Orazio Tomarchio

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Catania

Microservice architecture is increasingly favored for building large-scale applications designed for deployment in distributed and resource-constrained cloud-to-edge computing environments. As a cloud-native approach, microservices are particularly powerful due to their loosely coupled, independently deployable, and scalable characteristics. These...

Unlabelled: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of neurodegenerative disorder. The prodromal phase of AD is mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The capacity to predict the transitional phase from MCI to AD represents a challenge for the scientific community. The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is useful for diagnostic, predictiv...

With the wide adoption of cloud computing across technology industries and research institutions, an ever-growing interest in cloud orchestration frameworks has emerged over the past few years. These orchestration frameworks enable the automated provisioning and decommissioning of cloud applications in a timely and efficient manner, but they offer...

Kubernetes is today the de-facto standard container orchestration platform for the lifecycle management of microservices-based applications on Cloud environments. However it is not yet ready to be adopted on node clusters distributed in the Cloud-to-Edge continuum. In particular its scheduling strategy is not suitable for the placement of modern la...

Ensuring high quality and safety of food products has become a key factor on one hand to protect and improve consumers health and, on the other one, to gain market share. For this reason, much effort in the last year has been devoted to the development of integrated and innovative Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chains management systems, w...

In the past twenty years, we have witnessed an unprecedented production of data worldwide that has generated a growing demand for computing resources and has stimulated the design of computing paradigms and software tools to efficiently and quickly obtain insights on such a Big Data. State-of-the-art parallel computing techniques such as the MapRed...

The complexity of managing cloud applications’ life-cycle increases with the widening of the cloud landscape, as new IT players gain market share. Cloud orchestration frameworks promise to handle such complexity offering user-friendly management tools that help customers to transparently deal with portability and interoperability issues, by hiding...

The growth in the number and types of cloud-based services offered to IT customers is supported by the constant entry of new actors in the market and the consolidation of disruptive technologies such as AI, Big Data and Micro-services. From the customer’s perspective, in a market landscape where the cloud offer is highly diversified due to the pres...

Advances in the communication technologies, along with the birth of new communication paradigms leveraging on the power of the social, has fostered the production of huge amounts of data. Old-fashioned computing paradigms are unfit to handle the dimensions of the data daily produced by the countless, worldwide distributed sources of information. So...

The number of both service providers operating in the cloud market and customers consuming cloud-based services is constantly increasing, proving that the cloud computing paradigm has successfully delivered its potential. Nevertheless, the unceasing growth of the cloud market is posing hard challenges on its participants. On the provider side, the...

IoT has been promoting the view of sensors as smart objects capable of sensing data from the real world and interacting with other smart entities over the Internet. Software applications built over the IoT are usually designed to work at many different layers of the network, from the very "Edge" of it, i.e., close to sensors, up to the Cloud, or an...

MapReduce is with no doubt the parallel computation paradigm which has managed to interpret and serve at best the need, expressed in any field, of running fast and accurate analyses on Big Data. The strength of MapReduce is its capability of exploiting the computing power of a cluster of resources, by distributing the load on multiple computing uni...

Human computation or Human-based computation (HBC) is a paradigm that considers the design and analysis of information processing systems in which humans participate as computational agents performing small tasks and being orchestrated by a computer system. In particular, humans perform small pieces of work and a computer system is in charge of orc...

Smart Cities aim to increase citizens’ quality of life. Smart Government is a part of Smart Cities domain aiming to enhance the communication and interactions of citizens and companies with government. The SIMPATICO framework combines machine and human intelligence to simplify e-services i.e., web accessible apps to accomplish administrative proced...

Cloud computing is a consolidated and high-maturity level paradigm which is capable of handling powerful computing environments and providing complex services in a flexible and scalable way. In order to compete in the cloud service market, one of the challenges Cloud providers are faced with is to efficiently automate the service “provisioning” act...

Governments are facing increasing expectations from citizens to deliver more innovative and responsive services. Digital technologies offers opportunities for more collaborative and participatory relationships across stakeholders to actively collaborate in the design of public services and participate in their delivery. In this work we present Citi...

The use of diagnostic imaging procedures has significantly risen in the last decade. However, several studies estimate that a substantial number of requests for diagnostic imaging are inappropriate, leading to unnecessary exposure to radiation, increased wait times, and ineffective use of health care resources. Although many radiology societies fro...

