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In scenarios where resource locality is the key, Fog Computing helps in bringing the potentialities of Everythingas-a-Service (XaaS) closer to the end user, reducing both service time and load on the Cloud infrastructure. We designed and developed FORCH, a service model-aware Fog Computing orchestrator to dynamically allocate services and manage resources available on Fog nodes, in order to provide for different needs of the end users. An experimental test bed to validate FORCH architecture has been implemented and will be the subject of our live demonstration, showing the feasibility of the proposed approach running on different Fog node types and with different service models.

The present paper focuses on the recovery of energy from the unitary passage of people inside the turnstiles. Positioned at strategic points such as stadiums, buildings and fairs, the turnstiles are objects that interact with a large number of people, so we decided to take advantage of this peculiarity to get electricity immediately usable [1-3]. The issue of energy sustainability is increasingly discussed in terms of climate change that is undergoing our planet; hence an ever increasing awareness of avoiding energy losses in all phases of everyday life, even in those apparently unimportant. In our case, people do not have to change their habits or gestures during the turnstile approach, what changes is the concept of passing that becomes the protagonist and fundamental to reach our goal.

After heart surgery, complications affecting the brachial plexus have been reported in 2% to 38% of cases. The long thoracic nerve is vulnerable to damage at various levels, due to its long and superficial course. This nerve supplies the serratus anterior muscle, which has an important role in the abduction and elevation of the superior limb; paralysis of the serratus anterior causes "winged scapula," a condition in which the arm cannot be lifted higher than 90 degrees from the side. Unfortunately the long thoracic nerve can be damaged by a wide variety of traumatic and nontraumatic occurrences, ranging from viral or nonviral disease to improper surgical technique, to the position of the patient during transfer to a hospital bed. Our patient, a 62-year-old man with triple-vessel disease, underwent myocardial revascularization in which right and left internal thoracic arteries and the left radial artery were grafted to the right coronary, descending anterior, and obtuse marginal arteries, respectively. Despite strong recovery and an apparently good postoperative course, the patient sued for damages due to subsequent winging of the left scapula. In this instance, the legal case has less to do with the cause of the lesion (which remains unclear) than with failure to adequately inform the patient of possible complications at the expense of the nervous system. The lesson is that each patient must receive detailed written and oral explanation of the potential benefits and all conceivable risks of a procedure.

A case of asymptomatic aortic valve fibroelastoma was diagnosed by transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiography in a 77-year-old man. A 2nd tumor was found at surgery. Both fibroelastomas were removed surgically without aortic valve replacement. During surgical excision of a cardiac fibroelastoma, the entire area surrounding the lesion should be inspected carefully for additional lesions. Such lesions can be missed on echocardiographic evaluation.

Cardiac myxomas are primary cardiac tumors. In some cases of atrial myxoma, the standard left atriotomy alone does not enable safe tumor resection and easy access to the mitral valve. We report the cases of 2 patients with huge left atrial myxomas associated with severe mitral valve regurgitation who underwent an inverted T-shaped biatrial incision for tumor excision and mitral repair. This approach reduces tumor fragmentation and permits good mitral valve exposure.

Spontaneous coronary artery dissection is an unusual trigger for acute coronary syndrome or sudden death, occurring more frequently in relatively young people and mainly in the female sex. The underlying mechanism is not completely understood, but predisposing factors may include metabolism and collagen synthesis disorders. The case of a 34-year-old woman who underwent coronary angiography for acute anterolateral myocardial ischemia after cocaine abuse is reported. Dissection of the left main trunk extending to both proximal descending anterior and circumflex arteries was detected and the patient was promptly and successfully managed with tirofiban hydrochloride infusion and urgent coronary artery bypass grafting.

