Luca Spalazzi

Università Politecnica delle Marche | Università degli Studi di Ancona · Department of Information Engineering (DII)

The IoT paradigm revolves around a tight interaction between the IT side (i.e., the thing and the software therein) and the human counterpart. From a security standpoint, both these aspects should be taken into consideration when building up reliable and effective security solutions. We argue that traditional static approaches to securing IoT fail...

The database-centric approach for industrial applications in the fourth industrial revolution has been proposed as a viable possibility in view of new trends towards distributed, autonomic, and intelligent control systems. In particular, with the RMAS architecture and its compliance to the new directions envisioned by the IEC 61499 standard, a suit...

Nowadays, the volume of the multimedia heterogeneous evidence presented for digital forensic analysis has significantly increased, thus requiring the application of big data technologies, cloud-based forensics services, as well as Machine Learning (ML) techniques. In digital forensics domain, ML algorithms have been applied for cybercrime investiga...

Several families of malware are based on the need to establish a connection with a Command and Control (C\&C) server. In addition, to avoid detection, these servers "hide" behind domain names that are periodically changed according to a specific Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA). Hence, the malware that has infected a particular host uses the same...

BPMN choreography is a modeling language capable to describe scenarios where several independent participants have to collaborate in a climate of opposing interests and therefore are forced to trust each other. For this reason, in many contexts, a strong need for transparency, responsibility, and choreography compliance arise by the various partici...

Automatic emotion recognition has powerful opportunities in the clinical field, but several critical aspects are still open, such as heterogeneity of methodologies or technologies tested mainly on healthy people. This systematic review aims to survey automatic emotion recognition systems applied in real clinical contexts, to deeply analyse clinical...

Botnets are one of the major cyber infections used in several criminal activities. In most botnets, a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) is used by bots to make DNS queries aimed at establishing the connection with the Command and Control (C&C) server. The identification of such queries by monitoring the network DNS traffic is then crucial for bot d...

Gait dysfunctions are pathognomonic, progressive and, generally, continuous in Parkinson’s Disease (PD). The Freezing of Gait (FoG) is an episodic gait disorder involving up to 70% of people with PD, within 10 years of clinical onset, and associated with an increased risk for falls and immobility, which in turn, contributes to greater disability. A...

Many Java programs encode temporal behaviors in their source code, typically mixing three features provided by the Java language: (1) pausing the execution for a limited amount of time, (2) waiting for an event that has to occur before a deadline expires, and (3) comparing timestamps. In this work, we show how to exploit modern SMT solvers together...

Parameterized model checking is a formal verification technique for verifying that some specifications hold in systems consisting of many similar cooperating but indistinguishable processes. The problem is known to be undecidable in general, even when restricted to reachability properties. To overcome this limitation, several techniques have been e...

In the last decades, Computer Engineering has shown an impressive development and has become a pervasive protagonist in daily life and scientific research. Databases and Artificial Intelligence represent two of the major players in this development. Today, they are quickly converging towards a new, much more sophisticated and inclusive, paradigm, n...

Automated program repair has the potential to reduce the developers' effort to fix errors in their code. In particular, modern programming languages, such as Java, C, and C\#, represent time as integer variables that suffer from integer overflow, introducing subtle errors that are hard to discover and repair. Recent researches on automated program...

We consider a blockchain-based protocol for the certification of academic credentials named Blockcerts, which is currently used worldwide for validating digital certificates of competence compliant with the Open Badges standard. We study the certification steps that are performed by the Blockcerts protocol to validate a certificate, and find that t...

Mobile and pervasive computing enabled a new realm of possibilities into the indoor positioning domain. Although many candidate technologies have been proposed, no one can still adapt to every use case. A case centered design and the implementation of the solution within the specific domain is the current research trend. With the rise of Bluetooth...

Background and aims. Freezing of Gait (FOG) is a distressing gait disorder frequently related to Parkinson’s disease (PD) progression and severe disability. Detecting and quantifying FOG, in a clinical setting, is difficult given its episodic nature; hence, reliable tools are warranted for FOG monitoring in the daily life. A number of wearable sens...

Modern programming languages, such as Java, represent time as integer variables, called timestamps. Timestamps allow developers to tacitly model incorrect time values resulting in a program failure because any negative value or every positive value is not necessarily a valid time representation. Current approaches to automatically detect errors in...

Recent developments in cloud architectures have originated new models of online storage clouds based on data dispersal algorithms. According to these algorithms the data is divided into several slices that are distributed among remote and independent storage nodes. Ensuring confidentiality in this context is crucial: only legitimate users should ac...

