Trust and Privacy in Development of Publish/Subscribe Systems

Publish/subscribe (pub/sub) is a widely deployed paradigm for information dissemination in a variety of distributed applications such as financial platforms, e-health frameworks and the Internet-of-Things. In essence, the pub/sub model considers one or more publishers generating feeds of information and a set of subscribers, the clients of the system. A pub/sub service is in charge of delivering the published information to interested clients. With the advent of cloud computing, we observe a growing tendency to externalize applications using pub/sub services to public clouds. This trend, despite its advantages, opens up multiple important data privacy and trust issues. Although multiple solutions for data protection have been proposed by the academic community, there is no unified view or framework describing how to deploy secure pub/sub systems on public clouds. To remediate this, we advocate towards a trust model which we believe can serve as basis for such deployments

Insulin amyloidosis: A case report

Insulin amyloidosis is a rare form of localized amyloidosis due to insulin aggregation into subcutaneous amyloid fibrils. We describe the case of a 55 years old male with insulin-requiring type 1 diabetes presenting with two non-inflammatory intra-dermal nodules associated with local lymph node enlargement. Diagnosis was confirmed by Congo red coloration of the amyloid deposit and insulin protein identification on mass spectrometry. Insulin amyloidosis is a potential complication of repeated subcutaneous insulin injections. The main risk factor is the intrinsic characteristic of the insulin used. Insulin amyloidosis leads to systemic metabolic consequences such as chronic hyperglycemia or unpredictable hypoglycemia, as well as unesthetic cutaneous lumps or abscesses. Standard-of-care is yet to be defined but mainly rely on therapeutical education of insulin injections, while surgical excision is reported to improve glycemic control in some patients

DATAFLASKS: epidemic store for massive scale systems

Very large scale distributed systems provide some of the most interesting research challenges while at the same time being increasingly required by nowadays applications. The escalation in the amount of connected devices and data being produced and exchanged, demands new data management systems. Although new data stores are continuously being proposed, they are not suitable for very large scale environments. The high levels of churn and constant dynamics found in very large scale systems demand robust, proactive and unstructured approaches to data management. In this paper we propose a novel data store solely based on epidemic (or gossip-based) protocols. It leverages the capacity of these protocols to provide data persistence guarantees even in highly dynamic, massive scale systems. We provide an open source prototype of the data store and correspondent evaluation

DataFlasks : an epidemic dependable key-value substrate

Recently, tuple-stores have become pivotal struc- tures in many information systems. Their ability to handle large datasets makes them important in an era with unprecedented amounts of data being produced and exchanged. However, these tuple-stores typically rely on structured peer-to-peer protocols which assume moderately stable environments. Such assumption does not always hold for very large scale systems sized in the scale of thousands of machines. In this paper we present a novel approach to the design of a tuple-store. Our approach follows a stratified design based on an unstructured substrate. We focus on this substrate and how the use of epidemic protocols allow reaching high dependability and scalability.(undefined

Identification of equivalent topography in an open channel flow using Lagrangian data assimilation

International audienceWe present a Lagrangian data assimilation experiment in an open channel flow above a broad-crested weir. The observations consist of trajectories of particles transported by the flow and extracted from a video film, in addition to classical water level measurements. However, the presence of vertical recirculations on both sides of the weir actually conducts to the identification of an equivalent topography corresponding to the lower limit of a surface jet. In addition, results on the identification of the Manning coefficient may allow to detect the presence of bottom recirculations

Holons:Towards a systematic approach to composing systems of systems

The world's computing infrastructure is increasingly differentiating into self-contained distributed systems with various purposes and capabilities (e.g. IoT installations, clouds, VANETs, WSNs, CDNs, ...). Furthermore, such systems are increasingly being composed to generate systems of systems that offer value-added functionality. Today, however, system of systems composition is typically ad-hoc and fragile. It requires developers to possess an intimate knowledge of system internals and low-level interactions between their components. In this paper, we outline a vision and set up a research agenda towards the generalised programmatic construction of distributed systems as compositions of other distributed systems. Our vision, in which we refer uniformly to systems and to compositions of systems as holons, employs code generation techniques and uses common abstractions, operations and mechanisms at all system levels to support uniform system of systems composition. We believe our holon approach could facilitate a step change in the convenience and correctness with which systems of systems can be built, and open unprecedented opportunities for the emergence of new and previously-unenvisaged distributed system deployments, analogous perhaps to the impact the mashup culture has had on the way we now build web applications

