Designing and experimenting coordination primitives for service oriented computing

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services (WS) are becoming a widely accepted device for designing and implementing distributed systems. SOAs have given an important contribution to software engineering providing a model where applications are defined by assembling together certain functionalities, called services, possibly provided by remote suppliers. The characterizing issue of SOAs consists of defining common principles to make services accessible and usable regardless their execution context. Nevertheless, the architectural specification is far from giving a complete reference application model on which systems should rely on. The specification just includes principles for achieving interoperability and reusability of services; other aspects are left to the implementing platforms. As a consequence, it is understood how services are specified in isolation and how their functionalities are made available to the requesters, but the definition of languages for describing service composition are far from being widely accepted and reveals to be an impelling challenge. In the last years, several solutions have been proposed for describing aggregated services. However, they often lack a formally defined semantics. Moreover, these solutions are often specific for a platform (e.g. WSs) and are difficult to adapt to other platforms since they rely on low level assumptions that are out of the SOA specifications. This thesis aims at providing new methodologies for implementing the coordination of services. Our framework proposes to be flexible enough to support high level languages and to provide reliable tools for testing correctness of implementation. Our approach relies on a formal model that takes the form of a process calculus specifically designed to deal with services and their coordination. The process calculus has been the main tool driving the specification issues as well the implementation issues. Indeed, it acts as a bridge between the high level specification language and the run-time environment. A distinguished feature of our proposal is that our formal model, i.e. the process calculus, describes distributed processes relying on an event notification mechanism as machinery for interactions. Services are represented by certain components that embody local computations and react to changes of the overall environment in which they are involved. The adoption of event notification results particularly fashionable for tackling service coordination. The principles studied at specification level are from one side understood within a theoretical framework that provides instruments for checking correctness of interaction policies and from the other side offers the core model for implementing and experimenting a programming middleware

Increased Carotid Thickness in Subjects with Recently-Diagnosed Diabetes from Rural Cameroon

PMCID: PMC3423396This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Changes in bone turnover markers in patients without bone metastases receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors: An exploratory analysis

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) has revolutionized the treatment of different advanced solid tumors, but most patients develop severe immune-related adverse events (irAEs). Although a bi-directional crosstalk between bone and immune systems is widely described, the effect of ICIs on the skeleton is poorly investigated. Here, we analyze the changes in plasma levels of type I collagen C-terminal telopeptide (CTX-I) and N-terminal propeptide of type I procollagen (PINP), reference makers of bone turnover, in patients treated with ICIs and their associ-ation with clinical outcome.A series of 44 patients affected by advanced non-small cell lung cancer or renal cell carcinoma, without bone metastases, and treated with ICIs as monotherapy were enrolled. CTX-I and PINP plasma levels were assessed at baseline and after 3 months of ICIs treatment by ELISA kits.A significant increase of CTX-I with a concomitant decreasing trend towards the reduction of PINP was observed after 3 months of treatment. Intriguingly, CTX-I increase was associated with poor prognosis in terms of treatment response and survival. These data suggest a direct relationship between ICIs treatment, increased osteoclast activity and potential fracture risk.Overall, this study reveals that ICIs may act as triggers for skeletal events, and if confirmed in larger pro-spective studies, it would identify a new class of skeletal-related irAEs

Ambient-noise tomography of the wider Vienna Basin region

We present a new 3-D shear-velocity model for the top 30 km of the crust in the wider Vienna Basin region based on surface waves extracted from ambient-noise cross-correlations. We use continuous seismic records of 63 broad-band stations of the AlpArray project to retrieve interstation Green’s functions from ambient-noise cross-correlations in the period range from 5 to 25 s. From these Green’s functions, we measure Rayleigh group traveltimes, utilizing all four components of the cross-correlation tensor, which are associated with Rayleigh waves (ZZ, RR, RZ and ZR), to exploit multiple measurements per station pair. A set of selection criteria is applied to ensure that we use high-quality recordings of fundamental Rayleigh modes. We regionalize the interstation group velocities in a 5 km × 5 km grid with an average path density of ∼20 paths per cell. From the resulting group-velocity maps, we extract local 1-D dispersion curves for each cell and invert all cells independently to retrieve the crustal shear-velocity structure of the study area. The resulting model provides a previously unachieved lateral resolution of seismic velocities in the region of ∼15 km. As major features, we image the Vienna Basin and Little Hungarian Plain as low-velocity anomalies, and the Bohemian Massif with high velocities. The edges of these features are marked with prominent velocity contrasts correlated with faults, such as the Alpine Front and Vienna Basin transfer fault system. The observed structures correlate well with surface geology, gravitational anomalies and the few known crystalline basement depths from boreholes. For depths larger than those reached by boreholes, the new model allows new insight into the complex structure of the Vienna Basin and surrounding areas, including deep low-velocity zones, which we image with previously unachieved detail. This model may be used in the future to interpret the deeper structures and tectonic evolution of the wider Vienna Basin region, evaluate natural resources, model wave propagation and improve earthquake locations, among others

Arrival angles of teleseismic fundamental mode Rayleigh waves across the AlpArray

The dense AlpArray network allows studying seismic wave propagation with high spatial resolution. Here we introduce an array approach to measure arrival angles of teleseismic Rayleigh waves. The approach combines the advantages of phase correlation as in the two-station method with array beamforming to obtain the phase-velocity vector. 20 earthquakes from the first two years of the AlpArray project are selected, and spatial patterns of arrival-angle deviations across the AlpArray are shown in maps, depending on period and earthquake location. The cause of these intriguing spatial patterns is discussed. A simple wave-propagation modelling example using an isolated anomaly and a Gaussian beam solution suggests that much of the complexity can be explained as a result of wave interference after passing a structural anomaly along the wave paths. This indicates that arrival-angle information constitutes useful additional information on the Earth structure, beyond what is currently used in inversions

