Privacy protection vs. utility in visual data

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Ubiquitous and networked sensors impose a huge challenge for privacy protection which has become an emerging problem of modern society. Protecting the privacy of...     

SoSyM significantly reduces its backlog

Software and Systems Modeling -     

Food Allergens: Is There a Correlation between Stability to Digestion and Allergenicity?

Food allergy is a major health problem in the Western countries, affecting 3–8% of the population. It has not yet been established what makes a dietary protein a food allergen. Several characteristics have been proposed to be shared by food allergens. One of these is resistance to digestion. This paper reviews data from digestibility studies on purified food allergens and evaluates the predictive value of digestibility tests on the allergenic potential. We point out that food allergens do not necessarily resist digestion. We discuss how the choice of in vitro digestibility assay condition and the method used for detection of residual intact protein as well as fragments hereof may greatly influence the outcome as well as the interpretation of results. The finding that digests from food allergens may retain allergenicity, stresses the importance of using immunological assays for evaluating the allergenic potential of food allergen digestion products. Studies assessing the allergenicity of digestion products, by either IgE-binding, elicitation or sensitizing capacity, shows that digestion may abolish, decrease, have no effect, or even increase the allergenicity of food allergens. Therefore, the predictive value of the pepsin resistance test for assessing the allergenic potential of novel proteins can be questioned.     

Novel Readout Electronics for Thickness Shear-Mode Liquid Sensors Compensating for Spurious Conductivity and Capacitances

In this paper, a readout circuit for a thickness shear-mode (TSM) resonator is presented which can be used for sensing applications in liquids such as viscosity sensing. The system features compensation of both spurious capacitances and conductances in parallel to the resonator. This allows measurements even in conductive liquids without the need for an elaborate sealing of the sensor. The influence of the spurious elements is determined by means of two orthogonal synchronous detectors and eliminated by active compensation using voltage-controlled amplifiers (VCAs). Furthermore, the circuit is robust against possible phase errors. The basic concept is discussed in detail, and a readout circuit is developed. A prototype is presented, and sample results are given, demonstrating the feasibility of the approach     

State/event fault trees—A safety analysis model for software-controlled systems

Safety models for software-controlled systems should be intuitive, compositional and have the expressive power to model both software and hardware behaviour. Moreover, they should provide quantitative results for failure or hazard probabilities. Fault trees are an accepted and intuitive model for safety analysis, but they are incapable of expressing state dependencies or temporal order of events. We propose to combine fault trees with an explicit State/Event semantics, using a graphical notation that is similar to Statecharts. Our new model, named State/Event Fault Trees (SEFTs), subsumes both deterministic state machines suited to describe software behaviour, and Markov chains that model probabilistic failures, while keeping the visualisation of causal chains known from fault trees. We allow exponentially distributed probabilistic events, deterministic delays, and triggered events. The model provides a component concept, where components are connected by typed ports. Quantitative evaluation is achieved by translating the component models to Deterministic and Stochastic Petri Nets (DSPNs) and using an existing tool for analysis or simulation. This paper, which is an extended version of [Kaiser B, Gramlich C. State-Event-Fault-Trees—a safety analysis model for software controlled systems. Computer safety, reliability, and security. Proceedings of the 23rd international conference, SAFECOMP 2004, Potsdam, Germany, September 21st–24th. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3219, 2004.p. 195–209], revisits the model elements and the analysis procedure and provides a small case study of a fire alarm system, completed by an outlook on our tool project ESSaRel.