Local and transboundary transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus sequence type 398 through pig trading

Livestock-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus sequence type (ST) 398 (LA-MRSA ST398) is a genetic lineage for which pigs are regarded as the main reservoir. An increasing prevalence of LA-MRSA ST398 has been reported in areas with high livestock density throughout Europe. In this study, we have investigated the drivers contributing to the introduction and spread of LA-MRSA ST398 along the pig farming system in Southern Italy. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of LA-MRSA ST398 isolates collected in 2018 from pigs (n=53) and employees (n=14) from 10 farms in the Calabria region were comparatively analysed with previously published WGS data from Italian ST398 isolates (n=45), an international ST398 reference collection (n=89) and isolates from Danish pigs farms (n=283), which are the main suppliers of pigs imported to Italy. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) were used to infer isolates relatedness and, together with data from animal trading, factors contributing to LA-MRSA ST398 dissemination were identified. The analyses support the existence of two concurrent pathways for the spread of LA-MRSA ST398 in Southern Italy: i) multiple introductions of LA-MRSA ST398 through the import of colonized pigs from other European countries including Denmark and France and; ii) the spread of distinct clones dependent on local trading of pigs between farms. Phylogenetically related Italian and Danish LA-MRSA ST398 isolates shared extensive similarities including carriage of antimicrobial resistance genes. Our findings highlight the potential risk of transboundary transmission of antimicrobial-resistant bacterial clones with a high zoonotic potential when importing pigs from countries with high LA-MRSA prevalence

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

ProMisE: a Framework for Process models custoMisation to the opErative context

Process diversity has recently become a target for the attention of a large part of the Software Engineering community. It implies that in order for a process model to be effective it must be specialized with respect to the context in which the process is execute. The authors face this problem by proposing ProMisE, a process pattern based framework able to capitalize the experiences gained in using a process model in diverse environments. It is an experience base focused on process models

Driving Flexibility and Consistency of Business Processes by Means of Product-Line Engineering and Decision Tables

Today's organizations are increasingly pushed to be distributed by space, time and capabilities and are involved to leverage synergies by integrating their business processes in order to produce new value-added products and services. Here the importance of integrating whole processes rather than simply integrate databases or software applications. Seeing the duality between products and processes, we propose to exploit flexibility provided by the product-line engineering approach for modeling business processes as a Business Process Line (BPL) in order to capture process variability, promote reuse and integration and provide the capacity to anticipate process changes. To support process evolution and consistency, we suggest the use of decision tables to elicit, track and manage all the emerging decision points during business process modeling, with the purpose of maintaining the relationships among business needs, environmental changes and process tasks. In a real case study we practiced the proposed methodology by leveraging the synergy of feature models, variability mechanisms and decision tables. The results prove that the BPL satisfies the requirements for business process flexibility

Enterprise Information Integration Management System (EII_MS)

This demo illustrates the EII management system which is a support tool to iterative reengineering of data and applications, developed in SERLAB. EII_MS provides a unified view of enterprise data over the various data sources in spite of original data heterogeneity and redundancy

Empirical studies for innovation dissemination: Ten years of experience

Context: technology transfer and innovation dissemination are key success factors for an enterprise. The shift to a new software technology determines inevitable changes to ingrained and familiar processes and at the same time leads to changes in practices, requires training and commitment on behalf of technical staff and management. As so, it cannot leave out neither organizational nor technical factors. Objective: our conjecture is that the process of innovation dissemination is facilitated if the new technology is supported by empirical evidence. In this sense, Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) serves as support for transferring an innovation, either it being a process or product, within production processes. Method: this paper investigates the relation between empirical studies and technical/organizational factors in order to identify the most suitable empirical study for disseminating an innovation in an enterprise. The analysis has been carried out with respect to empirical studies carried out during a ten year time span within the Software Engineering Research LABoratory (SERLAB), at the University of Bari. Results: the results point out that a critical factor in designing empirical studies is the quality model, i.e. measurement program defined by researchers during the study and used to collect relevant information on the effectiveness and efficacy of the innovation being transferred, in order to gain commitment on behalf of stakeholders who will finally adopt the technology. Conclusion: the study outcomes provide an empirically founded guideline that can be used when choosing the most appropriate approach for addressing an innovation. Copyright 2013 ACM

Non Invasive Monitoring of a Distributed Maintenance Process

It is well known that measurement impacts on developer performances. Furthermore, in order to be effective, it must conform to the context characteristics. Both these aspects are critical for globally distributed software processes due to distance and heterogeneity between monitored sites. Here measurement must be non invasive and interpretation of results flexible with respect to each site context. Our conjecture is that quality of primary processes, can be measured, non intrusively, through supporting ones and that interpretation must be based on experience collected during process execution. This work faces these critical issues focusing on maintenance processes. The paper presents a non invasive Statistical Process Control (SPC) based approach, for measuring a primary process (maintenance) through a supporting one (Problem Resolution Process). The approach's efficacy shall be investigated through a simulation carried out on legacy data collected in an industrial environment

Ricerca empirica di fattori influenzanti la produttività software: analisi discriminante su progetti raccolti da ISBSG

Questo lavoro analizza i dati contenuti nel database ISBSG che raccoglie progetti eseguiti da diverse organizzazioni distribuite sull’intero globo. L’analisi è mirata a ricavare informazioni utili nel supporto alle decisioni finalizzate a gestire meglio un progetto e prevedere le risorse richieste alla sua esecuzione. Più precisamente, si usa l’analisi discriminante per rilevare quali metriche in ISBSG hanno maggiore capacità discriminante tra i progetti, rispetto alla produttività degli stessi. Poiché le metriche utilizzate formalizzano variabili del contesto di sviluppo (ad esempio: linguaggio di programmazione, metodo di sviluppo utilizzato, tipo di progetto, ecc.), allora quelle che maggiormente differenziano i progetti rispetto all’impegno uomo richiesto suggeriscono le variabili di processo su cui si può agire per migliorare la produttività. Inoltre, considerate le variabili maggiormente discriminanti è possibile selezionare i progetti che presentano valori simili rispetto a queste ed utilizzarli per ricavare un modello di previsione. Il presente lavoro descrive le azioni eseguite per rendere il data base ISBSG statisticamente trattabile, i risultati ottenuti a valle dell’analisi condotta e in fine l’interpretazione di questi dal punto di vista dei responsabili di progetto. I risultati ottenuti danno evidenza statistica a molte delle congetture accreditate dai professionisti dello sviluppo software e ne rivelano altre che, in genere, non sono considerate di rilevante impatto sulle prestazioni pur essendo tali