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The application of virtualisation techniques in communication networks is growing in response to continuous pressure due to profitability stagnation and profit margin reduction. In this regard, the trend of Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), which refers to the use of cloud-based software for carrying out network functions, is expected to modify this scenario. The EU FP7 T-NOVA project has the goal of providing mechanisms to foster the adoption of NFV. In this paper, we present a look in the commercialisation of NFV-based offerings through a marketplace, in which users can trade, auction, select and acquire NFV services. In this respect, a brokering mechanism was developed that is able to facilitate competition among Function Providers (FPs), allowing the T-NOVA customers to search for available offerings, trade between the third-party function developers (FPs) and finally the Service Provider (SP) to find the best price for the VNFs, which will be part of each T-NOVA Network Service.

Objective Congenital hydrocephalus (CH) is one of the most frequent CNS congenital malformations, representing an entity with serious pathological consequences. Although several studies have previously assessed child-related risk factors associated with CH development, there is a gap of knowledge on maternal environmental risk factors related to CH. The authors have systematically assessed extrinsic factors in the maternal environment that potentially confer an increased risk of CH development. Methods The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, and EMBASE were systematically searched for works published between 1966 and December 2015 to identify all relevant articles published in English. Only studies that investigated environmental risk factors concerning the mother-either during gestation or pregestationally-were included. Results In total, 13 studies (5 cohorts, 3 case series, 3 case-control studies, 1 meta-analysis, and 1 case report) meeting the inclusion criteria were identified. Maternal medication or alcohol use during gestation; lifestyle modifiable maternal pathologies such as obesity, diabetes, or hypertension; lack of prenatal care; and a low socioeconomic status were identified as significant maternal environmental risk factors for CH development. Maternal infections and trauma to the mother during pregnancy have also been highlighted as potential mother-related risk factors for CH. Conclusions Congenital hydrocephalus is an important cause of serious infant health disability that can lead to health inequalities among adults. The present study identified several maternal environmental risk factors for CH, thus yielding important scientific information relevant to prevention of some CH cases. However, further research is warranted to confirm the impact of the identified factors and examine their underlying behavioral and/or biological basis, leading to the generation of suitable prevention strategies.

The Linked Data paradigm is the most common practice for publishing, sharing and managing information in the Data Web. Linkzoo is an IT infrastructure for collaborative publishing, annotating and sharing of Data Web resources, and their publication as Linked Data. In this paper, we overview LinkZoo and its main components, and we focus on the search facilities provided to retrieve and explore RDF resources. Two search services are presented: (1) an interactive, two-step keyword search service, where live natural language query suggestions are given to the user based on the input keywords and the resource types they match within LinkZoo, and (2) a keyword search service for exploring remote SPARQL endpoints that automatically generates a set of candidate SPARQL queries, i.e., SPARQL queries that try to capture userâ??s information needs as expressed by the keywords used. Finally, we demonstrate the search functionalities through a use case drawn from the life sciences domain.

In this paper, we present how we could benefit from the transmitted data of a broadcast link in order to achieve optimized performance of P2P content distribution. In this context, the paper elaborates on a prototype broadcast-aware P2P mechanism (namely BAP2P) that assists content distribution among users located in different CMNs by minimising redundant traffic in the downlink stream, thus providing enhanced scalability and optimised performance. The mechanism is evaluated based on ‘Download Completion Time’ and the ‘Block exchanged’ over the DVB-T network and the results indicate the validity of the Mechanism presented.

MPEG-DASH is the first international standardisation effort in the area of HTTP Adaptive Streaming, but as its vendor counterparts suffers from the QoE unfairness issue: alike MPEG-DASH users, sharing the same net and requesting the same video service, receive segments from different Quality Profiles. Being interested to exploit MPEG-DASH paradigm for transferring video services over interactive digital broadcasting networks, we discuss, in this paper, how these broadcasting networks can provide QoE fairness to their MPEG-DASH users. In more detail, we propose the elevation of the broadcasting networks' edge routers to QoE fairness nodes able to enforce any QoE fairness policy to their MPEG-DASH users. Towards validating our approach, we integrated in each edge router a Traffic Shaper, to be used as a QoE fairness module, and run several experiments that verified the QoE unfairness issue, besides revealing ours solution capacity to eliminate it.

