classes as a problem of matching the individual users’ profiles with the profiles of the classes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that exploits a multi-agent system to suitably distribute such a matching computation on all the user devices. The good effectiveness and the promising efficiency of our approach is shown by the experimental results obtained on simulated On-line Social Networks data.

In the near future the number of equipment connected to the Internet will greatly increase, so that further development of applications meant to verify their operations will be required. Monitoring represents an important factor in improving the quality of the services provided in cloud computing, given the fact that it allows scaling resource utilization in an adaptive manner. This paper aims to provide a solution for the monitoring of network devices and services, allowing administrator to verify connectivity of the equipment, their performances and network security. The main contribution of the paper consists in proposing an integrated solution that is deployed in the cloud for monitoring all the network components. Finally, the paper discusses the main findings and advantages for a reference implementation of the monitoring system using a simulated network.

© Springer International Publishing AG 2016. This paper improves the understanding of linear cryptanalysis by highlighting some previously overlooked aspects. It shows that linear hulls are sometimes formed already in a single round, and that overlooking such hulls may lead to a wrong estimation of the linear correlation, and thus of the data complexity. It shows how correlation matrices can be used to avoid this, and provides a tutorial on how to use them properly. By separating the input and output masks from the key mask it refines the formulas for computing the expected correlation and the expected linear potential. Finally, it shows that when the correlation of a hull is not properly estimated (e.g., by using the correlation of a single trail as the correlation of the hull), the success probability of Matsui’s Algorithm 1 drops, sometimes drastically. It also shows that when the trails composing the hull are properly accounted for, more than a single key bit can be recovered using Algorithm 1. All the ideas presented in this paper are followed by examples comparing previous methods to the corrected ones, and verified experimentally with reduced-round versions of Simon32/64. ispartof: pages:269-286 ispartof: Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol:10095 pages:269-286 ispartof: INDOCRYPT 2016 location:Kolkata, INDIA date:11 Dec - 14 Dec 2016 status: published

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.

A new growing and pruning algorithm is proposed for radial basis function (RBF) neural network structure design in this paper, which is named as self-organizing RBF (SORBF). The structure of the RBF neural network is introduced in this paper first, and then the growing and pruning algorithm is used to design the structure of the RBF neural network automatically. The growing and pruning approach is based on the radius of the receptive field of the RBF nodes. Meanwhile, the parameters adjusting algorithms are proposed for the whole RBF neural network. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through functions approximation and dynamic system identification. Then, the method is used to capture the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) concentration in a wastewater treatment system. Experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient for network structure optimization, and it achieves better performance than some of the existing algorithms.

International audience; In the video analysis domain, automatic detection of actions performed in a recorded video represents an important scientific and industrial challenge. This paper presents a new method to approximate the boundaries of actions performed by a person while interacting with his environment (such as moving objects). This method relies on a Codebook quantization method to analyze the rough evolution of each pixel and then decide whether this evolution corresponds to an action or not; this decision is taken by an automated system. Statistics are then produced - at the scale of the whole frame - to estimate the start and the end of an action. According to our proposed evaluation protocol, this method produces interesting results on both real and simulated videos. This statistic-based protocol is discussed at the end of this paper. The interpretation of this evaluation protocol nominates this method to be a solid base to localize the exact boundaries of actions or - in the framework of this research activity - to associate prescriptive text with a visual content.

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.

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.

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.

Independent living technologies are fast gaining interest within both academia and industry, amid the realization that the world's population is ageing. Technology can increase the quality of life of older people, allowing them to age-in-place and helping them to remain physically, cognitively and socially engaged with their environment. However, little research in this area is applied. The paper argues for the necessity of moving such technology out of the research laboratory and into the home, where its real impact on the lives of older adults can be assessed. Moreover, a series of recommendations are outlined, encompassing the life cycle of independent living technologies, from ethnographic assessment, through to design, deployment and evaluation. This work is based on lessons learned in deploying such technologies to older people in over 200 homes. This paper can act as a guide for other researchers interested in developing technologies with older people.

Since its inception, Service Orientation has promised to offer seamless alignment of the business and IT aspects of service-oriented systems. Practitioners, however, often report that such alignment is far from being solved. Specifically, current research in aligning services either remains at a too abstract, strategic level, or is too technology-oriented to be really useful in practice. In spite of being an “old” problem, business-IT alignment is still a dilemma. What makes alignment so difficult? In this work we address this fundamental question by questioning what should be aligned, and what are the concerns hindering alignment. This paper explores the conceptual gaps around the notion of service in the two economic- and IT perspectives. By framing the core constructs of Service Orientation and contrasting those constructs between the economic- and IT perspectives, this paper elicits five core alignment concerns. We illustrate the concerns using a real-life case study featuring an airport baggage handling system. The alignment concerns pinpoint promising solutions in which the alignment problem can be solved.