Shear-wave velocity structure beneath the Dinarides from the inversion of Rayleigh-wave dispersion

Highlights • Rayleigh-wave phase velocity in the wider Dinarides region using the two-station method. • Uppermost mantle shear-wave velocity model of the Dinarides-Adriatic Sea region. • Velocity model reveals a robust high-velocity anomaly present under the whole Dinarides. • High-velocity anomaly reaches depth of 160 km in the northern Dinarides to more than 200 km under southern Dinarides. • New structural model incorporating delamination as one of the processes controlling the continental collision in the Dinarides. The interaction between the Adriatic microplate (Adria) and Eurasia is the main driving factor in the central Mediterranean tectonics. Their interplay has shaped the geodynamics of the whole region and formed several mountain belts including Alps, Dinarides and Apennines. Among these, Dinarides are the least investigated and little is known about the underlying geodynamic processes. There are numerous open questions about the current state of interaction between Adria and Eurasia under the Dinaric domain. One of the most interesting is the nature of lithospheric underthrusting of Adriatic plate, e.g. length of the slab or varying slab disposition along the orogen. Previous investigations have found a low-velocity zone in the uppermost mantle under the northern-central Dinarides which was interpreted as a slab gap. Conversely, several newer studies have indicated the presence of the continuous slab under the Dinarides with no trace of the low velocity zone. Thus, to investigate the Dinaric mantle structure further, we use regional-to-teleseismic surface-wave records from 98 seismic stations in the wider Dinarides region to create a 3D shear-wave velocity model. More precisely, a two-station method is used to extract Rayleigh-wave phase velocity while tomography and 1D inversion of the phase velocity are employed to map the depth dependent shear-wave velocity. Resulting velocity model reveals a robust high-velocity anomaly present under the whole Dinarides, reaching the depths of 160 km in the north to more than 200 km under southern Dinarides. These results do not agree with most of the previous investigations and show continuous underthrusting of the Adriatic lithosphere under Europe along the whole Dinaric region. The geometry of the down-going slab varies from the deeper slab in the north and south to the shallower underthrusting in the center. On-top of both north and south slabs there is a low-velocity wedge indicating lithospheric delamination which could explain the 200 km deep high-velocity body existing under the southern Dinarides

Crustal Thinning From Orogen to Back-Arc Basin: The Structure of the Pannonian Basin Region Revealed by P-to-S Converted Seismic Waves

We present the results of P-to-S receiver function analysis to improve the 3D image of the sedimentary layer, the upper crust, and lower crust in the Pannonian Basin area. The Pannonian Basin hosts deep sedimentary depocentres superimposed on a complex basement structure and it is surrounded by mountain belts. We processed waveforms from 221 three-component broadband seismological stations. As a result of the dense station coverage, we were able to achieve so far unprecedented spatial resolution in determining the velocity structure of the crust. We applied a three-fold quality control process; the first two being applied to the observed waveforms and the third to the calculated radial receiver functions. This work is the first comprehensive receiver function study of the entire region. To prepare the inversions, we performed station-wise H-Vp/Vs grid search, as well as Common Conversion Point migration. Our main focus was then the S-wave velocity structure of the area, which we determined by the Neighborhood Algorithm inversion method at each station, where data were sub-divided into back-azimuthal bundles based on similar Ps delay times. The 1D, nonlinear inversions provided the depth of the discontinuities, shear-wave velocities and Vp/Vs ratios of each layer per bundle, and we calculated uncertainty values for each of these parameters. We then developed a 3D interpolation method based on natural neighbor interpolation to obtain the 3D crustal structure from the local inversion results. We present the sedimentary thickness map, the first Conrad depth map and an improved, detailed Moho map, as well as the first upper and lower crustal thickness maps obtained from receiver function analysis. The velocity jump across the Conrad discontinuity is estimated at less than 0.2 km/s over most of the investigated area. We also compare the new Moho map from our approach to simple grid search results and prior knowledge from other techniques. Our Moho depth map presents local variations in the investigated area: the crust-mantle boundary is at 20–26 km beneath the sedimentary basins, while it is situated deeper below the Apuseni Mountains, Transdanubian and North Hungarian Ranges (28–33 km), and it is the deepest beneath the Eastern Alps and the Southern Carpathians (40–45 km). These values reflect well the Neogene evolution of the region, such as crustal thinning of the Pannonian Basin and orogenic thickening in the neighboring mountain belts

Composizionalità di transazioni e Web Services nell'ambito della telefonia mobile

Nella dissertazione vengono affrontate le problematiche relative alla composizione di servizi di rete per applicazioni su reti overlay differenti. In particolare, viene presentato un caso di studio in cui i servizi di rete disponibili sono ottenuti componendo servizi di rete overlay IP (web services) e rete di telefonia mobile (servizi ParlayX). Inoltre, nella dissertazione, viene presentato il progetto e la realizzazione di una API per la gestione di transazioni distribuite su reti overlay distinte

Global Coordination Policies for Services

An important issue of the service oriented approach is the possibility to aggregate, through programmable coordination patterns, the activities involved by service interactions. Two different approaches can be adopted to tackle service coordination: orchestration and choreography. In this paper, we introduce a formal methodology for the with the aim of handling coordinationamong services from the perspective of a global observer in the spirit of choreography models. In particular, we address the problem of verifying compliance and consistency between the design of service interactions and the choreography constraints