Supporting Tropos concepts in Agent OPEN

The growth of interest in agent-orientation as a new paradigm has introduced the need for developing concepts, tools and techniques for modeling and engineering agent-based software systems. Object technology has been supporting the development of information systems for many years but is now slowly evolving to encompass more recent ideas relating to the concept of "agent". Integrating agent concepts into existing OO methodologies has resulted in several agent-oriented methodologies, one of which is Agent OPEN. In this paper, we evaluate the existing Agent OPEN description against ideas formulated within Tropos, an agent-oriented software development methodology. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004

A Requirement-centric Approach to Web Service Modeling, Discovery, and Selection

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has gained considerable popularity for implementing Service-Based Applications (SBAs) in a flexible\ud and effective manner. The basic idea of SOC is to understand users'\ud requirements for SBAs first, and then discover and select relevant\ud services (i.e., that fit closely functional requirements) and offer\ud a high Quality of Service (QoS). Understanding users’ requirements\ud is already achieved by existing requirement engineering approaches\ud (e.g., TROPOS, KAOS, and MAP) which model SBAs in a requirement-driven\ud manner. However, discovering and selecting relevant and high QoS\ud services are still challenging tasks that require time and effort\ud due to the increasing number of available Web services. In this paper,\ud we propose a requirement-centric approach which allows: (i) modeling\ud users’ requirements for SBAs with the MAP formalism and specifying\ud required services using an Intentional Service Model (ISM); (ii)\ud discovering services by querying the Web service search engine Service-Finder\ud and using keywords extracted from the specifications provided by\ud the ISM; and(iii) selecting automatically relevant and high QoS services\ud by applying Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We validate our approach\ud by performing experiments on an e-books application. The experimental\ud results show that our approach allows the selection of relevant and\ud high QoS services with a high accuracy (the average precision is\ud 89.41%) and efficiency (the average recall is 95.43%)

Effects of the current financial and economic crisis on the rural landscape as well as the agri-food sector in Europe and Central Asia

This paper reviews the expected effects of the current financial crisis and subsequent recession on the rural landscape, in particular the agri-food sector in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) on the basis of the structure of the rural economy and of different organisations and institutions. Empirical evidence suggests that the crisis has hit the ECA region the hardest. Agriculture contributes about 9% to gross domestic product (GDP) for the ECA region as a whole with 16% of the population being employed in the agricultural sector. As far as the impact of the financial crisis on the agri-food sector is concerned, there are a few interconnected issues: (1) reduction in income elastic food demand and commodity price decline, (2) loss of employment and earnings of rural people working in urban centres, implying also costly labour reallocation, (3) rising rural poverty originating mainly from lack of opportunities in the non-farm sector and a sizable decline of international remittances, (4) tightening of agricultural credit markets, and the (5) collapse of sectoral government support programs and social safety-net measures in many countries. The paper reveals how the crisis hit farming and broader agri-business differently in general and in the ECA sub-regions

Impact of upstream landslide on perialpine lake ecosystem: An assessment using multi-temporal satellite data

Monitoring freshwater and wetland systems and their response to stressors of natural or anthropogenic origin is critical for ecosystem conservation. A multi-temporal set of 87 images, acquired by Sentinel-2 satellites over three years (2016–2018), provided quantitative information for assessing the temporal evolution of key ecosystem variables in the perialpine Lake Mezzola (northern Italy), which has suffered from the impacts of a massive landslide that took place upstream of the lake basin in summer 2017. Sentinel-2 derived products revealed an increase in lake turbidity triggered by the landslide that amounted to twice the average values scored in the years preceding and following the event. Hotspots of turbidity within the lake were in particular highlighted. Moreover, both submerged and riparian vegetation showed harmful impacts due to sediment deposition. A partial loss of submerged macrophyte cover was found, with delayed growth and a possible community shift in favor of species adapted to inorganic substrates. Satellite-derived seasonal dynamics showed that exceptional sediment load can overwrite climatic factors in controlling phenology of riparian reed beds, resulting in two consecutive years with shorter than normal growing season and roughly 20% drop in productivity, according to spectral proxies. Compared to 2016, senescence came earlier by around 20 days on average in 2017 season, and green-up was delayed by up to 50 days (20 days, on average) in 2018, following the landslide. The approach presented could be easily implemented for continuous monitoring of similar ecosystems subject to external pressures with periods of high sediment loads