Agile development methods are becoming increasingly important to face continuously changing requirements. Nevertheless, the adoption of such methods in industrial environments still needs to be fostered. Companies call for tools to keep under (quantitative) control both agility and coordination of IT teams. In this paper, we report on an empirical case study aiming at enabling real com-panies migrating from waterfall to Agile software development process. Our re-search effort has been spent in introducing 11 different IT small and medium-sized enterprises to Agile methods and to observe them executing real business projects. To have a common evaluation framework, we selected a set of 61 met-rics, with the purpose of monitoring and measuring the evolution towards Agile methods of each company involved in the experiment. In the paper, we provide readers with empirical data on companies’ feedback. We report on two different categories of real insights into what the companies are doing: (i) the metrics they consider to be useful and/or directly exploitable by product lines beyond the theoretical definitions; (ii) the tools and strategies they are adopting and connecting to existing development environments to easily collect data from the metrics, and evaluate quantitative improvements in the Agile methods.

It is now possible and affordable to sequence my own genome and multiple aspects of my phenotype. In a recent paper (Chen et al. 2012), Mike Snyder demonstrated the beauty of this by “self-quantifying” his “integrative Personal Omics Profile” during one year. Interestingly, he did not “quantify” his lifestyle (dietary intake, physical exercise). When, halfway during his experiment, he curiously developed type 2 diabetes, the cure was eating less (which was neither specified in the paper). Apparently, “big science” does not realize the need for quantification, nor the impact of the environment. Nutrition research is developing in a genotype × phenotype × environment interaction science. Actually, the capacity to constantly adapt to a changing environment is now being coined as a new definition of health (Huber et al. 2011; van Ommen et al. 2009). On a molecular regulatory level, a multitude of processes is constantly fine-tuning aspects of our phenotype to maintain and regain homeostasis after dietary, metabolic, oxidative, inflammatory and other challenges. We have coined this as “phenotypic flexibility,” Quantification of our health status thus needs to take into account our ability to cope with these challenges. If my health is determined by my “genotype × phenotype × environment,” we need to properly “quantify” each of these components. Modern nutrition science has seen a number of major developments over the last 10 years: the inclusion of omics technologies (nutrigenomics), the modern version of “back to physiology” (nutritional systems biology), the personalized nutrition hype, new metabolomics-based methods of food intake quantification, etc. The big question now remains: Is nutrition science ready to “quantify” my personal health status and provide related personal dietary and lifestyle advice based on quantification of my own genotype × phenotype × environment interaction? A careful look at changes in healthcare points at the urgent need for both prevention and personal empowerment (Fani Marvasti and Stafford 2012). Each individual, in order to properly take control of one`s own health, needs access or even better, needs to own all relevant information regarding personal health status. Apart from the above-mentioned integrative personal omics profile, other activities point in this direction. There is a push from the “medical records” front, and more interestingly, the Quantified Self crowd source movement (http://quantifiedself.com) launches all kinds of initiatives. Developments in personal sensors are exploding and the European Commission takes this very seriously with action plans on eHealth and mHealth (http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/eHealth). An interesting feature of most of the above-mentioned initiatives is that the generated data usually become open access. This is not just an enforced action from the journals or funders, but actually is a new trend in science on top of the “big data” wave, where new science and business models develop on the awareness that it is more advantageous to share than not to share (Friend and Norman 2013). Now, imagine that we have access to thousands of “Mike Snyder” datasets, extended with proper dietary intake data and all other relevant parameters and that all these data sources were standardized, open access and covering all relevant aspects of genotyping, phenotyping and “exotyping” over a number of years. This would become a treasure for nutrition and health research! NuGO, the Nutrigenomics Organisation has taken up the challenge to organize this: an open access cohort where each individual provides and owns her/his own health data that both provide an empowerment for individual health optimization and, brought together, a powerful open access cohort. As a first step, a 2-year project is being launched to establish all analytical methods, standards and operation procedures, data infrastructure, ethical and privacy aspects, governance, etc. We have decided to stay “close to home” in this experimental phase and enroll ourselves, (nutrition) scientists, as participants. Who else then us can best evaluate how to quantify food intake, assess the real use of genetic variation for our nutritional phenotype, determine the best “do it yourself” challenge test to determine phenotypic flexibility, etc. Thus, the “Nutrition Researcher Cohort” (NRC) is born. Details are provided at www.nugo.org/nrc. The NRC is thus a “crowd science” project, where we, as experts/subjects, both participate and build. If you are interested, please join, either as participant and as scientist. Once the two year initial phase is passed, we can implement the lessons learned in a really new mix between a nutrition and health cohort and a personal healthcare setting.