Background and objectives The use of smartphones can greatly help for gait parameters estimation during daily living, but its accuracy needs a deeper evaluation against a gold standard. The objective of the paper is a step-by-step assessment of smartphone performance in heel strike, step count, step period, and step length estimation. The influence...

Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms are a vital part of mission-critical distributed systems. In principle, automatic verification can be used to ensure the absence of bugs in such algorithms. In practice however, model checking tools will only establish the correctness of distributed algorithms if message passing is encoded efficiently. In this...

Recent developments in cloud storage architectures have originated new models of online storage as cooperative storage systems and interconnected clouds. Such distributed environments involve many organizations, thus ensuring confidentiality becomes crucial: only legitimate clients should recover the information they distribute among storage nodes....

The majority of Italian historical city centres is placed in earthquake prone regions. Their complex urban fabrics, ancient buildings heritage and high population densities imply a high importance of man-environment interactions while facing with risk reduction strategies: a “behavioural design” approach should be introduced. Historical buildings a...

Nowadays, new computing paradigms are emerging from the interlinked networks of sensors, actuators, and processing devices: Cloud of Things and Fog Computing. As a consequence of this trend, there is a strong need for virtualization solutions on embedded systems. In relation to this, two fundamental questions arise: (1) Are the current hardware tec...

One of the most influencing elements in inhabitants’ earthquake safety definition is represented by the interactions between people and post-event environment in urban scenarios. Understanding and simulating rules for pedestrians’ motion in earthquake evacuation could be useful to inquire the risk assessment introducing the ‘‘human’’ factor influen...

Smartphones are particularly suitable for health related applications during daily living, given their diffusion into society and computational capabilities. We proposed a smartphone application for real-time step length estimation, using inverted pendulum model. We tested the proposed solution on 5 healthy subjects, comparing the smartphone estima...

Step length (SL) is a fundamental parameter for the characterization of normal and pathologic gait. In particular, Freezing of Gait (FOG) in Parkinson’s Disease is a motor disorder associated with a markedly reduction of SL, hence this parameter has the potential to be used for FOG detection and monitoring. In this paper, we present a non-obtrusive...

High-performance computing (HPC) is now present in many spheres and domains of modern society. The special issue of Concurrency Computation contains research papers addressing the state-of-the-art in HPC and simulation and reflects some of the trends reported earlier. P. Trunfio deals with a peer-to-peer file-sharing model that takes into account e...

Step Length (SL) is an essential parameter in the healthcare field to monitor the gait of patients affected by motor disorders such as Freezing of Gait (FoG), a motor block that provokes an interruption of the normal gait cycle. As a consequence spatio-temporal parameters of gait, in particular SL, are strongly altered before and during a FoG event...

The earthquake risk assessment approach actually ignores human behaviors during earthquake. Nevertheless, simulating pedestrians’ motion could be useful to introduce “human” interactions with post-earthquake scenarios. This work proposes an agent-based model for evacuation simulation based on the analysis of videotapes concerning real events. Modif...

In this work we extend the Emerson and Kahlon’s cutoff theorems for process skeletons with conjunctive guards to Parameterized Networks of Timed Automata, i.e. systems obtained by an apriori unknown number of Timed Automata instantiated from a finite set U1,…,Un of Timed Automata templates. In this way we aim at giving a tool to universally verify...

Industrial real-time systems are widely used in various application domains. In these fields, flexibility and cost are the two most important metrics to measure, from the non-functional point of view, the quality of a real-time system. To meet the expectations of the industry, research on real-time systems is focusing on two main directions: virtua...

In this work we extend the Emerson and Kahlon's cutoff theorems for process skeletons with conjunctive guards to Parameterized Networks of Timed Automata, i.e. systems obtained by an \emph{apriori} unknown number of Timed Automata instantiated from a finite set $U_1, \dots, U_n$ of Timed Automata templates. In this way we aim at giving a tool to un...

The progressive population aging provokes an increase of importance in safety aspects for the elderly and the people with disabilities that are housed in care homes and hospitals. Current regulations denote an inadequate approach to safety problems connected to possible evacuation due to events like earthquakes, floods, fires. The law approach impl...

Cloud federation can be described through the concept of collaboration, where each organization has its own cloud(s) that deals with a different and independent domain but needs to work together with other organizations in order to fulfill a specific shared objective. According to this perspective, the federation is a collection of interacting clou...

