Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Logic-based Technologies for Intelligent Systems: State of the Art and Perspectives

Together with the disruptive development of modern sub-symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence (AI), symbolic approaches to classical AI are re-gaining momentum, as more and more researchers exploit their potential to make AI more comprehensible, explainable, and therefore trustworthy. Since logic-based approaches lay at the core of symbolic AI, summarizing their state of the art is of paramount importance now more than ever, in order to identify trends, benefits, key features, gaps, and limitations of the techniques proposed so far, as well as to identify promising research perspectives. Along this line, this paper provides an overview of logic-based approaches and technologies by sketching their evolution and pointing out their main application areas. Future perspectives for exploitation of logic-based technologies are discussed as well, in order to identify those research fields that deserve more attention, considering the areas that already exploit logic-based approaches as well as those that are more likely to adopt logic-based approaches in the future

Multi-level Policy-aware Privacy Analysis

Projekt NAPLES (Novel Tools for Analysing Privacy Leakages – Privaatslekete Analüüsi Uudsed Vahendid) on Tartu Ülikooli ja Cybernetica AS-i ühine teadusprojekt, mida rahastab Kaitsealase Täiustatud Uurimisprojektide Agentuuri (DARPA) Brandeisi programm.NAPLES-i raames on välja töötatud teooria ja erinevaid tööriistu, et tuvastada ning kirjeldada infosüsteemide andmelekkeid. PLEAK on tööriist, mille sisendiks on äriprotsessimudeli ja -notatsiooni (BPMN) abil kirja pandud äriprotsess. Lisaks standardsele notatsioonile on mudelile lisatud arvutuslikke detaile ning infot privaatsuskaitse tehnoloogiate kohta, mis võimaldavad erinevatel tasemetel privaatsuslekete analüüse. NAPLES-i projekti käigus on loodud mitu erinevat analüüsitööriista. Peamiselt keskenduvad analüsaatorid niinimetatud "SQL koostöövoole" - BPMN-i koostöö mudelile, mille tegevused ning andmeobjektid on kirjeldatud vastavalt SQL päringute ning tabeli skeemidega. Binaarne avalikustamise analüüs annab privaatsuskaitse tehnoloogiate põhjal kõrgtasemelise ülevaate selle kohta, kellele on mingid andmed kättesaadavad. Teised analüüsivahendid nagu Leaks-When (Millal lekib) ja Guessing Advantage (äraarvamise edukus) lisavad detailsemad kvalitatiivseid ning kvantitatiivseid meetmeid lekete paremaks mõistmiseks.Minu töö oli NAPLE projekti osa ning minu panused olid mitmesugused.Esiteks ma lisasin globaalse ja lokaalse privaatsuspoliitika ideed SQL koostöövoogudessse. Privaatsuspoliitika tagab äriprotsessis osalejale ligipääsuõiguse mingile osale SQL skeemiga kirjeldatud andmetest. Teiseks ma kavandasin ning integreerisin mitmekihilise lekkanalüüsi alates binaarsest avalikustamise analüüsist (millised andmed on nähtaval) kuni tingimusliku avalikustamise (mis tingimustel leke toimub) ja kvantitatiivse meetmeni (kui palju andmete kohta lekib). Mitmekihiline analüüs põhineb PLEAK-i analüsaatoritel, kuid neid oli vaja täiendada, et nad toetaksid ühtseid sisendeid ning et Leaks-When ja Guessing Advantage tööriistad põhineksid privaatsuspoliitikatel. Lisaks arendasin juhtumiuuringu, et demonstreerida integreeritud mitmetasandilist privaatsusanalüüsi ning PLEAK-i tööriistu.The NAPLES (Novel Tools for Analysing Privacy Leakages) project is a research initiative conducted as a collaboration between Cybernetica AS and the University of Tartu, with funds of the Brandeis program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The research project has produced the theory and a set of tools for the analysis of privacy-related concerns, to determine the potential leakage of the data from the information systems. Specifically, PLEAK is a tool that takes as input business processes specified with the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), where modelentities are associated with privacy-enhancing technologies, in order to enable the analysis of privacy concerns at different levels of granularity. With the time, the NAPLES project has produced several analyzers. Such analyzers target SQLcollaborative workflows, that is, BPMN collaborative models that specify the steps of computation that correspond to SQL manipulation statements over the data objects representing the SQL data sources. The simple disclosure analysis performs a high-level data reachability analysis that reveals potentialdata leakages in the privacy-enhanced model of a business process: it tells whether a data object is visible to a given party. Other analyzers, such as the Leaks-When and the Guessing Advantage ones, provide finer-grained, qualitative and quantitative measures of data leakage to stakeholders.My work was part of the NAPLES project and my contributions are manifold. First, I added the concept of Global and Local privacy policies in the SQL collaborative workflows, which endow a party of the business process with access rights to the selected SQL entities with defined constraints. Second,I designed an integrated multi-level approach to the disclosure analysis: from the high-level declarative disclosure (What data might leak?) to the conditional disclosure (When does data leak?) and quantitative measure (How much does data leak?). This approach is based on existing tools of PLEAK for privacyanalysis. However, I refined these tools to accept more unified set of inputs and integrated the privacy policies with the Leaks-When and Guessing Advantage analyzers. Finally, I developed a case study, which has been used for showcasing the aforementioned integrated multi-level approach to the disclosure analysis, and that has been used as a proof-of-concept for NAPLES tools

Twenty years of rewriting logic

AbstractRewriting logic is a simple computational logic that can naturally express both concurrent computation and logical deduction with great generality. This paper provides a gentle, intuitive introduction to its main ideas, as well as a survey of the work that many researchers have carried out over the last twenty years in advancing: (i) its foundations; (ii) its semantic framework and logical framework uses; (iii) its language implementations and its formal tools; and (iv) its many applications to automated deduction, software and hardware specification and verification, security, real-time and cyber-physical systems, probabilistic systems, bioinformatics and chemical systems

Towards a Network of Marine Protected Areas in the South China Sea: Legal and Political Perspectives

The once pristine and rich marine environment of the South China Sea is degrading at an alarming rate due to the rapid socioeconomic development of the region. Despite this, and because mainly of complicated sovereignty and maritime boundary disputes, coastal States have not been able to develop effective regional cooperation to safeguard the shared marine environment. This dissertation, “Towards a Network of Marine Protected Areas in the South China Sea: Legal and Political Perspectives”, researches legal and political measures to support the development of a network of marine protected areas in the South China Sea. Such a network, if properly developed, would not only help to protect the marine environment and resources of the region but also contribute to lower the tension among its coastal States. These measures should be developed in accordance with international law, based on the specific geopolitical context of the South China Sea region and take into consideration experiences in developing regional networks of marine protected areas from other marine regions. Consequently, three optional categories of measures for the development of a network of marine protected areas in the South China Sea are suggested at the end. They include national-focused measures; measures to enhance the regional cooperation; and measures to build a regime for marine protected areas and network of marine protected areas in the South China Sea. These measures could be taken alternatively or on a step-by-step basis