Antonino Mazzeo

The Talking Museum Project

Abstract In this paper, we present an ongoing project, named Talking Museum and developed within DATABENC - a high technology district for Cultural Heritage management. The project exploits the Internet of Things technologies in order to make objects of a museum exhibition able to “talk” during users’ visit and capable of automatically telling their story using multimedia facilities. In particular, we have deployed in the museum a particular Wireless Sensor Network that, using Bluetooth technology, is able to sense the surrounding area for detecting user devices’ presence. Once a device has been detected, the related MAC address is retrieved and a multimedia story of the closest museum objects is delivered to the related user. Eventually, proper multimedia recommendation techniques drive users towards other objects of possible interest to facilitate and make more stimulating the visit. As case of study, we show an example of Talking museum as a smart guide of sculptures’ art exhibition within the Maschio Angioino castle, in Naples (Italy).

Exploiting Cloud Technologies and Context Information for Recommending Touristic Paths

In the developing of applications for touristic paths planning, contextaware recommendation services are gaining more and more relevance. Recommender applications can accommodate location’s dependent information with user’s needs in a mobile environment, related to the touristic domain.

A SLA evaluation methodology in Service Oriented Architectures

Cooperative services in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) inter act and delegate jobs to each other; when they have to respect a Service Level Agreement (SLA) they need to explicitly manage it amongst each other. SLAs and, above all, security-SLAs, are usually expressed in ambiguous ways and this implies that they need to be manually evaluated both in a mutual agreement to ”qualify a service” and in the monitoring process. Due to this approach, usually, service composition cannot be dynamically performed. In this paper we introduce a methodology which helps in security SLA automatic evaluation and comparison. The methodology founds on the adoption of policies both for service behav ior and SLA description and on the definition of a metric function for evaluation and comparison of policies. We will illustrate the applicability of the proposed methodology in different contexts of great interest for e-government projects.

Carry-save Montgomery modular exponentiation on reconfigurable hardware

In this paper we present a hardware implementation of the RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography. Basically, the RSA algorithm entails a modular exponentiation operation on large integers, which is considerably time-consuming to implement. To this end, we adopted a novel algorithm combining the Montgomerys technique and the carry-save representation of numbers. A highly modular, bit-slice based architecture has been designed for executing the algorithm in hardware. We also propose an FPGA-based implementation of the architecture developed. The characteristics of the algorithm, the regularity of the architecture, and the data-flow aware placement of the FPGA resources resulted in a considerable performance improvement, as compared to other implementations presented in the literature.

FPGA-Based Implementation of a Serial RSA Processor

In this paper we present an hardware implementation of the RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography. The RSA algorithm consists in the computation of modular exponentials on large integers, that can be reduced to repeated modular multiplications. We present a serial implementation of RSA, which is based upon an optimized version of the RSA algorithm originally proposed by P.L. Montgomery (1985). The proposed architecture is innovative, and it widely exploits specific capabilities of Xilinx programmable devices. As compared to other solutions in the literature, the proposed implementation of the RSA processor has smaller area occupation and comparable performance. The final performance level is a function of the serialization factor We provide a thorough discussion of design tradeoffs, in terms of area requirements vs performance, for different values of the key length and of the serialization factor.

A Framework for Semantic Interoperability over the Cloud

Semantic Interoperability is one of the most important open challenges in the Knowledge Management field. In this work, we propose a framework for making easier information exchanging operations among heterogeneous information sources, over the Cloud. Exploiting the Semantic Web technologies, the framework has the objective of allowing semantic interoperability among distributed software agents preserving not only semantics of transmitted messages, but also the subjectivity of agents world vision in the communication process. The proposed system, in fact, will help users in the digital documents exchanging activities by extracting the related relevant information and coding their informative contents in a shape capable of preserving the original semantics, also in the case of communications agents using different or incompatible vocabularies. The framework is a an evolution of semantic interoperable methodologies towards cloud computer technologies, thus guaranteeing several advantages in terms of usability, scalability and fault tolerance. In particular, we implemented a prototype that provides interoperability functionalities in the E-Health domain, managing information coming from heterogeneous sources.

A policy-based methodology for security evaluation: A Security Metric for Public Key Infrastructures

The security of complex infrastructures depends on many technical and organizational issues that need to be properly addressed by a security policy. For purpose of our discussion, we define a security policy as a document that states what is and what is not allowed in a system during normal operation; it consists of a set of rules that could be expressed in formal, semi-formal or very informal language. In many contexts, a system can be considered secure and trustworthy if the policy enforced by its security administrator is trustworthy too; from this standpoint it is possible to evaluate the system security by evaluating its policy. In this paper we present a policy-based methodology to formalize and compare policies, and a Security Metric to evaluate the security level that a system is able to grant. All the steps of the methodology will be illustrated with an operative approach, by directly applying it to a real case study: the semi-automated Cross Certification among Public Key Infrastructures.

Heterogeneous system performance prediction and analysis using PS

PS (PVM simulator), is a simulator of PVM programs which lets users conduct performance prediction and analysis of distributed applications executed in heterogeneous and network computing environments. The article describes the tool and its development environment. As a prediction tool, the PS simulator lets developers obtain extrapolated performance data by estimating the behavior that a parallel application would attain on different types of architectures from traces collected on a workstation or on a scaled down distributed environment. As an analysis tool, it lets developers collect aggregate and analytical indexes related to heterogeneous system performance (such as efficiency, throughput, response time, and individual processor utilization) or traces that can be processed offline by a variety of tools for performance visualization and analysis (such as ParaGraph). It also lets users evaluate the effect of such factors as time spent in blocks of code, processor speed, network latency, and bandwidth on the overall application performance.

Solution Workflows for Model-Based Analysis of Complex Systems

The development and analysis of increasingly complex systems require the intensive use of models and of sophisticated approaches to systems modeling. This paper focuses on workflows supporting the solution of complex, composed, formal models used to study and/or develop real-world systems. The workflows we deal with orchestrate multiple distributed tools and applications in order to provide the user with a powerful, composed solution environment. The aim is to automate and reproduce analysis and simulation tasks starting from a high level, graph-based description of the model to be solved. This paper thus introduces solution workflows and presents the Solution Process Definition Language (SPDL) for the specification of solution workflows processes. One of the key elements of SPDL is its formal semantics, which allow for unambiguous specification of its constructs and validation of the workflows. A workflow pattern analysis of SPDL is also provided. SPDL and its execution environment, the OsMoSys framework, are then applied to a homeland security scenario. The OsMoSys framework and the SPDL language provide a practical contribution to the applicability of model engineering techniques by enabling the semiautomatic solution of complex models.

An FPGA-Based Smart Classifier for Decision Support Systems

In recent years, the accuracy and performance of decision support systems have become a bottleneck in many monitoring applications. As for the accuracy, different classification algorithms are available but the overall performance are related to the specific software implementation. In this paper we propose a novel hardware implementation to fasten a decision tree classifier. We also present the evaluation of our architecture by putting in evidence the positive performance results obtained with the proposed implementation.