A multimodal semantic location service for intelligent environments: an application for Smart Hospitals

This paper presents semantic models, mechanisms and a service to locate mobile entities in Smart and Intelligent Environments. The key feature of the service is the semantic integration of different positioning systems that not only enables the environment to handle transparently such physical positioning systems, but also to reason on location information coming from different systems and to combine it to obtain higher context information. Indeed, the service relies on the use of ontologies and rules to define a uniform, unambiguous and well-defined model for the location information, independently of the particular positioning system. Moreover, the location service performs logic and reasoning mechanisms to provide both physical and semantic locations of mobile objects and to infer the finest granularity in the case when a mobile object is located by more than one positioning system. Finally, we present an application of the proposed approach to the case of a Smart Hospital.     

Steady-state O<Subscript>2</Subscript> and CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> diffusion in carbonated mortars produced with blended cements

The diffusion coefficient \(D_{{{\text{O}}_{2} }}\), the porosity and the pore structure of mortars produced with a Portland cement and a range of blended cements containing limestone powder, microsilica, portlandite or slag were measured in the non-carbonated and the carbonated state. Additionally, the setup for measuring O₂ diffusion was adapted to measure also the CO₂ diffusion of the carbonated mortars. The diffusion coefficient \(D_{{{\text{O}}_{2} }}\) and the total porosity were increased in the mortars containing microsilica and slag, while they were decreased in the other mortars due to carbonation. Invariably, the pore structure became coarser in all samples. The relationship between diffusion coefficients \(D_{{{\text{O}}_{2} }}\) and \(D_{{{\text{CO}}_{2} }}\) in the carbonated mortars was always linear, with \(D_{{{\text{O}}_{2} }}\) systematically higher by factor of 1.37. As this factor broadly agrees with what was found in the scant literature about CO₂ diffusion, it could be used for estimating \(D_{{{\text{CO}}_{2} }}\) of carbonated mortar and concrete based on measurements of O₂ diffusion.     

Cell-protection mechanism through autophagy in HGFs/<Emphasis Type="Italic">S. mitis</Emphasis> co-culture treated with Chitlac-nAg

Silver-based products have been proven to be effective in retarding and preventing bacterial growth since ancient times. In the field of restorative dentistry, the use of silver ions/nanoparticles has been explored to counteract bacterial infections, as silver can destroy bacterial cell walls by reacting with membrane proteins. However, it is also cytotoxic towards eukaryotic cells, which are capable of internalizing nanoparticles. In this work, we investigated the biological effects of Chitlac-nAg, a colloidal system based on a modified chitosan (Chitlac), administered for 24–48?h to a co-culture of primary human gingival fibroblasts and Streptococcus mitis in the presence of saliva, developed to mimic the microenvironment of the oral cavity. We sought to determine its efficiency to combat oral hygiene-related diseases without affecting eukaryotic cells. Cytotoxicity, reactive oxygen species production, apoptosis induction, nanoparticles uptake, and lysosome and autophagosome metabolism were evaluated. In vitro results show that Chitlac-nAg does not exert cytotoxic effects on human gingival fibroblasts, which seem to survive through a homoeostasis mechanism involving autophagy. That suggests that the novel biomaterial Chitlac-nAg could be a promising tool in the field of dentistry.     

A scalable interest-oriented peer-to-peer pub/sub network

There has been a big challenge in structured peer-to-peer overlay network research area. Generally, a structured overlay network involves nodes evenly or based on their resource availabilities, and gathers nodes?? resources to achieve some bigger tasks. The challenge here is to gather resources based on nodes?? interests, and only interested nodes are involved in a certain task. Toward this challenge, we propose a new scheme to a peer-to-peer publish/subscribe network. Publish/subscribe represents a new paradigm for distributed content delivery. It provides an alternative to address-based communication due to its ability to decouple communication between the source and the destination. We propose a Bloom filter based mapping scheme to map IDs to nodes?? interests in addition to new interest proximity metric to forward events and to build nodes?? routing tables. We also propose a new approach called ??shared interest approach?? for network discovery. To evaluate the algorithms proposed in this work, we conducted simulations in both static and dynamic settings, and found a low false positive rate. We also discuss about a well-known application called Twitter, and show how our scheme would work in a real environment.     

Enhancing structural software coverage by incrementally computing branch executability

Structural code coverage criteria have been studied since the early seventies, and now they are well supported by commercial and open-source tools and are commonly embedded in several advanced industrial processes. Most industrial applications still refer to simple criteria, like statement and branch coverage, and consider complex criteria, like modified condition decision coverage, only rarely and often driven by the requirements of certification agencies. The industrial value of structural criteria is limited by the difficulty of achieving high coverage, due to both the complexity of deriving test cases that execute specific uncovered elements and the presence of many infeasible elements in the code. In this paper, we propose a technique that both generates test cases that execute yet uncovered branches and identifies infeasible branches that can be eliminated from the computation of the branch coverage. In this way, we can increase branch coverage to closely approximate full coverage, thus improving its industrial value. The algorithm combines symbolic analysis, abstraction refinement, and a novel technique named coarsening, to execute unexplored branches, identify infeasible ones, and mitigate the state space explosion problem. In the paper, we present the technique and illustrate its effectiveness through a set of experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation.