Supporting Users in Cloud Plan Selection

Cloud computing is a key technology for outsourcing data and applications to external providers. The current cloud market offers a multitude of solutions (plans) differing from one another in terms of their characteristics. In this context, the selection of the right plan for outsourcing is of paramount importance for users wishing to move their data/applications to the cloud. The scientific community has then developed different models and tools for capturing users\u2019 requirements and evaluating candidate plans to determine the extent to which each of them satisfies such requirements. In this chapter, we illustrate some of the existing solutions proposed for cloud plan selection and for supporting users in the specification of their (crisp and/or fuzzy) needs

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

Genome-wide association study of primary tooth eruption identifies pleiotropic loci associated with height and craniofacial distances

Twin and family studies indicate that the timing of primary tooth eruption is highly heritable, with estimates typically exceeding 80%. To identify variants involved in primary tooth eruption we performed a population based genome-wide association study of ‘age at first tooth’ and ‘number of teeth’ using 5998 and 6609 individuals respectively from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) and 5403 individuals from the 1966 Northern Finland Birth Cohort (NFBC1966). We tested 2,446,724 SNPs imputed in both studies. Analyses were controlled for the effect of gestational age, sex and age of measurement. Results from the two studies were combined using fixed effects inverse variance meta-analysis. We identified a total of fifteen independent loci, with ten loci reaching genome-wide significance (p<5x10−8) for ‘age at first tooth’ and eleven loci for ‘number of teeth’. Together these associations explain 6.06% of the variation in ‘age of first tooth’ and 4.76% of the variation in ‘number of teeth’. The identified loci included eight previously unidentified loci, some containing genes known to play a role in tooth and other developmental pathways, including a SNP in the protein-coding region of BMP4 (rs17563, P= 9.080x10−17). Three of these loci, containing the genes HMGA2, AJUBA and ADK, also showed evidence of association with craniofacial distances, particularly those indexing facial width. Our results suggest that the genome-wide association approach is a powerful strategy for detecting variants involved in tooth eruption, and potentially craniofacial growth and more generally organ development

Orbit Closures and Invariants

The first author would like to thank Sebastian Herpel for the conversations we had which led to the first iteration of some of the ideas in this paper, and also Stephen Donkin for some very helpful nudges towards the right literature. All three authors acknowledge the funding of EPSRC grant EP/L005328/1. We would like to thank the anonymous referee for their very insightful comments and for pointing out a subtle gap in the proof of Theorem 1.1.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Constraints on the χ_(c1) versus χ_(c2) polarizations in proton-proton collisions at √s = 8 TeV

The polarizations of promptly produced χ_(c1) and χ_(c2) mesons are studied using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, in proton-proton collisions at √s=8  TeV. The χ_c states are reconstructed via their radiative decays χ_c → J/ψγ, with the photons being measured through conversions to e⁺e⁻, which allows the two states to be well resolved. The polarizations are measured in the helicity frame, through the analysis of the χ_(c2) to χ_(c1) yield ratio as a function of the polar or azimuthal angle of the positive muon emitted in the J/ψ → μ⁺μ⁻ decay, in three bins of J/ψ transverse momentum. While no differences are seen between the two states in terms of azimuthal decay angle distributions, they are observed to have significantly different polar anisotropies. The measurement favors a scenario where at least one of the two states is strongly polarized along the helicity quantization axis, in agreement with nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics predictions. This is the first measurement of significantly polarized quarkonia produced at high transverse momentum