A platform for P2P agent-based collaborative applications

The operational environment can be a valuable source of information about the behavior of software applications and their usage context. Although a single instance of an application has limited evidence of the range of the possible behaviors and situations that might be experienced in the field, the collective knowledge composed by the evidence gathered by the many instances of a same application running in several diverse user environments (eg, a browser) might be an invaluable source of information. This information can be exploited by applications able to autonomously analyze how they behave in the field and adjust their behavior accordingly. Augmenting applications with the capability to collaborate and directly share information about their behavior is challenging because it requires the definition of a fully decentralized and dependable networked infrastructure whose nodes are the user machines. The nodes of the infrastructure must be collaborative, to share information, and autonomous, to exploit the available information to change their behavior, for instance, to better accommodate the needs of the users to prevent known problems. This paper describes the initial results that we obtained with the design and the development of an infrastructure that can enable the execution of collaborative scenarios in a fully decentralized way. Our idea is to combine the agent-based paradigm, which is well suited to design collaborative and autonomous nodes, and the peer-to-peer paradigm, which is well suited to design distributed and dynamic network infrastructures. To demonstrate our idea, we augmented the popular JADE agent-based platform with a software layer that supports both the creation of a fully decentralized peer-to-peer network of JADE platforms and the execution of services within that network, thus enabling JADE multiagent systems (MASs) to behave as peer-to-peer networks. The resulting platform can be used to study the design of collaborative applications running in the field

FTX's downfall and Binance's consolidation: The fragility of centralised digital finance

This paper investigates the causes and the consequences of the FTX digital currency exchange's failure in November 2022. Analysing on-chain data, we report that FTX heavily relied on leveraging and misusing its native token, FTT, and we show how this behaviour exacerbated the company's fragile financial situation. To gain further insights into the downfall, we employ state-of-the-art network science instruments to model the evolutionary dependency structures of 199 cryptocurrencies on an hourly basis, and we investigate tick-by-tick public trades at the time of the events. We identify the collapse of the Terra-Luna ecosystem as the pivotal event that triggered a significant decrease in the exchange's liquidity. Results suggest that the crash was actively accelerated by Binance tweets causing a systemic reaction in the cryptocurrency market. Finally, identifying the actors who mostly benefited from the FTX's collapse and highlighting a generalised trend toward centralisation in the crypto space, we emphasise the importance of genuinely decentralised finance for a transparent, future digital economy

Parametric trace expressions for runtime verification of Java-like programs

Parametric trace expressions are a formalism expressly designed for parametric runtime verification (RV) which has been introduced and successfully employed in the context of runtime monitoring of multiagent systems. Trace expressions are built on the general notion of event type, which allows them to be adopted in different contexts. In this paper we show how trace expressions can be used for conveniently specifying the expected behavior of a Java-like program to be monitored at runtime. Furthermore, we investigate the basic properties of the primitive operators on which trace expressions are coinductively defined in terms of a labeled transition system; this provides a basis for formal reasoning about equivalence of trace expressions and for adopting useful optimization techniques to speed up runtime verification

Association of magnetic resonance assessed disc degeneration and late clinical recurrence in dogs treated surgically for thoracolumbar intervertebral disc extrusions

BackgroundRadiographic signs of intervertebral disc mineralization are thought to indicate sites of future recurrence of disc extrusion (Hansen type I) but the relationship between evidence of disc degeneration on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and future disc extrusion with recurrence of clinical signs has not been examined.ObjectivesTo examine the relationship between MRI-assessed degeneration of thoracolumbar intervertebral discs and late recurrence of clinical signs in dogs presented with acute thoracolumbar intervertebral disc extrusion and treated by hemilaminectomy alone.AnimalsNinety-two client-owned dogs presented to 2 referral hospitals between 2009 and 2014.MethodsRetrospective analysis of association between clinical signs consistent with recurrent thoracolumbar intervertebral disc extrusion and MRI evidence of disc degeneration in dogs undergoing hemilaminectomy for acute thoracolumbar intervertebral disc extrusion. Univariable and multivariable Cox regression analyses were used to explore associations between recurrence of clinical signs and several characteristics of T10-L3 discs at initial diagnosis.ResultsNinety-two cases were included, of which 42 (46%) were Dachshunds and median age was 5.3 years. Clinical signs recurred in 33/92 (36%) dogs. Finding a completely degenerate disc in the T10 to L3 region (in addition to the operated site) at the time of surgery was associated with a hazard ratio of 2.92 (95% confidence interval: 1.37-6.20) for recurrence of clinical signs.Conclusions and clinical importanceOur results suggest that in cases of thoracolumbar intervertebral disc extrusion in dogs, recurrence of signs is likely if at least 1 completely degenerate disc in addition to the currently symptomatic disc is visible on MRI

Early diagnosis of tuberous sclerosis complex: A race against time. How to make the diagnosis before seizures?

