Marjan Druzovec

Measuring the Performance of Real-Time Systems

So far, performance measures for real time systems did not receive much attention. An assessment of the few existing benchmarking methods for real time systems will reveal that they are highly inappropriate. Taking a closer look into the fundamental issues of real time systems it will become clear, that for hard real time systems qualitative characteristics are much more important than quantitative measures. The major qualitative performance criteria are compiled. Systems fulfiling the qualitative aspects may then be compared on the basis of costs.

Interdisciplinary projects — Cooperation of students of different study programs

Projects and internships in which students are involved are usually a part of their study programs and obligatory and are on that base mostly one field oriented. Even if interdisciplinary knowledge is expected, more or less, those projects cover only one course. We are aware, that real life project teams are mostly interdisciplinary, so we are trying to organise the work in similar spirit. In such a case a lot of organisational work and agreements between teachers from different disciplines and courses on preparation of projects (distribution and evaluation of workload that is demand by each discipline or course) is required. More interdisciplinary are projects that are not part of study programs and students are cooperating in them for other reasons and motivations. In our contribution we will present two case studies from the University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Institute of Media Communication, Institute of Informatics and Institute of Computer Science that cover nonobligatory projects, as well as some experiences from obligatory projects will be introduced. Stress will be on non-obligatory projects.

Internationalization as a part of the database development

Nowadays development and research projects increasingly extend over boundaries set by a single company, research organisation or country. To compete successfully in this global information technology market, the internationalization of software, data and Web contents for disparate users is essential. Software internationalisation is the process of developing software products that are not dependent on specific local or cultural attributes or practise. It is becoming an increasingly important topic while software, data and Web contents gets integrated into the fabric of society and cultures worldwide. Things like date, time, currency symbols, and delimiters are handled seamlessly. More open are topics like quality assurance, standards and data modelling. Nevertheless to ensure the progress and up to date solutions, integration of internationalization contents in development of database are expected and have to be supported. Education of internationalization and localization-aware computer science professionals is so playing the key role. Experts have to cope with local cultural conventions that influence applications solutions and data modelling.

Protecting medical data for analyses

In the last few decades, medical data has mainly been a by-product of daily operations. In general, not much has been used for analytical purposes, other than reporting and simple statistics. Just recently, it has become clear that data are important assets if used for analyses that help decision-making. To be able to analyse the data, one needs to have full access to the relevant sources. This may contradict one of the paramount requirements - to have secure, private data - especially if the data analyst is outsourced and not directly affiliated with the data owner, as is often the case in medical environments. In this paper, we present data analyses from the data protection point of view. We propose a solution for outsourced model-based data analyses. A formal framework for protecting the data that leaves the organizations boundary, based on the relational data models abstract data type, is presented. The data and the data structure are modified so that the process of data analysis can still take place and the results can still be obtained, but the data content itself is hard to reveal. Once the data analysis results are returned, the inverse process discloses the meaning of the model to the data owners.

Diagnostics and a qualitative model

First generation expert systems were using shallow knowledge based on heuristic information to solve a diagnostic problem. This approach has many disadvantages, which can be avoided by using deep knowledge. Diagnostic reasoning based on deep knowledge is called model-based diagnostics. Recently, the use of qualitative modeling in relation to deep knowledge in expert systems has become increasingly important. The main purpose of our contribution is to present the model-based diagnostic approach at a formal level. The originality of the presented formalization is the concept of the diagnostic space, the characterization of the minimal diagnoses, and the measurement. The formalization serves as the theoretical background to prove our view to the design of qualitative system models and to establish the diagnostic architecture called DISY. The qualitative system model in our diagnostic approach needs not to be specially adopted for use in the diagnostic domain. The only requirement is that it must simulate the system behavior expressed by normal or abnormal functioning of its components. Proposed DISY architecture is not complex and simply takes into an account the previous diagnostic result to obtain a new one from the additional observation-measurement (medical tests or examinations) of the system.