Platelet function studies in myeloproliferative neoplasms patients with Calreticulin or JAK2V617F mutation

Background: JAK2V617F and Calreticulin (CALR) mutations are the most frequent molecular causes of Phi-negative myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN). Patients with CALR mutations are at lower risk of thrombosis than patients with JAK2V617F. We hypothesized that CALR-mutated blood platelets would have platelet function defects that might explain why these patients are at lower risk of thrombosis. Objectives: Our main objective was to explore and compare platelet function depending on the MPN molecular marker. Methods: We analyzed platelet function in 16 patients with MPN with CALR mutations and 17 patients with JAK2V617F mutation and compared them with healthy controls. None of these patients was taking antiplatelet therapy. We performed an extensive analysis of platelet function and measured plasmatic soluble P-selectin and CD40L levels. Results: We observed significant defects in platelet aggregation, surface glycoprotein expression, fibrinogen binding, and granule content in platelets from patients with MPN compared with that in controls. Moreover, soluble CD40L and P-selectin levels were elevated in patients with MPN compared with that in controls, suggesting an in vivo platelet preactivation. Comparison of platelet function between patients with CALR and JAK2V617F MPN revealed only minor differences in platelets from patients with CALR. However, these results need to be interpreted within the context of absence of an inflammatory environment that could impact platelet function during MPN. Conclusions: These results do not support the hypothesis that calreticulin-mutated platelets have platelet function defects that could explain the lower thrombotic risk of patients with CALR

On the support of versioning in distributed key-value stores

The ability to access and query data stored in multiple versions is an important asset for many applications, such as Web graph analysis, collaborative editing platforms, data forensics, or correlation mining. The storage and retrieval of versioned data requires a specific API and support from the storage layer. The choice of the data structures used to maintain versioned data has a fundamental impact on the performance of insertions and queries. The appropriate data structure also depends on the nature of the versioned data and the nature of the access patterns. In this paper we study the design and implementation space for providing versioning support on top of a distributed key-value store (KVS). We define an API for versioned data access supporting multiple writers and show that a plain KVS does not offer the necessary synchronization power for implementing this API. We leverage the support for listeners at the KVS level and propose a general construction for implementing arbitrary types of data structures for storing and querying versioned data. We explore the design space of versioned data storage ranging from a flat data structure to a distributed sharded index. The resulting system, \system, is implemented on top of an industrial-grade open-source KVS, Infinispan. Our evaluation, based on real-world Wikipedia access logs, studies the performance of each versioning mechanisms in terms of load balancing, latency and storage overhead in the context of different access scenarios

Br J Haematol

Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is defined by a low platelet count that can trigger potentially life-threatening haemorrhages. Three-quarters of adult patients exhibit persistent or chronic disease and require second-line treatments. Among these, rituximab, an anti-CD20 antibody, has yielded valuable results, with global responses in 60% of patients at 6 months and complete responses in 30% at 5 years. Factors predictive of response to ITP therapy would help physicians choose optimal treatments. We retrospectively analysed clinical courses, biological markers and blood lymphocyte subset numbers of 72 patients on rituximab to treat persistent/chronic ITP followed-up in our department between 2007 and 2021, divided into three groups according to the platelet count at 6 months: complete, partial or no response. Among all studied parameters, a low number of CD3 CD16 CD56 circulating NK cells was associated with the complete response to rituximab. We also found that, after rituximab therapy, complete responders exhibited increased NK and decreased activated CD8 T cell percentages. These results emphasize that the role played by NK cells in ITP remains incompletely known but that factors predictive of response to rituximab can be easily derived using blood lymphocyte subset data

Br J Haematol

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