Tools and verification

This chapter presents different tools that have been developed inside the Sensoria project. Sensoria studied qualitative analysis techniques for verifying properties of service implementations with respect to their formal specifications. The tools presented in this chapter have been developed to carry out the analysis in an automated, or semi-automated, way. We present four different tools, all developed during the Sensoria project, exploiting new techniques and calculi from the Sensoria project itself

A state/event-based model-checking approach for the analysis of abstract system properties.

AbstractWe present the UMC framework for the formal analysis of concurrent systems specified by collections of UML state machines. The formal model of a system is given by a doubly labelled transition system, and the logic used to specify its properties is the state-based and event-based logic UCTL. UMC is an on-the-fly analysis framework which allows the user to interactively explore a UML model, to visualize abstract behavioural slices of it and to perform local model checking of UCTL formulae. An automotive scenario from the service-oriented computing (SOC) domain is used as case study to illustrate our approach

Teaching reading strategies in history lessons:A micro-level analysis of professional development training and its practical challenges

Reading comprehension is an important skill in secondary education, yet many history teachers find it difficult to provide adequate reading strategy instruction. In this study, we designed a digital learning environment to support teachers’ instruction of reading strategies based on student data. We provided history teachers in the experimental conditions with a visualisation of student performance data. Additionally, these teachers received professional development (PD) training and a guiding manual on how to translate these data into structured, explicit reading strategy instruction. Teachers in the control condition were only provided with basic data. We investigated teachers’ personal experiences through micro-level analysis of qualitative interview data. Our results show that teachers in the experimental condition improved the variation of their strategy instruction and used modelling behaviour more often after the PD training. However, we also identified multiple contextual implementation barriers that provided us with important suggestions for future practice-oriented educational research

Relationships between adolescent students’ reading skills, historical content knowledge and historical reasoning ability

The ability to apply various reading skills is an important prerequisite to comprehend expository texts commonly found in history textbooks, but it is unclear which specific skills contribute to students’ historical content knowledge and historical reasoning abilities. This study used a digital learning environment (DLE) to measure and support lower secondary students’ subject-specific reading skills, and explored the relationships with students’ historical content knowledge and historical reasoning ability. Results showed that subject-specific reading skills, such as explaining historical events, correlated significantly with both historical content knowledge and historical reasoning ability, but not all skills were significant predictors. These findings indicate that to promote the advanced practice of historical reasoning, history teachers should pay attention to students’ reading comprehension skills

Method for coregistration of optical measurements of breast tissue with histopathology : the importance of accounting for tissue deformations

For the validation of optical diagnostic technologies, experimental results need to be benchmarked against the gold standard. Currently, the gold standard for tissue characterization is assessment of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained sections by a pathologist. When processing tissue into H&E sections, the shape of the tissue deforms with respect to the initial shape when it was optically measured. We demonstrate the importance of accounting for these tissue deformations when correlating optical measurement with routinely acquired histopathology. We propose a method to register the tissue in the H&E sections to the optical measurements, which corrects for these tissue deformations. We compare the registered H&E sections to H&E sections that were registered with an algorithm that does not account for tissue deformations by evaluating both the shape and the composition of the tissue and using microcomputer tomography data as an independent measure. The proposed method, which did account for tissue deformations, was more accurate than the method that did not account for tissue deformations. These results emphasize the need for a registration method that accounts for tissue deformations, such as the method presented in this study, which can aid in validating optical techniques for clinical use. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License

On Secure Implementation of an IHE XUA-Based Protocol for Authenticating Healthcare Professionals

The importance of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) has been addressed in recent years by governments and institutions.Many large scale projects have been funded with the aim to allow healthcare professionals to consult patients data. Properties such as confidentiality, authentication and authorization are the key for the success for these projects. The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative promotes the coordinated use of established standards for authenticated and secure EHR exchanges among clinics and hospitals. In particular, the IHE integration profile named XUA permits to attest user identities by relying on SAML assertions, i.e. XML documents containing authentication statements. In this paper, we provide a formal model for the secure issuance of such an assertion. We first specify the scenario using the process calculus COWS and then analyse it using the model checker CMC. Our analysis reveals a potential flaw in the XUA profile when using a SAML assertion in an unprotected network. We then suggest a solution for this flaw, and model check and implement this solution to show that it is secure and feasible