arXiv subjects

Vincenzo De Florio

Publications and source records attributed to Vincenzo De Florio.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Perspectives and solutions towards intelligent ambient assisted living systems

The population of the elderly people has kept increasing rapidly over the world in the past decades. Solutions that are able to effectively support the elderly people to live independently at their home are thus urgently needed. Ambient assisted living (AAL) aims to provide products and services with ambient intelligence to build a safe environment around people in need. With the high prevalence of multiple chronic diseases, the elderly people often need different levels of care management to prolong independent living at home. An effective AAL system should provide the required clinical support as an extension to the services provided in hospitals. Following the rapid growth of available data, together with the wide application of machine learning technologies, we are now able to build intelligent ambient assisted systems to fulfil such a request. This paper discusses different levels of intelligence in AAL. We also introduce our solution for building an intelligent AAL system with the discussed technologies. Taking semantic web technology as its backbone, such an AAL system is able to aggregate information from different sources, solve the semantic gap between different data sources, and perform adaptive and personalized carepath management based on the ambient environment.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2019

Trading off Complexity for Expressiveness in Programming Languages: Visions and Preliminary Experiences

When programming resource-scarce embedded smart devices, the designer often requires both the low-level system programming features of a language such as C and higher level capability typical of a language like Java. The choice of a particular language typically implies trade offs between conflicting design goals such as performance, costs, and overheads. The large variety of languages, virtual machines, and translators provides the designer with a dense trade off space, ranging from minimalistic to rich full-fledged approaches, but once a choice is made it is often difficult for the designer to revise it. In this work we propose a system of light-weighted and modular extensions as a method to flexibly reshape the target programming language as needed, adding only those application layer features that match the current design goals. In so doing complexity is made transparent, but not hidden: While the programmer can benefit of higher level constructs, the designer can deal with modular building blocks each characterized by a certain algorithmic complexity and therefore each accountable for a given share of the overhead. As a result the designer is given a finer control on the amount of resources that are consumed by the run-time executive of the chosen programming language.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2019

Flexible Development of Dependability Services: An Experience Derived from Energy Automation Systems

This paper describes a novel approach for the flexible development of dependable automation services applied to a case study taken from requirements of energy automation systems. It shows first how the use of a custom compositional recovery language can be exploited to achieve a flexible and dependable functionality in software. Then it is shown how modeling techniques based on Petri nets can be used to assess the properties that different configurations of the addressed service can achieve.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2017

Fractal social organization as a foundation to pervasive social computing services

Pervasive social computing is a promising approach that promises to empower both the individual and the whole and thus candidates itself as a foundation to the "smarter" social organizations that our new turbulent and resource-scarce worlds so urgently requires. In this contribution we first identify those that we consider as the major requirements to be fulfilled in order to realize an effective pervasive social computing infrastructure. We then conjecture that our service-oriented community and fractal social organization fulfill those requirements and therefore constitute an effective strategy to design pervasive social computing infrastructures. In order to motivate our conjecture, in this paper we discuss a model of social translucence and discuss fractal social organization as a referral service empowering a social system's parts and whole.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

Systems, Resilience, and Organization: Analogies and Points of Contact with Hierarchy Theory

Aim of this paper is to provide preliminary elements for discussion about the implications of the Hierarchy Theory of Evolution on the design and evolution of artificial systems and socio-technical organizations. In order to achieve this goal, a number of analogies are drawn between the System of Leibniz; the socio-technical architecture known as Fractal Social Organization; resilience and related disciplines; and Hierarchy Theory. In so doing we hope to provide elements for reflection and, hopefully, enrich the discussion on the above topics with considerations pertaining to related fields and disciplines, including computer science, management science, cybernetics, social systems, and general systems theory.

cs.OH↗

arXiv2017

Towards a Smarter organization for a Self-servicing Society

Traditional social organizations such as those for the management of healthcare are the result of designs that matched well with an operational context considerably different from the one we are experiencing today. The new context reveals all the fragility of our societies. In this paper, a platform is introduced by combining social-oriented communities and complex-event processing concepts: SELFSERV. Its aim is to complement the "old recipes" with smarter forms of social organization based on the self-service paradigm and by exploring culture-specific aspects and technological challenges.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2016

A Fault-tolerance Linguistic Structure for Distributed Applications

The structures for the expression of fault-tolerance provisions into the application software are the central topic of this dissertation. Structuring techniques provide means to control complexity, the latter being a relevant factor for the introduction of design faults. This fact and the ever increasing complexity of today's distributed software justify the need for simple, coherent, and effective structures for the expression of fault-tolerance in the application software. A first contribution of this dissertation is the definition of a base of structural attributes with which application-level fault-tolerance structures can be qualitatively assessed and compared with each other and with respect to the above mentioned need. This result is then used to provide an elaborated survey of the state-of-the-art of software fault-tolerance structures. The key contribution of this work is a novel structuring technique for the expression of the fault-tolerance design concerns in the application layer of those distributed software systems that are characterized by soft real-time requirements and with a number of processing nodes known at compile-time. The main thesis of this dissertation is that this new structuring technique is capable of exhibiting satisfactory values of the structural attributes in the domain of soft real-time, distributed and parallel applications. Following this novel approach, beside the conventional programming language addressing the functional design concerns, a special-purpose linguistic structure (the so-called "recovery language") is available to address error recovery and reconfiguration. This recovery language comes into play as soon as an error is detected by an underlying error detection layer, or when some erroneous condition is signaled by the application processes.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2016