In this paper, we show how Active Window Management (AWM) technique can be exploited for providing QoE fairness to the HTTP Adaptive Streaming users of an interactive digital broadcasting network. Furthermore, we test AWM's efficiency against another QoE fairness provision solution, presented in other research efforts, namely the Traffic Shaping. Towards these, we firstly describe the deployment of AWM and Traffic Shaping software modules in each intermediate node (Cell Main Node-CMN) of the broadcasting network and secondly we proceed with the experimental evaluation. The experimental results showed not only AWM's efficiency to achieve the set fairness goal but also revealed AWM's capacity, when compared to Traffic Shaping, to provide for much lower TCP Round Trip Times (88% less) and zero retransmissions; a result which could, in principle, lead to less TCP rate variations and thus less Quality Profile fluctuations.

Two hundred fifty patients with distant metastasis from malignant melanoma were analyzed at the first appearance of systemic metastasis. Commonly involved sites were lung, subcutaneous tissue, brain, and liver. Frequency of liver metastasis was higher with eye and mucous membrane primary sites (P less than 0.01). Liver involvement had the worse survival compared to lung and brain. Patients with mucosal or unknown primary sites had decreased survival compared to other sites (P less than 0.01). Patients with primary melanomas thicker than 4 mm had significantly shorter survival (P less than 0.02). Single-organ involvement correlated with longer survival compared to multiple-organ involvement (P less than 0.04). Survival of metastatic disease was more favorable in patients with involvement of subcutaneous tissue only and in those with a disease-free interval of 2 years or longer. Five-year survival from first appearance of metastasis was 7% and median survival was 8 months.

SummaRy Aim: To analyze socio-demographic correlates of alcohol drinking among Greek healthy adults. Methods: Data related to alcohol consumption patterns of 5,500 adult individuals, coming from 26 Hellenic provinces were abstracted from SESy-Europe database within a framework of the nationwide Hellenic anticancer-trial PACMeR 02 study. Statistic: χ 2 test and logistic regression analyses were used. Results: 42.5% of males and 82.5% of females did not consume alcoholic drinks. Among users, daily alcohol assumption was 28.50 g/day for men and 9.85 g/day for women. The mainland population presented higher proportions for both abstainers and moderate-heavy drinkers. Consumption rate was higher for sub-populations living in islands, but they were mostly light drinkers rather than heavy consumers. Among males, younger subjects, farmers and craftsmen had a higher tendency for alcohol abuse. Among females, the proportion of consumers and abusers was notably more elevated among younger individuals, especially among those living in urban areas of mainland, with higher educational level, employees and freelance professionals. A particular attention to the newly and rapidly growing patterns of alcoholism among young females should be given and prevention programs should be promptly developed.

Following up the success story of the OS-Specific App Stores, we present a new business case in network function virtualization (NFV), where function provider (FP) can publish, broke, trade, offer, and advertise their developed functions inside a novel Marketplace for NFV. This novel approach is able to attract new entrants to the networking market, including among other, a Novel Brokerage Platform, allowing Service Providers to transact with the FP. Finally, via the Marketplace, customers can browse and select services and virtual appliances that best match their needs, as well as negotiate Service Level Agreements and be charged under various billing models browse and select the services and virtual appliances that best match their needs.

Entity Resolution constitutes a core task for data integration that, due to its quadratic complexity, typically scales to large datasets through blocking methods. These can be configured in two ways. The schema-based configuration relies on schema information in order to select signatures of high distinctiveness and low noise, while the schema-agnostic one treats every token from all attribute values as a signature. The latter approach has significant potential, as it requires no fine-tuning by human experts and it applies to heterogeneous data. Yet, there is no systematic study on its relative performance with respect to the schema-based configuration. This work covers this gap by comparing analytically the two configurations in terms of effectiveness, time efficiency and scalability. We apply them to 9 established blocking methods and to 11 benchmarks of structured data. We provide valuable insights into the internal functionality of the blocking methods with the help of a novel taxonomy. Our studies reveal that the schema-agnostic configuration offers unsupervised and robust definition of blocking keys under versatile settings, trading a higher computational cost for a consistently higher recall than the schema-based one. It also enables the use of state-of-the-art blocking methods without schema knowledge.