Universal Access is commonly interpreted as focusing on designing for users with atypical requirements--specifically users with disabilities or older adults. However, Universal Access is also about providing access to users in all situations and circumstances, including those that place extraordinary or unusual demands on the users who might otherwise not need assistance. This paper examines the design of a user interface (UI) for use in an airport environment and explains how the lessons learned from research into designing for users with disabilities, in particular, have been applied in this new context. The paper further describes a series of experiments that were performed to demonstrate the usability of the new interface and also compares the efficiency and effectiveness of three different input strategies developed for the new UI. The most efficient method of input was a strategy of combined keyboard shortcuts offering access to the full functionality of the UI. The case study also highlights that new Web 2.0 technologies support the implementation of accessibility solutions more typically only associated with non-Web applications. Further, it demonstrates that relying on only the TAB key for supporting keyboard-only access is comparatively inefficient, and that Web developers should be actively encouraged to use all of the available functionality from Web 2.0 technologies to produce more flexible and efficient keyboard-only support.

We the members of the Editorial team of Indian Journal of Microbiology (INJM) are extremely thankful to all those who believe in the values of this journal. This is evident from the fact that quite a few of you have published your quality work with us. In the present scenario, the value of the work is judged from the citations it receives, which happens with time only. However, at the time of publication, people judge the quality of the work from the impact factor (IF) of the journal, where your precious work has been published. Now, this race to get recognized through IF is getting fierce. We are left with hardly any option but to participate in it and run, that too very fast lest we are left behind among the muck. It is important to move forward and get recognized. It’s time to have a few wins among your precious possessions. IF of INJM for 2012 will be declared very soon in June/July 2013. Since it will be based on the papers published in 2010 and 2011 but cited in 2012, there is little which we can do now. We will be facing the reality and hoping for the best to achieve a respectable IF. Our hopes are quite high in view of the fact that there are quite a few papers which have been cited in Journals of high IF, such as—Nature Reviews Microbiology, Biotechnology Advances, Current Opinion in Biotechnology, Critical Reviews in Environmental Science, FEMS Microbiology, Infection and Immunity, ISME Journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Bioresource Technology, PLoS One, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, etc. We must acknowledge the authors of these contributions, which have taken INJM to a higher platform and improved it visibility among the researchers worldwide. It also gives confidence to those who hesitate to publish their prestigious and important works in INJM, fearing that these may go unnoticed. With around 6,500 subscribers and 3,400 Life members of AMI going through these articles, INJM is as good as an “Open Access” journal. Since we have already seen Vol. 53(1) of INJM in March 2013, so in our own interest, we need to act in a focused manner. To enhance the visibility of our work we need to cite our present work (published in INJM) in our subsequent publications (in journals other than INJM) but to get it recognized (enhanced IF of INJM) we need to cite papers (of other authors, self citation will not prove effective) preferably from INJM published in 2011, 2012, 2013 and from Online First papers as well. INJM Vol. 53(2) is in your hands and you can expect the rest to follow soon. We very strongly believe that you will be submitting your innovative and novel works in future as well and the citations of your work will help us improve the status and image of INJM.

The optimal design and operation of dynamic bioprocesses gives in practice often rise to optimisation problems with multiple and conflicting objectives. As a result typically not a single optimal solution but a set of Pareto optimal solutions exist. From this set of Pareto optimal solutions, one has to be chosen by the decision maker. Hence, efficient approaches are required for a fast and accurate generation of the Pareto set such that the decision maker can easily and systematically evaluate optimal alternatives. In the current paper the multi-objective optimisation of several dynamic bioprocess examples is performed using the freely available ACADO Multi-Objective Toolkit (http://www.acadotoolkit.org). This toolkit integrates efficient multiple objective scalarisation strategies (e.g., Normal Boundary Intersection and (Enhanced) Normalised Normal Constraint) with fast deterministic approaches for dynamic optimisation (e.g., single and multiple shooting). It has been found that the toolkit is able to efficiently and accurately produce the Pareto sets for all bioprocess examples. The resulting Pareto sets are added as supplementary material to this paper. ispartof: Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering vol:36 issue:2 pages:151-164 ispartof: location:Germany status: published