Background: Tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) is a genetic disorder with an incidence of 1:6000 live births and associated with the development of benign tumors in several organs. It is also characterized by high rates of neurological and neuropsychiatric abnormalities, including epilepsy affecting 70-90% of patients and being one of the major risk factors of intellectual disability. The first seizures in TSC patients appear usually between the 4th and the 6th months of life. Recent studies have shown the beneficial role of preventative antiepileptic treatment in TSC patients, with the possibility for improvement of cognitive outcome. Moreover, European recommendations suggest early introduction of Vigabatrin if ictal discharges occur on EEG recordings, with or without clinical manifestation. The aim of this study was to define the most useful approach to make the diagnosis of TSC before seizure onset (before age 4th months), in order to start early EEG monitoring with possible preventative treatment intervention. Methods: We performed a retrospective review of children who were suspected of having TSC due to single or multiple cardiac tumors as the first sign of the disease. We analyzed the medical records in terms of conducted clinical tests and TSC signs, which were observed until the end of the 4th month of age. Subsequently, we described the different clinical scenarios and recommendations for early diagnosis. Results: 82/100 children were diagnosed with TSC within the first 4 months of life. Apart from cardiac tumors, the most frequently observed early TSC signs were subependymal nodules (71/100, 71%), cortical dysplasia (66/100, 66%), and hypomelanotic macules (35/100, 35%). The most useful clinical studies for early TSC diagnosis were brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), skin examination and echocardiography. Genetic testing was performed in 49/100 of the patients, but the results were obtained within the first 4 months of life in only 3 children. Conclusions: Early diagnosis of TSC, before seizure onset, is feasible and it is becoming pivotal for epilepsy management and improvement of cognitive outcome. Early TSC diagnosis is mostly based on clinical signs. Brain MRI, echocardiography, skin examination and genetic testing should be performed early in every patient suspected of having TSC

Agents and ontologies for a smart management of heterogeneous data: The IndianaMas system

The IndianaMas system is a platform for storing, retrieving and analyzing images, manual sketches and multilingual texts about rock carvings: to manage heterogeneous data formats, languages and data sources, it adopts a multiagent architecture that makes easier coping with such a mixed environment, and exploits ontologies to have a clear, formal and self contained representation of the domain. These two architectural solutions make possible to have a very modular organization of the overall system and to manage in parallel different kinds of data, which are exposed thanks to a digital library. In this paper we present the architecture and the functionalities of the IndianaMas system, focusing on the coordination level between the agents and on the organization of structured data in the digital library, to show how the adopted architectural approaches and solutions really allow the management of such a complex system

Design and Implementation of a NetLogo Interface for the Stand-Alone FYPA System

FYPA (Find Your Path, Agent!) is a multiagent system currently used by Ansaldo STS for off-line daily computation of paths of trains inside stations. Its exploitation for on-line replanning in case of unavailability of resources is envisaged in the very near future, since the system's performances demonstrated to be suitable for real time usage. In this paper we present StandaFYPA, the stand-alone version of FYPA that we developed for running batteries of tests on our own, without needing to access existing Ansaldo applications. StandaFYPA is equipped with a graphical interface implemented in NetLogo for off-line visualization, that we describe here in details

A Detailed Description of the EC2M Project: Exploiting Ontologies for the Automatic and Manual Documents Classification in Industrial Enterprise Content Management Systems

2noneEnterprise Content Management (ECM) systems represent a crucial aspect in the efficient and effective management of large-scale enterprises, in particular for those made up of several sites distributed all over the world. The increasing number of documents to be managed, the problems related to the sharing of private information between commercial partners, the need for semantically describing the contents of shared documents have pushed researchers to find new techniques and solutions to deal with these challenges. We already presented the high level description of a joint project of the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and System Engineering of the University of Genoa, Italy, and two companies, Nacon (member of Sempla Group, now part of the GFT Group) and Nis, to create an improved ECM system (named EC2M) exploiting ontologies to better classify, retrieve and share documentation among different sites of the involved companies: in this paper, we give a more detailed description of the project, with respect to its modules and to the underlying ontology used to classify documents. We present the automatic documents classification algorithm too, with an example of its execution. The developed system, which was born from a real industrial need, is currently used by GFT Italy to manage and share its documents among more than 600 users distributed in many different geographical locations and, thanks to the ontology, the semantic tagging process and the automatic documents forwarding have been successfully achieved. This joint project proves how a more formal representation of the documents domain can effectively improve the standard way of classifying and retrieving documents in real industrial scenarios, representing a winning collaboration between university and industry.noneBriola, D; Amicone, ABriola, D; Amicone,