The Internet of Things (IoT) as a concept is fascinating and exciting, with an exponential growth just beginning. The IoT global market is expected to grow from 170 billion USD in 2017 to 560 billion ...USD by 2022. Though many experts have pegged IoT as the next industrial revolution, two of the major challenging aspects of IoT since the early days are having a secure privacy-safe ecosystem encompassing all building blocks of IoT architecture and solve the scalability problem as the number of devices increases. In recent years, Distributed Ledgers have often been referred to as the solution for both privacy and security problems. One form of distributed ledger is the Blockchain system. The aim of this paper consists of reviewing the most recent Blockchain architectures, comparing the most interesting and popular consensus algorithms, and evaluating the convergence between Blockchain and IoT by illustrating some of the main interesting projects in this research field. Furthermore, the paper provides a vision of a disruptive research topic that the authors are investigating: the use of AI algorithms to be applied to IoT devices belonging to a Blockchain architecture. This obviously requires that the devices be provided with adequate computational capacity and that can efficiently optimize their energy consumption.
To assess critically the scientific literature is a very challenging task; in general it requires analysing a lot of documents to define the state-of-the-art of a research field and classifying them. ...The documents classifier systems have tried to address this problem by different techniques such as probabilistic, machine learning and neural networks models. One of the most popular document classification approaches is the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), a probabilistic topic model. One of the main issues of the LDA approach is that the retrieved topics are a collection of terms with their probabilities and it does not have a human-readable form. This paper defines an approach to make LDA topics comprehensible for humans by the exploitation of the Word2Vec approach.
The power management of ICT systems, that is, data processing (Dp) and telecommunication (Tlc) systems, is becoming a relevant problem in economical terms. Dp systems totalize millions of servers and ...associated subsystems (processors, monitors, storage devices, etc.) all over the world that need to be electrically powered. Dp systems are also used in the government of Tlc systems, which, besides requiring Dp electrical power, also require Tlc-specific power, both for mobile networks (with their cell-phone towers and associated subsystems: base stations, subscriber stations, switching nodes, etc.) and for wired networks (with their routers, gateways, switches, etc.). ICT research is thus expected to investigate into methods to reduce Dp- and Tlc-specific power consumption. However, saving power may turn into waste of performance, in other words, into waste of ICT quality of service (QoS). This paper investigates the Dp and Tlc power management policies that look at compromises between power saving and QoS.
Smarter City: Smart Energy Grid based on Blockchain Technology Pieroni, Alessandra; Scarpato, Noemi; Di Nunzio, Luca ...
International journal on advanced science, engineering and information technology,
02/2018, Letnik:
8, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Abstract Introduction The purpose of this study was to evaluate the in vivo response of periradicular tissues after sealing of furcation perforations with Biodentine, mineral trioxide aggregate ...(MTA), and gutta-percha by means of histopathologic and indirect immunofluorescence analyses. Methods Thirty teeth of 3 dogs were divided into 3 groups: Biodentine ( n = 14 teeth), MTA (negative control, n = 10 teeth), and gutta-percha (positive control, n = 6 teeth). After endodontic treatment, perforations were made on the center of the pulp chamber floor and filled with the materials. After 120 days, the animals were killed, and blocks containing the teeth and periradicular tissues were processed histotechnically for histopathologic semiquantitative (new mineralized tissue formation and bone resorption at the perforation site) and quantitative (thickness and area of newly formed mineralized tissue and number of inflammatory cells) analyses and RUNX2 immunofluorescence assay. Data were analyzed by χ2 , Fisher exact test, Mann-Whitney test, one-way analysis of variance, Kruskal-Wallis test, and Dunn posttest (α = 0.05). Results MTA and Biodentine induced the formation of significantly more new mineralized tissue ( P < .0001) than gutta-percha, which did not induce the formation of mineralized tissue in any case. Complete sealing of the perforations was more frequent with MTA, which formed mineralized tissue with greater thickness and area. Biodentine and MTA exhibited no bone resorption in the furcation region, fewer inflammatory cells, and greater RUNX2 immunostaining intensity than gutta-percha. Conclusions Although MTA presented higher frequency of complete sealing and greater thickness and area of newly formed mineralized tissue, Biodentine also had good histopathologic results and can be considered as an adequate furcation perforation repair material.
E-health-IoT Universe: A Review Scarpato, Noemi; Pieroni, Alessandra; Nunzio, Luca Di ...
International journal on advanced science, engineering and information technology,
12/2017, Letnik:
7, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) represents a major health issue worldwide, as patients with T2DM show an excess risk of death for cardiovascular causes, twice as high as the general population. Among ...the many complications of T2DM, heart failure (HF) deserves special consideration as one of the leading causes of morbidity and reduced life expectancy. T2DM has been associated with different phenotypes of HF, including HF with reduced and preserved ejection fraction. Cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) can evaluate the metabolic and ventilatory alterations related to myocardial dysfunction and/or peripheral impairment, representing a unique tool for the clinician to study the whole HF spectrum. While CPET allows for a thorough evaluation of functional capacity, it cannot directly differentiate central and peripheral determinants of effort intolerance. Combining CPET with imaging techniques could provide even higher accuracy and further insights into the progression of the disease since signs of left ventricular systolic and diastolic dysfunction can be detected during exercise, even in asymptomatic diabetic individuals. This review aims to dissect the alterations in cardiopulmonary function characterising patients with T2DM and HF to improve patient risk stratification.
Power Management of Server Farms Pieroni, Alessandra; Iazeolla, Giuseppe
Applied Mechanics and Materials,
01/2014, Letnik:
492, Številka:
Power and Energy Systems III
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The power management of server farms (Sf) is becoming a relevant problem in economical terms. Server farms totalize millions of servers all over the world that need to be electrically powered. ...Research is thus expected to investigate into methods to reduce Sf power consumption. However, saving power may turn into waste of performance (high response_times), in other words, into waste of Sf Quality of Service (QoS). By use of a Sfmodel, this paper investigates Sf power management strategies that look at compromises between power-saving and QoS. Various optimizing Sf power management policies are studied combined with the effects of job queueing disciplines. The (policy, discipline) pairs, or strategies, that optimize the Sf power consumption (minimum absorbed Watts), the Sf performance (minimum response_time), and the Sf performance-per-Watt (minimum response_time-per-Watt) are identified.By use of the model, the work the server-manager has to do to direct hisSf is greatly simplified, since the universe of all possible (strategies he needs to choose from is drastically reduced to a very small set of most significant strategies.
Abstract
Accurate estimates of the urban fractal dimension
D
f
are obtained by implementing the detrended moving average algorithm on high-resolution multi-spectral satellite images from the ...WorldView2 (WV2) database covering the largest European cities. Fractal dimension
D
f
varies between 1.65 and 1.90 with high values for highly urbanised urban sectors and low ones for suburban and peripheral ones. Based on recently proposed models, the values of the fractal dimension
D
f
are checked against the exponents
β
s
and
β
i
of the scaling law
Y
∼
N
β
, respectively for socio-economic and infrastructural variables
Y
, with
N
the population size. The exponents
β
s
and
β
i
are traditionally derived as if cities were zero-dimensional objects, with the relevant feature
Y
related to a single homogeneous population value
N
, thus neglecting the microscopic heterogeneity of the urban structure. Our findings go beyond this limit. High sensitive and repeatable satellite records yield robust local estimates of the urban scaling exponents. Furthermore, the work discusses how to discriminate among different scaling theories, shedding light on the debated issue of scaling phenomena contradictory perspectives and pave paths to a more systematic adoption of the complex system science methods to urban landscape analysis.
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