[EN] Childhood obesity is a significant health problem in current societies that is increasing at an alarming way among population of all ages. To date, studies on the effectiveness of treatments for childhood obesity in the medium and long term suggest a moderate effect on weight loss and maintenance, which has led to suggestions that early interventions have a preventive nature on adult obesity. The long-term recovery of the weight lost is often associated with a lack of adherence to recommendations for changing life habits. Then, obesity becomes a chronic problem, difficult to approach, and the main difficulty lies in promoting and ensuring adherence to a change in lifestyle. A system known as ETIOBE has been developed to improve the treatment adherence, to promote the mechanisms of self-control in patients and to prevent relapses. An important part of the ETIOBE system is the ubiquitous monitoring platform since it enables the clinician to obtain relevant information from patients (contextual, physiological and psychological), which enables treatment customization and adaptation, depending on the patient's evolution. The aim of this paper is to describe the monitoring platform which is intended to establish a sensor network whose focus is the obese children under clinical treatment, and the various elements that compose it: electronic PDA records to establish diet habits, HAS: home ambulatory system (data integration of biomedical devices; blood pressure to study hypertension; pulse oximeter to detect Sleep Disorders; and electronic t-shirt to detect physical activity). This paper presents the first validations of the electronic PDA records and the electronic t-shirt. These validations suggest that the monitoring platform can help to achieve the goals previously mentioned, by offering constant support and increasing motivation to change., This study was funded by Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia Spain, Project Game Teen (TIN2010-20187) and partially by projects Consolider-C (SEJ2006-14301/PSIC), "CIBER of Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition, an initiative of ISCIII'' and Excellence Research Program PROMETEO (Generalitat Valenciana. Conselleria de Educacion, 2008-157).

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.

In this paper, we evaluate the performances of state-of-the-art higher order masking schemes for the AES. Doing so, we pay a particular attention to the comparison between specialized solutions introduced exclusively as countermeasures against side-channel analysis, and a recent proposal by Roche and Prouff exploiting multiparty computation (MPC) techniques. We show that the additional security features this latter scheme provides (e.g., its glitch-freeness) come at the cost of large performance overheads. We then study how exploiting standard optimization techniques from the MPC literature can be used to reduce this gap. In particular, we show that “packed secret sharing” based on a modified multiplication algorithm can speed up MPC-based masking when the order of the masking scheme increases. Eventually, we discuss the randomness requirements of masked implementations. For this purpose, we first show with information theoretic arguments that the security guarantees of masking are only preserved if this randomness is uniform, and analyze the consequences of a deviation from this requirement. We then conclude the paper by including the cost of randomness generation in our performance evaluations. These results should help actual designers to choose a masking scheme based on security and performance constraints.

This paper addresses the problem of real time face recognition in unconstrained environments from the analysis of low quality video frames. It focuses in particular on finding an effective and fast to compute (that is, sparse) representation of faces, starting from classical Local Binary Patterns (LBPs). The two contributions of the paper are a new formulation of Group LASSO for structured feature selection (MCGroup LASSO) to cope directly with multi-class settings, and a face recognition pipeline based on a representation derived from MC-GrpLASSO. We present an extensive experimental analysis on two benchmark datasets, MOBO and Choke Point, and on a more complex dataset acquired in-house over a large temporal span. We compare our results with state-of-the-art approaches and show the superiority of our method in terms of both performances and sparseness of the obtained solution.

Breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation is a very difficult task due to poor image quality and speckle noise. In this paper, local features extracted from roughly segmented regions of interest (ROIs) are used to describe breast tumors. The roughly segmented ROI is viewed as a bag. And subregions of the ROI are considered as the instances of the bag. Multiple-instance learning (MIL) method is more suitable for classifying breast tumors using BUS images. However, due to the complexity of BUS images, traditional MIL method is not applicable. In this paper, a novel MIL method is proposed for solving such task. First, a self-organizing map is used to map the instance space to the concept space. Then, we use the distribution of the instances of each bag in the concept space to construct the bag feature vector. Finally, a support vector machine is employed for classifying the tumors. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance: the accuracy is 0.9107 and the area under receiver operator characteristic curve is 0.96 (p

