Exploitation of Best Effort Distributed Computing Infrastructures (BE-DCIs) allow operators to maximize the utilization of the infrastructures, and users to access the unused resources at relatively low cost. Because providers do not guarantee that the computing resources remain available to the user during the entire execution of their applications, they offer a diminished Quality of Service (...

We consider (subclasses of) polynomial bottom-up and top-down tree series transducers over a partially ordered semiring A = (A,⊕, ,0,1, ), and we compare the classes of tree-to-tree-series and o-tree-to-tree-series transformations computed by such transducers. Our main result states the following. If, for some a ∈ A with 1 a, the semiring A is a weak a-growth semiring and either (i) the semirin...

Over the years, many private sector participation (PSP) models have been evolved for infrastructure procurement and the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model is one of the most common approaches used for the same. Private infrastructure projects under BOT arrangement have a complex risk profile and to a considerable extent, the success of any BOT project is influenced by the degree to which variou...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS To evaluate the efficacy of base of tongue (BOT) resection via transoral robotic surgery (TORS) in the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea/hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS). STUDY DESIGN Case series METHODS Between June 2010 and May 2012, BOT resection via TORS was performed on 27 patients with OSAHS. Patients were excluded from this analysis if other concomitant upper airway...

We build a chat bot with iterative content exploration that leads a user through a personalized knowledge acquisition session. The chat bot is designed as an automated customer support or product recommendation agent assisting a user in learning product features, product usability, suitability, troubleshooting and other related tasks. To control the user navigation through content, we extend th...

Botnet is widely used in cyber-attacks and becomes a serious threat to network security. Existing approaches can detect botnet effectively in certain environments, however problems still exist in using host or network detection approaches respectively, such as robustness in detection tools, difficulties in global deployment and low precision rate. To solve the above problems, a novel detection ...

The aim of this work is to investigate the effectiveness of novel human-machine interaction paradigms for eHealth applications. In particular, we propose to replace usual human-machine interaction mechanisms with an approach that leverages a chat-bot program, opportunely designed and trained in order to act and interact with patients as a human being. Moreover, we have validated the proposed in...

As text-messaging chatbots become increasingly “human”, it will be important to understand the personal interactions that users are seeking with a chatbot. What chatbot personalities are most compelling to young, urban users in India? To explore this question, we first conducted exploratory Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) studies with 14 users that simulated interactions with a hypothetical chatbot. We eval...