Recent years have seen the fast-diffusion of internet-connected devices and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) research and application area. Research works are dealing with technologies that enable the so-called things to communicate among them and with users in order to provide data and/or accomplish tasks. This scenario is posing several c...

The research presented herein aims at managing emergencies by means of a Federated Cloud of Things wherein cloud resources such as computing, storage and network resources, physical objects like sensors and actuators, as well as virtual object resulting from the processing of user-generated data are connected together in order to provide a virtual...

Semantic technologies can play a key role in representing, storing, interconnecting, searching, and organizing information generated/consumed by things. In order to evaluate its feasibility, this paper presents a set of reasoning mechanisms based on an IoT ontology to be applied in an emergency management scenario. The scenario presented in this pa...

Recent developments in high performance computing and security are discussed in the Special Issue of Future Generation Computer System. High-performance computing is a research area dealing with the solution of computationally intensive problems by means of parallel architectures and parallel programming. Parallel programming is an extensive resear...

Earthquake risk assessment at urban scale is generally based on the definition of indices concerning site hazard, buildings vulnerability and exposition, but does not consider human behavioural aspects during both earthquake and first post-event phases. Our work proposes a model for earthquake evacuation simulation, which is based on the analysis o...

This paper addresses adult lifelong learners, i.e., persons interested in learning or compelled to learn during their working life but not able to, or not interested in participating in formal learning. These learners are motivated and self-aware enough to self-direct their learning, are presumed to be novices with respect to the needed knowledge a...

Cloud Computing is a paradigm that applies a service model on infrastructures, platforms and software. In the last few years, this new idea has been showing its potentials and how, in the long run, it will affect Information Technology and the act of interfacing to computation and storage. This article introduces the FCFA project, a framework for a...

Traditional software development processes are designed to deal with the construction of new software systems. We believe the software development methodologies should include from the beginning the possibility of a re-engineering phase. With our work we identify the main characteristics that make software (re)engineering tools useful and usable De...

Model checking is a formal verification method widely accepted in the web service world because of its capability to reason about service behavior at process level. It has been used as a basic tool in several scenarios such as service selection, service validation, and service composition. The importance of semantics is also widely recognized. Inde...

Nowadays web services have become one of the main technologies in the development of web applications. According to that providers now offer an increasing number of capabilities as web services. Furthermore, in the recent years, such deployment trend has seen the success of REST architecture and, consequently, the proliferation of RESTful web servi...

The aim of this work was to show how the developed tools facilitate the using of our framework for interenterprise collaboration at the business process level. Indeed, while both requester and provider procedures could be considered complex and annoying tasks, the use of both DREAMs4SPEC and DREAMs4BPEL can make easy and natural these activities. I...

Business process implementation can be fastened by identifying component services that can be used to implement one or more process tasks and by selecting them from a repository of already implemented services. In this paper, we propose an on-going work for the design of an iterative procedure to address this issue, by combining the two macro-phase...

Model checking is a formal verification method widely accepted in the web service world because of its capability to reason about service behaviors, at their process-level. It has been used as basic tool in several scenarios as service selection, service validation, and service composition. Furthermore, it has been widely applied to problems of sec...

We introduce Dynamic Networks of Timed Automata, an extension of (Networks of) Timed Automata useful for specifying concurrently executing timed-processes. The main difference with Timed Automata is that we allow the instantiation at run-time of multiple copies of automata. In this paper we also show an industrial case study where a system for moni...

In this chapter, we propose a new approach to the discovery, the selection and the automated composition of distributed processes in a pervasive computing environment, described as semantic web services through a new semantic annotation. In our approach, we map a process in a pervasive computing environment into a state transition system (STS) and...

This work presents an anomaly-based system for parental control. This approach combined with traditional parental control systems can produce a number of false positives and false negatives less than traditional solutions. The proposed system is also able to update the anomaly model according to feedback received by parents. Finally, in our system...

This work presents an IPS for web applications that combines anomaly detection, misuse detection, and a prevention module. This approach provides us a solution that produce a number of false positives and false negatives less than traditional solutions. The proposed system is also able to update the misuse and anomaly model according to feedback re...

We developed XAL, a framework that, in our opinion, allows to build Web-oriented applications and services in a more productive way. The core of the framework is a programming language based upon timed-automata. We believe this formalism reflects the nature of many web-oriented applications, each page being a state, and each link being a transition...

Malicious attacks on computer systems everyday propose many new challenges and, hence research on providing security in computing receives significant attention continuously. Some major challenges include unknown attack analysis, detection, and response. Another challenge is related to performances of such security tools. Indeed, new attacks requir...