The IJSO is a new peer reviewed journal for a specialist professional audience. All new journals face challenges in developing a vision and strategy, and establishing a style and a “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP). The USP establishes the place of the journal in the world literature and in the minds of potential authors and readers, and it is sensible for the Editorial Board to have a clear business plan and appropriate targets by which to measure progress. A Society journal such as the IJSO exists to serve the interests of the society members and subscribers, and to provide a platform for the exchange of information in that professional community through the peer reviewed publication process. As the journal grows, so its influence and academic weight may increase, and it can take on wider challenges with greater ambition. As Medical Subject Chair of the Elsevier SCOPUS Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB), I am privileged to assess several hundred specialist journal titles which are seeking accession to this major citation index each year, from a wide variety of regional and national institutions, and with a wide range in quality. In the process, I have learned much about the variation in standards of publication, and about what it takes to build a successful journal. So far as the future of the IJSO is concerned, there are a number of key points to make that will help the journal succeed. Firstly, the international professional surgical oncology community does not need another “me too” surgical oncology journal. Surgical Oncology already has an abundance of such journals, including the World Journal (WJSO), the European Journal (EJSO), the Journal of Surgical Oncology (JSO) and the Annals of Surgical Oncology (ASO). These journals already struggle to find new and original material, and many published papers are never cited and probably rarely read. Any new journal must find an original strategy. Secondly, many journals and their content suffer from poor quality, unimaginative editing, bloated with words and data, and are difficult to read. The general reader will always prefer the article with a clear, meaningful title and informative abstract, and concise content with a clean, simple, direct style and well argued, thoughtful and self-critical conclusions. Authors and editors should always write with the reader’s time and attention in mind. Thirdly, modern publishing must strike a balance between publishing the printed journal, the process of which dictates the quality standards, and the demands of the Internet, which secures the widest distribution of content and which determines the citations of the papers and authors. It is important that a journal has an excellent internet distribution platform, preferably provided by a major publisher such as Springer, and that particular editorial attention is given to clear, informative titles and structured abstracts. After all, these are the most that browsers and potential readers will ever see of the journal. Citations are taken to be an indirect hallmark of quality. Quality is a measure of trustworthiness and respect for a piece of published work; for the authors and for the journal in which the work is published. Each reference or citation thus represents, in effect, a positive vote for that work. Citation measures are the summation of references to published articles in other articles, and the science of bibliometrics exists for the statistical analysis of citations. The Impact Factor of a journal and the H Index of an author are two of many such bibliometric indices. Data systems such as Elsevier’s SCOPUS and Thomson-Reuters’ Web of Science reflect huge financial and intellectual investments to understand and exploit the knowledge derived from bibliometrics. Local and regional subspeciality journals such as the IJSO are thus most likely to make an Impact and to be read and cited by other authors if they publish material of a high quality which is readable, which is accessible, which is trustworthy and of high quality, and which is of unique interest. They should focus on local and regional professional issues and challenges, and develop their own identity. An effort to compete in terms of nature and style of content with the best established journals in the field will be unlikely to succeed, as the journal will not be widely read, authors will be disappointed, and the Impact Factor will languish. Conversely, a subspeciality journal in a developing country which takes courageous steps in identifying challenges and problems of health and service provision in its own region, and which commissions discussion and argument as to possible solutions, will be read with considerable interest in the wider world, and will secure credibility and influence. Herein, in my view, lies a marvellous opportunity for the IJSO and for the surgical oncology community of India. The IJSO represents a community of educated and ambitious professionals for whom English is the common language, just as it is the world’s common language of scientific communication. The problems of providing and delivering an acceptable standard of care to a growing and aging population of some 1200 million Indians, 900 million of whom are currently only able to access and afford the most basic health care are enormous, and provide fertile ground for imaginative writing in the surgical oncology specialities, as in all other health disciplines. How can the Indian surgical profession expand to meet those needs, and provide training and career opportunities for surgeons that will make working among rural communities as attractive as among metro elites? How can well established Western practices such as multidisciplinary cancer team working, governance and professional oversight be adapted to local conditions, and how can information flow around the mixed private-public sector surgical health economy, which is very different to that in many Western countries? How can the skills of the Indian IT sector be adapted to remedying the huge information gaps that still exist in our understanding of the consequences of our inputs and outcomes in our cancer treatments, and how can we use the new technologies of the television, internet and mobile telephony to educate and engage with the cancer needs of the increasingly interconnected rural communities? How can we address huge problems such as provision for palliative and terminal care, which are often held to be the hallmark of a caring society? Moreover, if “I” stands for “Indian Subcontinent” rather than “Indian”, then that sphere of influence and academic opportunity is substantially increased to include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Himalayan states. Further afield, China, many countries in Africa, Asia and South America face health care delivery problems similar to those faced in India. Indeed, of the six billion or so people who inhabit the planet, only one billion or so enjoy the living standards of the most advanced economies and metro elites. The moral and practical obligations to meet the needs and raising expectations of the remainder create fertile ground for intelligent authorship and debate in a new professional journal, which now has the opportunity to develop a substantial sphere of influence. Thus in summary, I believe that the IJSO has a prosperous future ahead if it develops a unique identity, and if it focuses on the search for regional solutions to regional challenges, rather than in slavish replication of the work of surgical oncologists in the advanced economies. Over the next few years, it will need to build solid foundations, with which to secure the credible track record necessary to register on the major citation indices. If it succeeds in these challenges, then the lives of countless people around the world will be enhanced. I wish the Editorial Board of the IJSO well as the seeds of its ambition take root.

This paper describes the generic virtualization service GVirtuS (Generic Virtualization Service), a framework for development of split-drivers for cloud virtualization solutions. The main goal of GVirtuS is to provide tools for developing elastic computing abstractions for high-performance private and public computing clouds. In this paper we focus our attention on GPU virtualization. However, GVirtuS is not limited to accelerator-based architectures: a virtual high performance parallel file system and a MPI channel are ongoing projects based on our split driver virtualization technology.

The Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) is a standardised extension to the mobile telephony security infrastructures (including the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) authentication infrastructure) that supports the provision of generic security services to network applications. In this paper we propose one possible means for extending the widespread Trusted Computing security infrastructure using a GAA-like framework. This enables an existing security infrastructure to be used as the basis of a general-purpose authenticated key establishment service in a simple and uniform way, and also provides an opportunity for trusted computing aware third parties to provide novel security services. We also discuss trust issues and possible applications of GAA services.

This paper evaluates the effect of a Web system which activates institutional repositories. Institutional repository is an important service of libraries in academic institutions. The authors developed a link system between the institutional repository and the researcher database of their university. The system reduces the efforts of researchers by reusing the metadata in the researcher database for registrations of their papers to the repository. The authors observed the access log of the repository before and after the start up of the link system. The result shows that the system increased the number of access, however there was no significant change on the number of registration of papers.

This paper describes one unplanned experiment of a 6th grade student writing her first computer program for 3D graphics before learning any programming language. Some intriguing aspects in her program are analyzed, especially the emerging understanding of key concepts like enumeration, naming conventions of variables and symmetry in 3D space. The paper also identifies two main directions of mental processes. The first direction is actively supported by the school. It is based on presenting and using knowledge in a distilled error-free way. The other direction encompasses techniques needed to identify wrong solutions and to find a way to overcome problems and reach a correct solution. This direction in underrepresented in the educational system and as a result, it is left uncultivated. Students are expected to develop such skills by themselves.

Radiology conferences enable participants the opportunity to ask experts questions through question and answer (Q and A) sessions or individually. Given the time limitations and intimidating circumstances, we incorporated conference text messaging (confexting) as a method of increasing interactivity between the audience and speakers. During a 5-day radiology conference, text messaging was utilized for anonymous interactivity between the audience and speakers during Q and A sessions. There were 324 text messages; 76 of these were either follow-up statements or questions related to earlier text messages. Forty-two questions were submitted via paper notes. There was a general trend of an increasing number of text messages and a decreasing number of paper notes. The anonymous text messaging system was found to be an effective method for interactivity between the audience and the speakers. The questions and answers could be presented in a PowerPoint format at the formal Q and A sessions. Questions texted to the authors during their talks could be immediately answered or addressed in subsequent talks. Although difficult for some individuals to embrace technology, confexting allows for interactivity and prompts discussion. Confexting is an effective method for interactivity between the audience and speakers not previously utilized in a conference setting. The anonymity and asynchronous communication enable conference participants to submit more questions than in the traditional setting. The speakers may be able to explain more thoroughly difficult concepts more thoroughly with additional slides at Q and A sessions or may immediately answer texted questions during their talks.

The study aims at addressing how the approach to strategy definition, strategic planning and external dynamicity can affect the process of business model design within a firm. Analyzing the case of a newcomer in the market for the provisioning of middleware platforms enabling the delivery of Mobile digital content, the paper first identifies a set of critical decisions to be made at a business model design level for a Mobile Middleware Technology Provider, and aggregates these variables within an overall reference framework; then, through a longitudinal case study, it assesses how and why the initial business model configuration changed after two years of business activity. The study allows to argue that those business model design changes occurred in the timeframe considered depended largely on a defective approach to business strategy definition, while environmental dynamicity mostly played an “amplification effect” on the mistakes made in the underlying strategic planning process.