Teaching of Information Security in the “Health Care and Nursing” Postgraduate program

Informatics plays an increasing role in the area of health care services. Not only will the patient’s satisfaction with the medical treatment depend on the cooperation and communication between the nurse and the doctor, but also on the nurse and her way of dealing with and usage of IT technology. Although having become a part of daily routines in the meantime, the question arises if nurses are aware of the importance of IT technology for their work duties. How many of the nurses will have probably ever thought about the importance and sensitivity of the data they daily use? Without doubt, computer-literacy among members of all professional groups within society has increased enormously in the last years. Nevertheless, especially the area of health care service demands some more specific knowledge and awareness by the concerned staff related to topics of possibilities, benefits, possible mistakes and theirs consequences, especially from the security point of view, including the sensitivity of the working area, as well as ethical issues. The aim of this paper is to present, the postgraduate program in general as well as the actual handling of providing lectures on information security for nurses. Furthermore, the paper will focus on (gained) experience, and the formative assessment of the postgraduate program.

Reusability and requirements engineering in intelligent systems

The area of intelligent systems is one of the most important and successful. Some definitions state that in some way, intelligent systems are a form of information system. This was successfully introduced from the research domain of artificial intelligence in information systems practice. According to some references, the hardest single part of building any system, either information, software or intelligent, is deciding what to build. No other part of conceptual work is so difficult as establishing the detailed technical requirements. The authors propose reusability to support and influence requirements engineering. Reusability is actually a very simple activity that is not even listed in most dictionaries. In the software environment, requirements, design models, algorithms, test documents and many other products of the software process can be reused. However, our approach is not concentrated on software reusability, but rather on database and intelligent systems reusability which are not so often reused, but they are the main goal of the MetaBase project (T. Welzer et al., 1998). MetaBase is an object oriented repository which provides a structure for archiving reusable database components of several applications not only medical information systems. All possible conceptual models are classified according to business domain and functional domain of their application domains. The structure of the repository allows not only storage of reusable database components of several applications but also classifying and comparing components from different applications (T. Welzer et al., 1998).

Model based diagnoses in medicine

First generation expert systems used shallow knowledge based on heuristic information to solve a diagnostic problem. This approach has many disadvantages, which can be avoided with the use of deep knowledge. Diagnostic reasoning based on deep knowledge is called model based diagnoses. Recently the use of qualitative modeling in relation to deep knowledge in expert systems has become increasingly important. Model based reasoning in our diagnostic system is performed with a simulation process of a qualitative system model. The qualitative system model need not to be specially adapted for use in a diagnostic domain. It only needs to simulate system behavior expressed by normal or abnormal functioning of its components. The proposed architecture is not complex, is very efficient and simply takes into account a previous diagnostic result to obtain a new one from additional observation measurement (medical tests or examinations) of the system.

Preparation on cultural differences for all

Erasmus is probably the most well-known European Commission (DG for Education and Culture) program to support the mobility of students, teachers and staff. There are also many others that support mobility, either worldwide or locally. The main goals of mobility for students and teachers independent of the program are learning and teaching in different cultural and lingual environments, as well as learning languages and benefiting from cross-cultural experiences and cultural differences. Quite often, neither students, teachers nor staff are as prepared for the active participation in different cultural and lingual environments as they are for domestic ones. Institutions primarily take care of the lingual readiness of students and sometimes cultural education is also included but rarely is any preparation done for teachers and staff. If the preparation is done for teachers and staff on mobility it is usually never done for those who are staying at home and working at a home institution with mobile students. The situation is also similar for non-mobile home students. Real life shows that preparing for cultural differences is needed for all of them.

Student thesis and projects - Examples of solutions for real environments

In the time of economic crises all around the world, students and graduates are looking for the possibility for employment already before graduating or even during the study. They appreciate connections to the real environment - industry and are looking for cooperation in different ways. One of possibilities are also placements in which students are involved and are usually a part of their study programs and obligatory. Those can be also a good start for further student thesis, even that in those cooperation some fright exist that can be at the end the both parties unhappy. From that point of view is the best cooperation when both parties find each other and trust each other. Interesting opportunity are also international cooperation on the base shorter or longer stay, through different mobility programs, even that students prefer to stay close to the local employers. Nevertheless, we collected through last years some experiences, that we will presented in the paper from different points of view.