A Goal-based Framework for Contextual Requirements Modeling and Analysis

Requirements Engineering (RE) research often ignores, or presumes a uniform nature of the context in which the system operates. This assumption is no longer valid in emerging computing paradigms, such as ambient, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, where it is essential to monitor and adapt to an inherently varying context. Besides influencing the software, context may influence stakeholders' goals and their choices to meet them. In this paper, we propose a goal-oriented RE modeling and reasoning framework for systems operating in varying contexts. We introduce contextual goal models to relate goals and contexts; context analysis to refine contexts and identify ways to verify them; reasoning techniques to derive requirements reflecting the context and users priorities at runtime; and finally, design time reasoning techniques to derive requirements for a system to be developed at minimum cost and valid in all considered contexts. We illustrate and evaluate our approach through a case study about a museum-guide mobile information system

PARTECIPAZIONE E GRADIMENTO DI UN PERCORSO DI ACCOMPAGNAMENTO PSICOLOGICO RIVOLTO ALLE MATRICOLE DELLA FACOLTÀ DI MEDICINA

Obiettivi: valutare la partecipazione e il gradimento delle matricole che aderiscono al “Progetto Accoglienza”, un percorso di accoglienza e accompagnamento psicologico, attivo da quattro anni, presso il Corso di Laurea in Medicina e Chirurgia dell’Università degli Studi di Brescia. Metodo: il percorso si fonda sull’implementazione della figura di studenti senior (tutor), adeguatamente formati e supervisionati da docenti della Sezione di Psicologia Clinica, attraverso l’utilizzo di modalità gruppali, in accordo con specifiche metodologie utilizzate da tempo in psicologia clinica. I tutor fungono da riferimenti rassicuranti e identificatori per le matricole, che a loro volta aderiscono al progetto in modo volontario e ricevono crediti opzionali, al fine di riconoscere il valore formativo dello scambio fra studenti del primo anno e studenti senior. Per la valutazione del livello di gradimento è stato predisposto un questionario ad hoc, elaborato in parte sulla base di strumenti utilizzati nei corsi professionali in cui è previsto l’accreditamento e in parte sulla base di proposte e riflessioni fra i docenti di psicologia dell’Ateneo, che non hanno preso parte al progetto. Risultati: il numero di studenti che partecipa con regolarità al percorso di accoglienza è cresciuto nei quattro anni: da 125 a 164. Gli studenti hanno in media un’età di 19.3 anni (±1.7) e sono in prevalenza femmine. Il questionario di gradimento viene compilato in media dall’85% delle matricole coinvolte. Quasi la totalità di esse riferisce che ripeterebbe l’esperienza, anche senza crediti formativi; il 98% la consiglierebbe ad una nuova matricola. Per quanto riguarda rilevanza, efficacia e utilità del percorso rispetto alle proprie esigenze formative, anche in questo caso la maggior parte degli studenti riporta una valutazione positiva. Conclusioni: i dati raccolti mostrano un gradimento medio-alto, che si mantiene costante negli anni. Si ritiene che tale percorso possa fornire un aiuto concreto per fronteggiare le difficoltà associate all’ingresso nell’Università. Fra gli indicatori di efficacia di consimili interventi nel lungo periodo, riteniamo utile la ricaduta in termini di prevenzione del drop out e dell’ allungamento temporale del corso di studi

Interaction of perceptual grouping and crossmodal temporal capture in tactile apparent-motion

Previous studies have shown that in tasks requiring participants to report the direction of apparent motion, task-irrelevant mono-beeps can "capture'' visual motion perception when the beeps occur temporally close to the visual stimuli. However, the contributions of the relative timing of multimodal events and the event structure, modulating uni- and/or crossmodal perceptual grouping, remain unclear. To examine this question and extend the investigation to the tactile modality, the current experiments presented tactile two-tap apparent-motion streams, with an SOA of 400 ms between successive, left-/right-hand middle-finger taps, accompanied by task-irrelevant, non-spatial auditory stimuli. The streams were shown for 90 seconds, and participants' task was to continuously report the perceived (left-or rightward) direction of tactile motion. In Experiment 1, each tactile stimulus was paired with an auditory beep, though odd-numbered taps were paired with an asynchronous beep, with audiotactile SOAs ranging from -75 ms to 75 ms. Perceived direction of tactile motion varied systematically with audiotactile SOA, indicative of a temporal-capture effect. In Experiment 2, two audiotactile SOAs-one short (75 ms), one long (325 ms)-were compared. The long-SOA condition preserved the crossmodal event structure (so the temporal-capture dynamics should have been similar to that in Experiment 1), but both beeps now occurred temporally close to the taps on one side (even-numbered taps). The two SOAs were found to produce opposite modulations of apparent motion, indicative of an influence of crossmodal grouping. In Experiment 3, only odd-numbered, but not even-numbered, taps were paired with auditory beeps. This abolished the temporal-capture effect and, instead, a dominant percept of apparent motion from the audiotactile side to the tactile-only side was observed independently of the SOA variation. These findings suggest that asymmetric crossmodal grouping leads to an attentional modulation of apparent motion, which inhibits crossmodal temporal-capture effects