Structuring the Scope: Enabling Adaptive and Multilateral Authorization Management

In this work, we examine an access scope, a concept in authorization management broadly applied for the specification of access constraints in web service integrations. By analyzing a typical use-case of cross-organizational cloud service automation, we show the suboptimal capabilities of static, coarse-grained and inflexible scopes that negatively impact security and management of service integrations on a web scale. Using the graph-based structure that relies on semantic technologies we introduce dereferenceable and selfdescriptive authorization extents that allow expressive, granular and dynamic specification of security requirements. Through its application in the running scenario, we show how this construct can be administered to support confidentiality, integrity and privacy requirements of service integrations by allowing selective information sharing based on contextual properties

Strengthening the Scientific Base for the Unambiguous Category II Fetal Heart Rate Tracing Algorithm.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Implementation of a flowgraph-based satellite operations software for Earth Observation missions

This project aims to develop mission-critical software that facilitates the monitoring and automation of the operations plan between the Operation Center and the CubeSats. This software will assist operators in various tasks, including scheduling satellite passes, controlling one or multiple Ground Stations to follow the satellite, preparing execution plans with contingencies for all the different steps in the communication protocol, and automating these processes. To minimize errors introduced by operators, the software will offer an interactive user interface for configuring message sets and information exchange during contact. It will also allow for the setup of conditional blocks that depend on received data, creating a seamless and error-free feedback loop. The objective is to gradually reduce the operator's workload, to the point of making their interaction unnecessary. This will enable automated communication with the satellite at any time of day. As part of the operations, all uploaded and downloaded data will be stored for posterior processing, with automated processing wherever possible. The software will be developed using the Rust programming language, known for its speed, memory safety, and thread safety. Rust compiler detects a significant amount of common errors at compile-time, this will allow the development of a highly reliable and high-performance application. While the project will initially focus on supporting the 3Cat-4 satellite, it will also create the basis to operate any other satellite in the future, such as the RITA Payload

Detecting automatically the layout of clinical documents to enhance the performances of downstream natural language processing

Objective:Develop and validate an algorithm for analyzing the layout of PDF clinical documents to improve the performance of downstream natural language processing tasks. Materials and Methods: We designed an algorithm to process clinical PDF documents and extract only clinically relevant text. The algorithm consists of several steps: initial text extraction using a PDF parser, followed by classification into categories such as body text, left notes, and footers using a Transformer deep neural network architecture, and finally an aggregation step to compile the lines of a given label in the text. We evaluated the technical performance of the body text extraction algorithm by applying it to a random sample of documents that were annotated. Medical performance was evaluated by examining the extraction of medical concepts of interest from the text in their respective sections. Finally, we tested an end-to-end system on a medical use case of automatic detection of acute infection described in the hospital report. Results:Our algorithm achieved per-line precision, recall, and F1 score of 98.4, 97.0, and 97.7, respectively, for body line extraction. The precision, recall, and F1 score per document for the acute infection detection algorithm were 82.54 (95CI 72.86-91.60), 85.24 (95CI 76.61-93.70), 83.87 (95CI 76, 92-90.08) with exploitation of the results of the advanced body extraction algorithm, respectively. Conclusion:We have developed and validated a system for extracting body text from clinical documents in PDF format by identifying their layout. We were able to demonstrate that this preprocessing allowed us to obtain better performances for a common downstream task, i.e., the extraction of medical concepts in their respective sections, thus proving the interest of this method on a clinical use case.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Media contracts formalization using a standardized contract expression language

Contract Expression Languages allow representing business contracts in a digital and structured form. Some examples are the Content Reference Forum format, the OASIS eContracts standard or a proposed extension for MPEG-21 Part 5. These formats have influenced the design of the MPEG-21 Contract Expression Language (CEL), which has been recently specified by modelling the most relevant clauses in audiovisual contracts. The MPEG-21 CEL, described in this paper, defines a language for representing media contracts as XML. It is structured in two schemas, a core defining the structural elements of a contract, and an extension with vocabulary for specific applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft