Università della Svizzera italiana

The antibody response to Plasmodium falciparum : cues for vaccine design and the discovery of receptor-based antibodies

Tan, Joshua ; Piccoli, Luca ; Lanzavecchia, Antonio

In: Annual Review of Immunology

P. falciparum remains a serious public health problem and a continuous challenge for the immune system due to the complexity and diversity of the pathogen. Recent advances from several laboratories in the characterization of the antibody response to the parasite have led to the identification of critical targets for protection and revealed a new mechanism of diversification based on the...

Università della Svizzera italiana

FJProf : profiling fork/join applications on the Java virtual machine

Rosales, Eduardo ; Rosà, Andrea ; Binder, Walter

An efficient fork/join application should maximize parallelism while minimizing overheads, and maximize locality while minimizing contention. However, there is no unique optimal implementation that best resolves such tradeoffs and failing in balancing them may lead to fork/join applications suffering from several issues (e.g., suboptimal forking, load imbalance, excessive synchronization),...

Università della Svizzera italiana

The relationship between costs and quality in nonprofit nursing homes

Di Giorgio, Laura ; Filippini, Massimo ; Masiero, Giuliano

We investigate the relationship between costs and quality in nonprofit nursing homes, a key issue in the present context of cost containment measures. In accordance with the economic theory of production, we estimate a three-inputs total cost function for nursing home services using data from 45 nursing homes in Switzerland between 2006 and 2010. Quality is measured by means of clinical...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Empirical validation of CodeCity : a controlled experiment

Wettel, Richard ; Lanza, Michele ; Robbes, Romain

We describe an empirical evaluation of a visualization approach based on a 3D city metaphor, implemented in a tool called CodeCity. We designed the controlled experiment based on a set of lessons extracted from the current body of research and perfected it during a preliminary pilot phase. We then conducted the experiment in four locations across three countries over a period of four months,...

Università della Svizzera italiana

P-Store : genuine partial replication in wide area networks

Schiper, Nicolas ; Sutra, Pierre ; Pedone, Fernando

Partial replication is a way to increase the scalability of replicated systems since updates only need to be applied to a subset of the system’s sites, thus allowing replicas to handle independent parts of the workload in parallel. In this paper, we propose P-Store, a partial database replication protocol for wide area networks. In P-Store, each transaction T optimistically executes on one...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Polynomial reproduction for univariate subdivision schemes of any arity

Conti, Costanza ; Hormann, Kai

In this paper we study the ability of convergent subdivision schemes to reproduce polynomials in the sense that for initial data, which is sampled from some polynomial function, the scheme yields the same polynomial in the limit. This property is desirable because the reproduction of polynomials up to some degree d implies that a scheme has approximation order d + 1. We first show that any...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Concept-based semantic annotation, indexing and retrieval of office-like document units

Nešic, Saša ; Jazayeri, Mehdi ; Crestani, Fabio ; Gaševic, Dragan

We present an ontology-driven approach to semantic annotation, indexing and retrieval of document units. This approach is based on a novel semantic document model (SDM) that we developed to make office-like document units be uniquely identified, semantically annotated with concepts from annotation ontologies and linkable across document boundaries. In the semantic annotation model that we...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Automated performance assessment for service-oriented middleware

Bianculli, Domenico ; Binder, Walter ; Drago, Mauro Luigi

Middleware for Web service compositions, such as BPEL engines, provides the execution environment for services as well as additional functionalities, such as monitoring and self-tuning. Given its role in service provisioning, it is very important to assess the performance of middleware in the context of a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). This paper presents SOABench, a framework for the...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Practical high-throughput content-based routing using unicast state and probabilistic encodings

Carzaniga, Antonio ; Hall, Cyrus ; Toffetti Carughi, Giovanni ; Wolf, Alexander L.

We address the problem that existing publish/subscribe messaging systems, including such commonly used ones as Apache’s ActiveMQ and IBM’s WebSphere MQ, exhibit degraded end-to-end throughput performance in a wide-area network setting. We contend that the cause of this problem is the lack of an appropriate routing protocol. Building on the idea of a content-based network, we introduce a...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Defining model transformations for property templates

Wuttke, Jochen

We defined the notion of property templates after we observed that many system failures can be clustered according to their symptoms, and the design constraints these failures violate [PW09]. In this technical report we document the semantics of property templates, and how we implemented these semantics in AspectJ code templates that support assertion generation for Java programs.