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

In this paper, the problem of classifying handwritten data with respect to gender is addressed. A classification method based on Gaussian Mixture Models is applied to distinguish between male and female handwriting. Two sets of features using on-line and off-line information have been used for the classification. Furthermore, we combined both feature sets and investigated several combination strategies. In our experiments, the on-line features produced a higher classification rate than the off-line features. However, the best results were obtained with the combination. The final gender detection rate on the test set is 67.57%, which is significantly higher than the performance of the on-line and off-line system with about 64.25 and 55.39%, respectively. The combined system also shows an improved performance over human-based classification. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the system presented in this paper is the first completely automatic gender detection system which works on on-line data. Furthermore, the combination of on-line and off-line features for gender detection is investigated for the first time in the literature.

The block cipher XTEA, designed by Needham and Wheeler, was published as a technical report in 1997. The cipher was a result of fixing some weaknesses in the cipher TEA (also designed by Wheeler and Needham), which was used in Microsoft's Xbox gaming console. XTEA is a 64-round Feistel cipher with a block size of 64 bits and a key size of 128 bits. In this paper, we present meet-in-the-middle attacks on twelve variants of the XTEA block cipher, where each variant consists of 23 rounds. Two of these require only 18 known plaintexts and a computational effort equivalent to testing about 2 117 keys, with a success probability of 1-2 -1025 . Under the standard (single-key) setting, there is no attack reported on 23 or more rounds of XTEA, that requires less time and fewer data than the above. This paper also discusses a variant of the classical meet-in-the-middle approach. All attacks in this paper are applicable to XETA as well, a block cipher that has not undergone public analysis yet. TEA, XTEA and XETA are implemented in the Linux kernel. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. ispartof: pages:250-+ ispartof: TOPICS IN CRYPTOLOGY - CT-RSA 2011 vol:6558 pages:250-+ ispartof: Workshop on Current Trends in Cryptology (CTCrypt 2013) location:Ekaterinburg, Russia date:23 Jun - 24 Jun 2013 status: published

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.

[EN] In this paper, an optimization tool based on a MILP model to support the teaching assignment process is proposed. It considers not only hierarchical issues among lecturers but also their preferences to teach a particular subject, the non-regular time schedules throughout the academic year, different type of credits, number of groups and other specific characteristics. Besides, it adds restrictions based on the time compatibility among the different subjects, the lecturers' availability, the maximum number of subjects per lecturer, the maximum number of lecturers per subject as well as the maximum and minimum saturation level for each lecturer, all of them in order to increase the teaching quality. Schedules heterogeneity and other features regarding the operation of some universities justify the usefulness of this model since no study that deals with all of them has been found in the literature review. Model validation has been performed with two real data sets collected from one academic year schedule at the Spanish University Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.

This paper proposes an alternative approach to the design of universally accessible interfaces to that provided by formal design frameworks applied ab initio to the development of new software. This approach, design-by-adaptation, involves the transfer of interface technology and/or design principles from one application domain to another, in situations where the recipient domain is similar to the host domain in terms of modelled systems, tasks and users. Using the example of interaction in 3D virtual environments, the paper explores how principles underlying the design of videogame interfaces may be applied to a broad family of visualization and analysis software which handles geographical data (virtual geographic environments, or VGEs). One of the motivations behind the current study is that VGE technology lags some way behind videogame technology in the modelling of 3D environments, and has a less-developed track record in providing the variety of interaction methods needed to undertake varied tasks in 3D virtual worlds by users with varied levels of experience. The current analysis extracted a set of interaction principles from videogames which were used to devise a set of 3D task interfaces that have been implemented in a prototype VGE for formal evaluation.

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.

A multi-agent planning problem consists of a set of activities that need to be planned by several autonomous agents. Here, plan coordination methods play an important role, since independently generated plans by different agents can easily lead to an infeasible joint plan. We study a coordination-by-design approach which allows each agent to make its own plan completely independently of the others, while still guaranteeing the feasibility of the joint plan. The essence of this coordination approach is to determine a minimum number of additional constraints (a minimum coordination set) such that autonomously developed plans satisfying these constraints are always mergeable into an overall feasible plan. It has been shown that such coordination problems are very hard to solve. Therefore, approximation algorithms have been developed to compute a sufficient, but not necessarily minimum coordination set.In this paper, we concentrate on a special class of multi-agent planning problems. These problems arise in several practical applications such as supply chain management and hospital patient treatment. The plan coordination instances in these applications turn out to have a special structure. Using so-called agent dependency graphs, we show that for this special class of problems a better approximation algorithm to compute a sufficient coordination set can be obtained.

