Increasing costs of diagnostic healthcare have necessitated the development of hardware independent non-invasive Point of Care (POC) systems. Although anemia prevalence rates in global populations vary between 10% and 60% in various demographic groups, smart monitoring systems have not yet been developed for screening and tracking anemia-like pallor. In this work, we present two cloud platform-...

In Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), virtual machines (VMs) use virtual hard disks (VHDs) provided by a remote storage service via the network. Due to separation of VMs and their VHDs, a new type of failure, called VHD failure, which may be caused by various components in the IaaS stack, becomes the dominating factor that reduces VM availability. The current state-of-the-art approaches fall s...

Cloud-native applications are intentionally designed for the cloud in order to leverage cloud platform features like horizontal scaling and elasticity – benefits coming along with cloud platforms. In addition to classical (and very often static) multi-tier deployment scenarios, cloud-native applications are typically operated on much more complex but elastic infrastructures. Furthermore, there ...

When SQL Azure was released in August 2009, it was the first database service of its kind along multiple axes, compared to other Cloud services: shared nothing architecture and log-based replication; support for full ACID properties; providing consistency and high availability; and by offering near 100% compatibility with on-premise SQL Server delivered a familiar programming model at cloud sca...

Antimicrobial photodynamic inactivation (APDI) using phenothiazinium dyes is mediated by reactive oxygen species consisting of a combination of singlet oxygen (quenched by azide), hydroxyl radicals and other reactive oxygen species. We recently showed that addition of sodium azide paradoxically potentiated APDI of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria using methylene blue as the photosensiti...

Electronic Health (e-Health) technology has brought the world with significant transformation from traditional paper-based medical practice to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based systems for automatic management (storage, processing, and archiving) of information. Traditionally e-Health systems have been designed to operate within stovepipes on dedicated networks, physical co...

Karyotypes were studied in the hooded and carrion crows, their naturally occurred hybrids, the jungle crow, the azure-winged magpie (2n = 80 in all aforementioned birds), and the magpie (2n = 82). Corvine birds of Primorskii Krai were karyotyped for the first time. In addition to the similarity in the diploid chromosome sets, corvine birds were shown to have a similar structure of karyotype: in...

Public cloud providers who support a Database-as-a-Service offering must efficiently allocate computing resources to each of their customers in order to reduce the total number of servers needed without incurring SLA violations. For example, Microsoft serves more than one million database customers on its Azure SQL Database platform. In order to avoid unnecesssary expense and stay competitive i...