The BlueGame project: Ad-hoc multilayer mobile game with social dimension

The paper presents the BlueGame project - an ad-hoc multiplayer mobile game based on the Dungeons&Dragons board game. The main idea lies in the adoption of Bluetooth Piconet configuration and direct face to face contact of players in real environments. Copyright 2007 ACM

Nanofibers in Mucosal Drug and Vaccine Delivery

Successful mucosal administration and delivery of drugs still pose a great challenge. However, the possibility to deliver not only small drug molecules but also macromolecular drugs and nanoparticles via mucosal surfaces represents a great opportunity. Rapid onset of drug action, avoidance of first-pass metabolism, and high immunocompetence of mucosa are some of the important features for mucosal drug and vaccine delivery. The use of mucoadhesive drug delivery systems, systems with fast dissolving properties, and nanomaterials with mucus penetration properties are examples of successful strategies to achieve effective mucosal drug and vaccine delivery. Non-keratinized mucosa of the oral cavity, the nasal and vaginal mucosa represent favorable sites of drug administration. Polymer nanofibers have attracted much attention because of remarkable characteristics such as a large surface area to volume ratio and high porosity. Nanofibers have been extensively used for different biomedical applications including wound dressing, tissue engineering, and drug delivery. Among their fabrication methods, the introduction of electrospinning technique was an important step toward achieving the goal of large scale industrial production of nanofiber-based drug delivery systems used in mucosal applications. This chapter provides an overview on all aspects of mucosal drug and vaccine delivery using nanofibers

Reputation Based Trust Management System Supporting Collaboration in a Medical Application

In a small group of people it is quite easy to start a collaboration based on shared trust, because people quickly recognize quality of each other. But this is not true when we move to the highly distributed environment with hundreds of users, not only from one institution or town, but even from different countries. It becomes very complicated task to distinguish experienced an trusted people from malicious users. In the paper a reputation system proposed particularly for a medical environment supporting collaboration among physicians is presented. The system provides tools for sharing knowledge and expertize in form of modules which can be seamlessly connected to each other provided more advanced functionality. The reputation system is designed to help physicians selecting the right (the most reliable) module from set of all modules within the system. The selection is made on trust being managed by the proposed reputation system

Hydrochemical Conditions for Aerobic/Anaerobic Biodegradation of Chlorinated Ethenes—A Multi-Site Assessment

A stall of cis-1,2-DCE and vinyl chloride (VC) is frequently observed during bioremediation of groundwater chloroethenes via reductive dechlorination. These chloroethenes may be oxidised by aerobic methanotrophs or ethenotrophs co-metabolically and/or metabolically. We assessed the potential for such oxidation at 12 sites (49 groundwater samples) using hydrochemical and molecular biological tools. Both ethenotroph (etnC and etnE) and methanotroph (mmoX and pmoA) functional genes were identified in 90% of samples, while reductive dehalogenase functional genes (vcrA and bvcA) were identified in 82%. All functional genes were simultaneously detected in 78% of samples, in actively biostimulated sites in 88% of samples. Correlation analysis revealed that cis-1,2-DCE concentration was positively correlated with vcrA, etnC and etnE, while VC concentration was correlated with etnC, etnE, vcrA and bvcA. However, feature selection based on random forest classification indicated a significant relationship for the vcrA in relation to cis-1,2-DCE, and vcrA, bvcA and etnE for VC and no prove of relationship between cis-1,2-DCE or VC and the methanotroph functional genes. Analysis of hydrochemical parameters indicated that aerobic oxidation of chloroethenes by ethenotrophs may take place under a range of redox conditions of aquifers and coincide with high ethene and VC concentrations

Reputation system for large scale environments

The paper describes a new approach for treating trust in reconfigurable groups of users with special accent on trust in the next generations of the Internet. The proposed model uses properties of weighted hypergraphs. Model flexibility enables description of relations between nodes such that these relations are preserved under frequent changes. The ideas can be straightforwardly generalized to other concepts describable by weighted hypergraphs. The consistency of the proposal was verified in a couple of experiments with our pilot implementation SecGRID. ©2007 IEEE