Application-layer Fault-Tolerance Protocols

The central topic of this book is application-level fault-tolerance, that is the methods, architectures, and tools that allow to express a fault-tolerant system in the application software of our computers. Application-level fault-tolerance is a sub-class of software fault-tolerance that focuses on the problems of expressing the problems and solutions of fault-tolerance in the top layer of the hierarchy of virtual machines that constitutes our computers. This book shows that application-level fault-tolerance is a key ingredient to craft truly dependable computer systems--other approaches, such as hardware fault-tolerance, operating system fault-tolerance, or fault-tolerant middleware, are also important ingredients to achieve resiliency, but they are not enough. Failing to address the application layer means leaving a backdoor open to problems such as design faults, interaction faults, or malicious attacks, whose consequences on the quality of service could be as unfortunate as, e.g., a physical fault affecting the system platform. In other words, in most cases it is simply not possible to achieve complete coverage against a given set of faults or erroneous conditions without embedding fault-tolerance provisions also in the application layer.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2016

A few reflections on the quality of emergence in complex collective systems

A number of elements towards a classification of the quality of emergence in emergent collective systems are provided. By using those elements, several classes of emergent systems are exemplified, ranging from simple aggregations of simple parts up to complex organizations of complex collective systems. In so doing, the factors likely to play a a significant role in the persistence of emergence and its opposite are highlighted. From this, new elements for discussion are identified also considering elements from the System of Leibniz.

cs.OH↗

arXiv2016

Software Assumptions Failure Tolerance: Role, Strategies, and Visions

At our behest or otherwise, while our software is being executed, a huge variety of design assumptions is continuously matched with the truth of the current condition. While standards and tools exist to express and verify some of these assumptions, in practice most of them end up being either sifted off or hidden between the lines of our codes. Across the system layers, a complex and at times obscure web of assumptions determines the quality of the match of our software with its deployment platforms and run-time environments. Our position is that it becomes increasingly important being able to design software systems with architectural and structuring techniques that allow software to be decomposed to reduce its complexity, but without hiding in the process vital hypotheses and assumptions. In this paper we discuss this problem, introduce three potentially dangerous consequences of its denial, and propose three strategies to facilitate their treatment. Finally we propose our vision towards a new holistic approach to software development to overcome the shortcomings offered by fragmented views to the problem of assumption failures.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2016

The Voting Farm: A Distributed Class for Software Voting

This document describes a class of C functions implementing a distributed software voting mechanism for EPX or similar message passing multi-threaded environments. Such a tool may be used for example, to set up a restoring organ, i.e., an NMR (i.e., N-module redundant) system with N voters. In order to describe the tool we start defining its basic building block, the voter. A voter is defined as a software module connected to one user module and to a farm of fellow voters arranged into a clique. By means of the functions in the class the user module is able: to create a static "picture" of the voting farm, needed for the set up of the clique; to instantiate the local voter; to send input or control messages to that voter. No interlocutor is needed other than the local voter. The other user modules are supposed to create coherent pictures and instances of voters on other nodes of the machine and to manage consistently the task of their local intermediary. All technicalities concerning the set up of the clique and the exchange of messages between the voters are completely transparent to the user module. In the following the basic functionalities of the VotingFarm class will be discussed, namely how to set up a "passive farm", or a non-alive topological representation of a yet-to-be-activated voting farm; how to initiate the voting farm; how to control the farm.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2016

A Design Tool to Reason about Ambient Assisted Living Systems

This paper proposes a design tool to investigate the properties and emergent behaviours of a special class of Ambient Assisted Living systems, namely mutual assistance communities where the dwellers contribute to each other's well being. Purpose of our system is to understand how mutual assistance communities work, what consequences a design decision could ultimately bring about, and how to construct care communities providing timely and cost-effective service for elderly and disabled people. We prove that mutual assistance between dwellers can provide care in time, and decrease the requirement for professional medical service. The simulation results show that with the existing rules most of the requirements for help can be solved or promptly initiated inside the community before their members resort to external professionals.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2016

