Matching demand and offer in on-line provision: A longitudinal study of monster.com

This is the post-print version of the final published paper that is available from the link below.When considering the jobs market, changes or recurring trends for skilled employees expressed by employers' needs have a tremendous impact on the evolution of website content. On-line jobs sites adverts, academic institutions and professional development “standard bodies” all share those needs as their common driver for contents evolution. This paper aims, on one hand, to discuss and to analyse how current needs and requirements (“demand”) of IT skills in the UK job market drive the contents of different types of websites, in turn analysing whether this demand changes and how. On the other hand, it is studied what the UK higher education institutions have to offer to fulfill this demand. The results found analysing the evolution of the largest on-line job centre (www.monster.com), and the websites of selected UK academic institutions, demonstrate that often what is requested by UK industries is not clearly offered by UK institutions. Given the prominence of monster.com in the global economy, these results could provide a meaningful starting point to support curricula development in UK, as much as worldwide

From "community" to "commercial" FLOSS: The case of moodle

This is the post-print version of the final published article that is available from the link below. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc.This paper documents the evolution of Moodle, an advanced Content Management System, and its transition from a purely volunteer-based project to one driven by commercial interests and stakeholders. The study of its evolution provides evidence of the sustainability of its process: increasing amounts of provided effort by developers correspond to similarly increasing produced outputs to the Moodle system. It is also evident how this OSS system, apart from achieving the transition to a successful multisite, collaborative and community-based OSS project, depends more on its community than its commercial partners

On the sustainability of web systems evolution

In the last twenty years, the evolution of web systems has been driven along three dimensions: the processes used to develop, evolve, maintain and re-engineer the systems themselves; the end products (the pages, content and links) of such processes; and finally the people dimension, with the extraordinary shift in how developers and users shape, interact and maintain the code and content that they put online. This paper reviews the questions that each of these dimensions has addressed in the past, and indicates which ones will need to be addressed in the future, in order for web system evolution to be sustainable. We show that the study on websites evolution has shifted from server- to client-side, focusing on better technologies and processes, and that the users becoming creators of content open several open questions, in particular the issue of credibility of the content created and the sustainability of such resources in the long term

HADES: a Hybrid Anomaly Detection System for Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems

Smart cities rely on large-scale heterogeneous distributed systems known as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Information systems based on CPS typically analyse a massive amount of data collected from various data sources that operate under noisy and dynamic conditions. How to determine the quality and reliability of such data is an open research problem that concerns the overall system safety, reliability and security. Our research goal is to tackle the challenge of real-time data quality assessment for large-scale CPS applications with a hybrid anomaly detection system. In this paper we describe the architecture of HADES, our Hybrid Anomaly DEtection System for sensors data monitoring, storage, processing, analysis, and management. Such data will be filtered with correlation-based outlier detection techniques, and then processed by predictive analytics for anomaly detection

Causal information quantification of prominent dynamical features of biological neurons

Neurons tend to fire a spike when they are near a bifurcation from the resting state to spiking activity. It is a delicate balance between noise, dynamic currents and initial condition that determines the phase diagram of neural activity. Many possible ionic mechanisms can be accounted for as the source of spike generation. Moreover, the biophysics and the dynamics behind it can usually be described through a phase diagram that involves membrane voltage versus the activation variable of the ionic channel. In this paper, we present a novel methodology to characterize the dynamics of this system, which takes into account the fine temporal structures of the complex neuronal signals. This allows us to accurately distinguish the most fundamental properties of neurophysiological neurons that were previously described by Izhikevich considering the phase-space trajectory, using a time causal space: statistical complexity versus Fisher information versus Shannon entropy.Instituto de Física de Líquidos y Sistemas Biológico

Frecuencias asociadas a los fenómenos estudiados por la compatibilidad electromagnética en ambientes residencial-comercial, industrial y hospitalario

El presente trabajo describe los principales fenómenos que causan perturbaciones electromagnéticas y los conceptos generales asociados a la Compatibilidad Electromagnética (CEM). Analiza además los modos de propagación de las perturbaciones conducida y radiada, junto a la subdivisión en dos aspectos clave: emisión e inmunidad. En base a los conceptos antes mencionados se distinguen las frecuencias que caracterizan a cada uno de los ensayos y mediciones CEM que en la actualidad son requeridos para evaluar el comportamiento (en relación con las perturbaciones) de equipos eléctricos y electrónicos en ambientes residenciales-comerciales, industriales y hospitalarios.Facultad de Ingenierí

