Distributed Contact and Identity Management

Contact management is a twofold problem involving a local and global level where the separation between them is rather fuzzy. Locally, users need to deal with contact management, which refers to a local need to store, organize, maintain up to date, and find information that will allow them contacting or reaching other people, organizations, etc. Globally, users deal with identity management that refers to peers having multiple identities (i.e., profiles) and the need of staying in control of them. In other words, they should be able to manage what information is shared and with whom. We believe many existing applications try to deal with this problem looking only at the data level and without analyzing the underlying complexity. Our approach focus on the complex social relations and interactions between users, identifying three main subproblem: (i) management of identity, (ii) search, and (iii) privacy. The solution we propose concentrates on the models that are needed to address these problems. In particular, we propose a Distributed Contact Management System (DCM System) that: Models and represents the knowledge of peers about physical or abstract objects through the notion of entities that can be of different types (e.g., locations, people, events, facilities, organizations, etc.) and are described by a set of attributes; By representing contacts as entities, allows peers to locally organize their contacts taking into consideration the semantics of the contact’s characteristics; By describing peers as entities allows them to manage their different identities in the network, by sharing different views of themselves (showing possibly different in- formation) with different people. The contributions of this thesis are, (i) the definition of a reference architecture that allows dealing with the diversity in relation with the partial view that peers have of the world, (ii) an approach to search entities based on identifiers, (iii) an approach to search entities based on descriptions, and (iv) the definition of the DCM system that instantiates the previously mentioned approaches and architecture to address concrete usage scenarios

Custom made EIT electrode belt with 32 electrodes.

<p>(A) Each electrode comprised of 4 x 4 gold plated blunt pins with sufficient length to reach through the hair coat. (B) The electrodes did not cause any discomfort to conscious dogs.</p

Averaged functional EIT images showing the regression coefficient (Pearson R) for each pixel that significantly correlated with the reference respiratory signal.

<p>Pixels with red colour positively correlate with respiration (respiratory signals) but those with blue colour inversely correlate. Inverse respiratory signals occupy only a few pixels on the sides of the images and these are most likely artefacts. Unlike in horses, there is no indication that abdominal gas pockets would affect thoracic EIT images in dogs. See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0183340#pone.0183340.g001" target="_blank">Fig 1</a> for more explanation.</p

Mean±standard deviation of the haemodynamic and respiratory parameters in the four groups.

*<p>Superscripts indicate groups that differ statistically significantly from column group.</p><p>HR: heart rate, MAP: mean arterial pressure, RR: respiratory rate, PE’CO₂: end-tidal carbon dioxide partial pressure, FE’iso: end-tidal isoflurane fraction.</p

Three consecutive respiratory cycles after the application of the modified Mueller’s manoeuver.

<p>During inspiration the intra-oesophageal pressure becomes negative (ΔP_oes) and the intra-gastric pressure positive (ΔP_gas). Their difference is the P_di (P_di = ΔP_gas-ΔP_oes). The three P_di values in each time point were averaged to one value.</p

Mean±standard deviation of end-tidal carbon dioxide partial pressure (PE’CO₂) in the four groups (I, IP, IF, IK).

<p>Mean±standard deviation of end-tidal carbon dioxide partial pressure (PE’CO₂) in the four groups (I, IP, IF, IK).</p

Mean±standard deviation of trans-diaphragmatic pressure (P_di) in the four groups (I, IP, IF, IK).

<p>Mean±standard deviation of trans-diaphragmatic pressure (P_di) in the four groups (I, IP, IF, IK).</p