Cold dark matter (CDM) constitutes most of the matter in the Universe. The interplay between dark and luminous matter in dense cosmic environments like galaxy clusters is studied theoretically using cosmological simulations. Observed gravitational lensing is used to test and characterize the properties of substructures - the small-scale distribution of dark matter - in clusters. An apt metric, the probability of strong lensing events produced by dark matter substructure, is devised and computed for 11 galaxy clusters. We report that observed cluster substructures are more efficient lenses than predicted by CDM simulations, by more than an order of magnitude. We suggest that hitherto undiagnosed systematic issues with simulations or incorrect assumptions about the properties of dark matter could explain our results., 56 pages, 15 figures. Published in Science

Fog Computing can facilitate the adoption of the Everything-as-a-Service paradigm in infrastructure segments that are located closer to the end user, or to the data source, compared to typical Cloud solutions. This enables combining the advantages of flexible service deployment models with the need to cope with the strict requirements – especially in terms of latency – of emerging applications in softwarized networks. Along comes the need to consider aspects of service orchestration specific to the Fog environment and its intrinsically dynamic nature. In this paper we propose an architecture for flexible Fog Computing service orchestration, with a particular focus on the awareness of service deployment models. We discuss the design choices and describe the components and operations of the proposed orchestration system. We then present a complete working implementation of such architecture, including insights on its ability to handle critical orchestration functions such as service discovery and resource monitoring. We also report on the experimental validation of the system and the performance evaluation on real-world equipment, proving the feasibility and the effectiveness of the approach on a dynamic Fog infrastructure. We complement the work by presenting the results of a combinatorial analysis, validated by simulation, of the service model-aware resource selection process. As a result of our investigation, we show that Fog services can be effectively deployed in a matter of a few seconds, or even in less than one second when suitable Fog nodes are available, taking advantage of the awareness of the available service models.

The service function chaining paradigm links ordered service functions via network virtualization, in support of applications with severe network constraints. To provide wide-area (federated) virtual network services, a distributed architecture should orchestrate cooperating or competing processes to generate and maintain virtual paths hosting service function chains while, guaranteeing performance and fast asynchronous consensus even in the presence of failures. To this end, we propose a prototype of an architecture for robust service function chain instantiation with convergence and performance guarantees. To instantiate a service chain, our system uses a fully distributed asynchronous consensus mechanism that has bounds on convergence time and leads to a (1 $-\,\,1/ {e}$ )-approximation ratio with respect to the Pareto optimal chain instantiation, even in the presence of (non-byzantine) failures. Moreover, we show that a better optimal chain approximation cannot exist. To establish the practicality of our approach, we evaluate the system performance, policy tradeoffs, and overhead via simulations and through a prototype implementation. We then describe our extensible management object model and compare our asynchronous consensus’s overhead against Raft, a recent decentralized consensus protocol, showing superior performance. We furthermore discuss a new management object model for distributed service function chain instantiation.

Industrial IoT coupled with emerging cloud computing architectures shows high potential in transforming the way industrial processes are managed and carried out. This potential can be further enhanced by enabling on-demand deployment of IoT services located very close to the factory premises. This article proposes an architecture, based on the ETSI multi-access edge computing (MEC) framework, for the automated deployment of Industrial IoT applications “as a service,” taking advantage of proximity computing platforms such as edge and fog environments. A proof-of-concept implementation is reported to demonstrate that transforming Industrial IoT applications into MEC-based services running over multiple technological domains is not only feasible, but can achieve full service deoployment in a matter of a few seconds.

The sensory quality of meat, in particular appearance and texture attributes, influences consumer behaviour. These attributes depend on the one side on animal welfare in farms, and on the other on pre-slaughter handling which is in any case a cause of stress which consequences may lead to economic damages for the whole production chain, consumer included. The objective of this research was to evaluate the influence of animal welfare status on pork quality. The study was carried out on 22 lots of 10 pigs (about 9 months old and 165 kg average alive weight) each one coming from 11 farms. The temperature range observed during transport and lairage was 10-25°C. The activity was performed over 2011 and 2012. To reach the above objective, management indicators of animal welfare were recorded in all the stages before slaughtering. In farms, the farm welfare index (FWI) was calculated. For each lot, the distance and time from the farm to the slaughterhouse were recorded as well as anomalous behavior (slipping, falling and pileups) in loading/unloading operations which was measured by direct observation. After slaughtering, physiological parameters (aldolase, creatine kinase, cortisol levels) as well as pork quality and biochemical indicators (water holding capacity, pH) were measured. Sensory quality of pork was evaluated through the quantitative descriptive analysis (QDA) which describes a complete product profile (appearance, olfactory, taste and flavour-related and textural). From the results it is possible to assume that sensory characteristics of pork, mainly those related to texture and appearance (intramuscular fat (P