In this paper we discuss the introduction of the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology in the management of the assistance operations in the hospitals. NFC is a new short range communication system based on RFID technology.

peer-reviewed Applying design patterns while developing a software system can improve its non-functional properties, such as extensibility and loose coupling. Precise specification of structure and behaviour communicates the invariants imposed by a pattern on a conforming implementation and enables formal software verification. Many existing design-pattern specification languages (DPSLs) focus on class structure alone, while those that do address behaviour suffer from a lack of expressiveness and/or imprecise semantics. In particular, in a review of existing work, three invariant categories were found to be inexpressible in state-of-the-art DPSLs: dependency, object state and data-structure. This paper presents Alas: a precise specification language that supports design-pattern descriptions including these invariant categories. The language is based on UML Class and Sequence diagrams with modified syntax and semantics. In this paper, the meaning of the presented invariants is formalized and relevant ambiguities in the UML Standard are clarified. We have evaluated Alas by specifying the widely-used Gang of Four pattern catalog and identified patterns that benefitted from the added expressiveness and semantics of Alas.

Systems for interactive storytelling and drama rely on agent theories to model characters, and adopt various techniques to cope with non-determinism at the story level, such as story models, combining them according to sophisticate architectural designs. However, a consolidated approach has not emerged yet, that fully reconciles these two dimensions. In this paper, we propose a unifying framework to accommodate the tension between story control and character behavior. By using a model of agent to analyze a classical example, we show that this tension cannot be solved by discharging the distinguishing properties of agency. Rather, we claim that the accurate modeling of agency is a prerequisite to the success of any attempt to solve this tension, together with the possibility for the author to state the story direction in terms of explicitly declared values.

ERP systems are complex software packages, generally composed of a core part and a set of modules to be customized according to the company’s characteristics, needs and target market. However, ERP system customization is often a critical problem because it is usually carried out by “shaping” the company and its business processes according to a predefined ERP model, rather than vice versa. As a result, company’s managers and employees using an ERP system are often forced to reason about and work in some way different from what they are accustomed to. Such a situation frequently leads to ERP failures. This paper advocates the adoption of HCI methods to address these problems. Specifically, the paper presents an approach to ERP customization based on user-system dialogue specification and participatory design, in order to allow ERP users to participate in creating the interaction experience they would like to live with the system.

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.

The software-efficient stream cipher HC-256 was proposed by Wu at FSE 2004. Due to its impressive performance, the cipher was also a well-received entrant to the ECRYPT eSTREAM competition. The closely related stream cipher HC-128, also designed by Wu, went on to find a place in the final portfolio of the eSTREAM contest. The cipher HC-256 is word-oriented, with 32 bits in each word, and uses a 256-bit key and a 256-bit IV. Since HC-256 was published in 2004, barring a cache-timing analysis of unprotected implementations, there has not been any attack on the cipher. This paper makes two contributions. First, we build a class of distinguishers on HC-256, each of which requires testing the validity of about 2 276.8 linear equations involving binary keystream variables. Thereby, our attacks improve the data complexity of the hitherto best-known distinguisher (presented by the designer along with the specifications of the cipher) by a factor of about 12. We also present another observation that, we believe, can be further exploited to build more efficient distinguishing attacks on the cipher. It is hoped that the results of this paper would also find use in future security evaluations of the closely-related ciphers HC-128 and HC-256'. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. ispartof: pages:38-52 ispartof: Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol:5824 pages:38-52 ispartof: IWSEC 2009 location:JAPAN, Toyama date:28 Oct - 30 Oct 2009 status: published

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.

A major challenge for researchers and clinicians who address health issues in the ageing population is to monitor functioning, and to timely initiate interventions that aim to prevent loss of functional abilities and to improve the quality of life of older people. With the progress of technologies in the last decades, methods have become available that use body fixed sensors (BFS) to measure aspects of human performance under real-life conditions. These methods are based on the use of miniaturised and integrated sensors in combination with lightweight, small measuring devices that both can be carried on the body without interfering with normal behaviour. This paper addresses the potential relevance of new technology for monitoring motor function in older people, thereby specifically focusing on mobility assessment. After a short introduction with background information about BFS based technology, this paper identifies areas of particular relevance, and discusses the application of ambulatory techniques for long-term monitoring of daily physical activity, fall detectors, fall risk evaluation, and assessment of motor performance such as gait and balance control. Examples are given how these techniques can become clinically relevant, particularly in the context of fall interventions for older people.