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© 2001 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. FUNAGES: an expert system for fundus fluorescein angiography V. Dimitroula, N. Bassiliades

A service oriented architecture to support the federation lifecycle management in a secure B2B environment

This paper presents a Service Oriented Architecture to manage the lifecycle of a federation in a secure Business to Business (B2B) environment. The main contribution of the authors to Grid and SOA communities is related to the definition and development of a set of design patterns and software components to support the creation, management and dissolution of a federation of different administrative domains. As case of study we present the application of our components to a concrete business scenario relating to the on-line game application provision, providing also an overview of the main business benefits assessed during the evaluation of the components

Dynamic Security Perimeters for Inter-Enterprise Service Integration

Levaraging the convergence of Grid and Web services technologies, we anticipate the emergence of new business and scientific computing paradigms that are based on dynamic Virtual Organisations (VO). These VOs span across organisational boundaries and enable the enactment of collaborative processes that integrate services, resources and knowledge in order to perform tasks that the VO partners could not undertake on their own. Such a dynamic and complex structure opens several challenging problems relating to VO security. In this paper, we summarise a novel architecture supporting Grid-enabled ollaboration for the purposes of Application Service Provision. We then focus on the underpinning security architecture that enables the federated management and distributed enforcement of dynamic security perimeters for virtual communities of services, and on resources that span across administrative and enterprise boundaries. We highlight how this architecture, realised in the context of a European research project developing a Grid platform for application serviced provision, addresses the outstanding challenges that underlie the automation of trust and security management in scalable, multi-institutional, and dynamic Virtual Organisations

Certification-Based Cloud Adaptation

Performance and dependability levels of cloud-based computations are difficult to guarantee by-design due to segregation of visibility and control between applications, data owners, and cloud providers. Lack of predictability increases users' uncertainty about the service levels they will actually achieve. Cloud tenants compete for shared resources/services at all layers of the cloud stack, and pose heterogeneous and conflicting non-functional requirements over them. These requirements have implications for platform and infrastructure layers, which have to be configured to satisfy inter-tenants requirements. We argue that adaptation techniques can play a crucial role in providing a reliable cloud, supporting definite behavior of applications and stable quality of service. We propose a multi-tenant, general-purpose adaptation technique for the cloud, based on evidence collected by means of a trustworthy certification process. We depart from traditional heavy and comprehensive certification processes and consider a flexible and lightweight certification process for the cloud. It is based on authentic evidence and provides accountable validation on the compliance of a cloud-based system. Our approach adapts the cloud at all layers to maintain stable non-functional properties in certificates over time, by continuously verifying certificate validity. We assess performance and quality of our approach in a wide range of settings

S&D pattern deployment at organizational level : a prototype for remote healthcare system

The analysis of security incidents and frauds has shown that several vulnerabilities of IT systems are due to loopholes in the policies and procedures adopted by organizations as well as in their structure. Organizations have thus to address security and dependability issues by analyzing their organizational setting. In this paper, we present a methodology to support the deployment of Security & Dependability patterns according to their position in the Enterprise Architecture and the underlying system infrastructures. The methodology discriminates the pattern deployment process between recommendations and guidelines. Recommendations concretize the deployment with refined software and/or hardware related patterns, whereas guidelines specify the organizational patterns in terms of the system-to-be, proposing human-resource and/or policy solutions. To make the discussion more concrete, we illustrate the framework with a case study on an emergency scenario within a remote healthcare system

Contribution of integrated teaching in the improvement of an undergraduate ophthalmology curriculum

Ioannis T Tsinopoulos, Chrysanthos Symeonidis, Konstantinos T Tsaousis, Asimina Mataftsi, Nikolaos Chalvatzis, Argyrios Tzamalis, Lampros P Lamprogiannis, Stavros A Dimitrakos2nd Department of Ophthalmology, Medical School, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Macedonia, GreecePurpose: Conventional medical curriculum is the rule of medical teaching in Greek Medical Schools. Medical students are often taught irrelevant details with little or no reference to their potential clinical significance. Alternatively, integrated teaching warrants that the complete teaching material is covered by each faculty member not considering areas of personal expertise. The aim of this study was to evaluate the implementation of integrated teaching in ophthalmic training.Methods: The main outcome measures of this retrospective study were a) comments and recommendations made anonymously by the fifth-year medical students in the evaluation questionnaires filled in at the end of their training, and b) scores obtained by students in their final examination at the end of their training in the 2nd Department of Ophthalmology as part of the core Curriculum of the Medical School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The latter outcome was analyzed with respect to the implementation of integrated teaching.Results: The score obtained by students in the final examination, which is an objective outcome measure, increased significantly after the implementation of integrated teaching. The final grade (scores out of 10) of students who were trained with the integrated system (6.17±1.67, mean ± standard deviation) was significantly higher compared to those (5.52±2.20) trained with the conventional system (P<0.001). The positive outcome of this process was evident as there was a significant increase in the number of students satisfied with the teaching process compared to previous academic years.Conclusion: Based on the experience of eight academic years and as a result of interactive assessment process our department has modified its medical student teaching process from conventional to integrated; all teaching staff members are involved in the teaching process, while students are divided in small groups. In conclusion, integrated teaching in small student groups appears to be an efficient teaching method (for both theoretical and clinical skills) of ophthalmic training for medical students.Keywords: medical teaching, integrated teaching, medical training assessmen