Time-series clustering for sensor fault detection in large-scale Cyber-Physical Systems

Large-scale Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are information systems that involve a vast network of sensor nodes and other devices that stream observations in real-time and typically are deployed in uncontrolled, broad geographical terrains. Sensor node failures are inevitable and unpredictable events in large-scale CPSs, which compromise the integrity of the sensors measurements and potentially reduce the quality of CPSs services and raise serious concerns related to CPSs safety, reliability, performance, and security. While many studies were conducted to tackle the challenge of sensor nodes failure detection using domain-specific solutions, this paper proposes a novel sensor nodes failure detection approach and empirically evaluates its validity using a real-world case study. This paper investigates time-series clustering techniques as a feasible solution to identify sensor nodes malfunctions by detecting long-segmental outliers in their observations' time series. Three different time-series clustering techniques have been investigated using real-world observations collected from two various sensor node networks, one of which consists of 275 temperature sensors distributed around London. This study demonstrates that time-series clustering effectively detects sensor node's continuous (halting/repeating) and incipient faults. It also showed that the feature-based time series clustering technique is a more efficient long-segmental outliers detection mechanism compared to shape-based time-series clustering techniques such as DTW and K-Shape, mainly when applied to shorter time-series windows

The role of ACTH in the pathogenesis of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome in the rat: hormonal profiles and ovarian morphology.

Numerous hypotheses have been proposed about the pathogenia of the polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). However, hormonal control of the persistent follicle has not been established. The objective of the present study was to compare the follicular structure and hormonal profiles of rats treated with adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH) with two experimental models of PCOS. ACTH-treated animals were compared with those exposed to continuous light, treated with estradiol valerate, and control (in proestrous and diestrous). Serum hormone levels, histomorphometrical changes, and immunoexpression of vimentin, cytokeratins, cadherins, and proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) were examined. Treatment with ACTH resulted in an elevation of corticosterone secretion with LH reduction but without changes in ovarian morphology. Although stress (or ACTH) stimulation may be only one pathophysiological mechanism involved in follicular cyst pathogenia in other species, we do not find important evidence to suppose that this would happen in rats.Fil: Baravalle, Celina. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Departamento de Ciencias Morfológicas. Laboratorio de Biología Celular y Molecular; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Salvetti, Natalia Raquel. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Departamento de Ciencias Morfológicas. Laboratorio de Biología Celular y Molecular; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Mira, G. A.. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias; ArgentinaFil: Lorente, J. A.. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias; ArgentinaFil: Ortega, Hugo Hector. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Departamento de Ciencias Morfológicas. Laboratorio de Biología Celular y Molecular; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Frecuencias asociadas a los fenómenos estudiados por la compatibilidad electromagnética en ambientes residencial-comercial, industrial y hospitalario

El presente trabajo describe los principales fenómenos que causan perturbaciones electromagnéticas y los conceptos generales asociados a la Compatibilidad Electromagnética (CEM). Analiza además los modos de propagación de las perturbaciones conducida y radiada, junto a la subdivisión en dos aspectos clave: emisión e inmunidad. En base a los conceptos antes mencionados se distinguen las frecuencias que caracterizan a cada uno de los ensayos y mediciones CEM que en la actualidad son requeridos para evaluar el comportamiento (en relación con las perturbaciones) de equipos eléctricos y electrónicos en ambientes residenciales-comerciales, industriales y hospitalarios.Facultad de Ingenierí

Mining the Dark Web: Drugs and fake ids

In the last years, governmental bodies have been futilely trying to fight against dark web marketplaces. Shortly after the closing of “The Silk Road” by the FBI and Europol in 2013, new successors have been established. Through the combination of cryptocurrencies and nonstandard communication protocols and tools, agents can anonymously trade in a marketplace for illegal items without leaving any record. This paper presents a research carried out to gain insights on the products and services sold within one of the larger marketplaces for drugs, fake ids and weapons on the Internet, Agora. Our work sheds a light on the nature of the market; there is a clear preponderance of drugs, which accounts for nearly 80% of the total items on sale. The ready availability of counterfeit documents, while they make up for a much smaller percentage of the market, raises worries. Finally, the role of organized crime within Agora is discussed and presented