An Algorithm for Tolerating Crash Failures in Distributed Systems

In the framework of the ESPRIT project 28620 "TIRAN" (tailorable fault tolerance frameworks for embedded applications), a toolset of error detection, isolation, and recovery components is being designed to serve as a basic means for orchestrating application-level fault tolerance. These tools will be used either as stand-alone components or as the peripheral components of a distributed application, that we call 'the backbone". The backbone is to run in the background of the user application. Its objectives include (1) gathering and maintaining error detection information produced by TIRAN components like watchdog timers, trap handlers, or by external detection services working at kernel or driver level, and (2) using this information at error recovery time. In particular, those TIRAN tools related to error detection and fault masking will forward their deductions to the backbone that, in turn, will make use of this information to orchestrate error recovery, requesting recovery and reconfiguration actions to those tools related to error isolation and recovery. Clearly a key point in this approach is guaranteeing that the backbone itself tolerates internal and external faults. In this article we describe one of the means that are used within the TIRAN backbone to fulfill this goal: a distributed algorithm for tolerating crash failures triggered by faults affecting at most all but one of the components of the backbone or at most all but one of the nodes of the system. We call this the algorithm of mutual suspicion.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2016

An Application-Level Dependable Technique for Farmer-Worker Parallel Programs

An application-level technique is described for farmer-worker parallel applications which allows a worker to be added or removed from the computing farm at any moment of the run time without affecting the overall outcome of the computation. The technique is based on uncoupling the farmer from the workers by means of a separate module which asynchronously feeds these latter with new "units of work" on an on-demand basis, and on a special feeding strategy based on bookkeeping the status of each work-unit. An augmentation of the LINDA model is finally proposed to exploit the bookkeeping algorithm for tuple management.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2015

On environments as systemic exoskeletons: Crosscutting optimizers and antifragility enablers

Classic approaches to General Systems Theory often adopt an individual perspective and a limited number of systemic classes. As a result, those classes include a wide number and variety of systems that result equivalent to each other. This paper introduces a different approach: First, systems belonging to a same class are further differentiated according to five major general characteristics. This introduces a "horizontal dimension" to system classification. A second component of our approach considers systems as nested compositional hierarchies of other sub-systems. The resulting "vertical dimension" further specializes the systemic classes and makes it easier to assess similarities and differences regarding properties such as resilience, performance, and quality-of-experience. Our approach is exemplified by considering a telemonitoring system designed in the framework of Flemish project "Little Sister". We show how our approach makes it possible to design intelligent environments able to closely follow a system's horizontal and vertical organization and to artificially augment its features by serving as crosscutting optimizers and as enablers of antifragile behaviors.

cs.OH↗

arXiv2015

Tapping Into the Wells of Social Energy: A Case Study Based on Falls Identification

Are purely technological solutions the best answer we can get to the shortcomings our organizations are often experiencing today? The results we gathered in this work lead us to giving a negative answer to such question. Science and technology are powerful boosters, though when they are applied to the "local, static organization of an obsolete yesterday" they fail to translate in the solutions we need to our problems. Our stance here is that those boosters should be applied to novel, distributed, and dynamic models able to allow us to escape from the local minima our societies are currently locked in. One such model is simulated in this paper to demonstrate how it may be possible to tap into the vast basins of social energy of our human societies to realize ubiquitous computing sociotechnical services for the identification and timely response to falls.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2015

A framework for adaptive real-time applications: the declarative real-time OSGi component model

Nowadays, more and more applications require OSGi to have some form of real-time support, which is currently very limited. The resulting closed-system solutions lack of a standard management scheme which forbids standard, system-wide policies for real-time system's deployment, adaptation, and reconfiguration. In order to tackle this problem, this paper proposes a declarative real-time component model. In this model, the distinguishing real-time contract of each component is declaratively described, and a general component real-time management interface is designed. They are used to maintain an accurate view of existing real-time components' promised contracts. A real-time component runtime service is designed to control the whole lifecycle of the components. By using global information and general control interface, it can adjust the system continue to operate without impairing the deployed components' real-time contracts in the face of run-time changes. This system allows itself to be easily extended with other constraint resolving policies to fit different context. The prototype has been tested into a simulated control system. The result shows this framework can provide good real time performance while still provides real-time component dynamicity support as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive solution providing explicit real-time support from design to execution in OSGi framework.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2015

Promises and Challenges of Ambient Assisted Living Systems

The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly, which becomes a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a new approach which promises to address the needs from elderly people. Ambient Intelligence technologies are widely developed in this domain aiming to construct safe environments around assisted peoples and help them maintain independent living. However, there are still many fundamental issues in AAL that remain open. Most of the current efforts still do not fully express the power of human being, and the importance of social connections and social activities is less noticed. Our conjecture is that such features are fundamental prerequisites towards truly effective AAL services. This paper reviews the current status of researches on AAL, discusses the promises and possible advantages of AAL, and also indicates the challenges we must meet in order to develop practical and efficient AAL systems for elderly people. In this paper, we also propose an approach to construct effective home-care system for the elderly people.

cs.CY↗