Advances in the communication technologies, along with the birth of new communication paradigms leveraging on the power of the social, has fostered the production of huge amounts of data. Oldfashioned computing paradigms are unfit to handle the dimensions of the data daily produced by the countless, worldwide distributed sources of information. So...

The Cloud computing paradigm has kept its promise to transform computing resources into utilities ready to be consumed in a dynamic and flexible way, on an “as per need” basis. The next big challenge cloud providers are facing is the capability of automating the internal operational processes that need to be run in order to efficiently serve the in...

Significant advances in medical imaging have been made in the past decades, enabling physicians to reach high precision in diagnosing patients’ diseases by means of sophisticated imaging tools. However, the use of sophisticated tools is limited by the high costs and, in some cases, by the utilization of ionizing radiation, which have both great imp...

Big data analysis requires adequate infrastructure and programming paradigms capable of processing large amount of data. Hadoop, the most known open-source implementation of the MapReduce paradigm, is widely employed in big data analysis frameworks. However, in many recent application scenarios data are natively distributed over different geographi...

The widespread availability of IoT technologies allows, among others, detailed monitoring of environmental parameters that can be used for effective prevention and forecasts of natural disasters. When such events occur, or are about to occur, the primary concern of authorities responsible for the public safety is to organise and enforce the relief...

Illustrare il percorso di validazione del software ”Collaboradi”, per il supporto alla prescrizione di esami di Diagnostica per Immagini (DI) da parte dei clinici ospedalieri e dei medici di medicina generale (MMG), effettuato all’interno dell’Azienda Sanitaria Provinciale (ASP) Messina.

Business Process Simulation is a useful and widely adopted technique that fits process analysts with the ability to estimate the performance impact of important business decisions before the actions are actually deployed. In order for the simulation to provide accurate and reliable results, process models need to consider not just the workflow dyna...

The fourth industrial revolution related to the Internet of Things (IoT) is leading to the emergence of future smart cities and cyber-physical systems with a rapidly increasing of smart connected objects (such as personal devices, sensors, actuators). Therefore, companies such as Telcos, Cloud and Service Providers have to analyze a huge amount of...

Internet-of-Things scenarios will be typically characterized by huge amounts of data made available. A challenging task is to efficiently manage such data, by analyzing, elaborating and extracting useful information from them. Distributed computing framework such as Hadoop, based on the MapReduce paradigm, have been used to process such amounts of...

In many application fields such as social networks, e-commerce and content delivery networks there is a constant production of big amounts of data in geographically distributed sites that need to be timely elaborated. Distributed computing frameworks such as Hadoop (based on the MapReduce paradigm) have been used to process big data by exploiting t...

Business Process Simulation is considered by many a very useful technique to analyze the impact of some important choices designers take at process design or optimization time, right before processes are actually implemented and deployed. In order for the simulation to provide accurate and reliable results, process models need to take into account...

One of the fundamental principles which cloud computing paradigm builds upon is that resources in the cloud may be accessed “on-demand”, i.e., when they are required and for just the time they are required. This intrinsic technologic feature encouraged the cloud commercial providers to adopt the pay-per-use pricing mechanism as it turned to be the...

The achievement of business goals is heavily affected by the capability of enterprises to design, enforce and govern business processes. The dynamism of the market requires business goals to be constantly tuned, thus obliging the enterprise to continuously re-design processes. The cost for process re-engineering may be not negligible, if we conside...

The market of cloud resources is currently dominated by proprietary solutions for what concerns resource delivering, pricing models and service level agreements. In the future cloud markets, when cloud standards will get mature and full interoperability among cloud systems will be a reality, the competition challenge among providers will be played...

Business process modeling is recognized as being one of the most crucial step in the management of the Business Process life cycle. Models which either are incorrect or do not accurately represent the desired process dynamics may seriously impair the achievement of an enterprise’s business goals. There is a growing interest towards simulative tools...

A Smart Grid combines the use of traditional technology with innovative digital solutions, making the management of the electricity grid more flexible. It allows for monitoring, analysis, control and communication within the supply chain to improve efficiency, reduce the energy consumption and cost, and maximize the transparency and reliability of...

Commercial cloud providers are used to allocate computing resources to requesting customers according to the well known direct-sell, fixed-price mechanism. This mechanism is proved to be economically inefficient, as it does not account for the market’s supply-demand rate. Nevertheless, providers will unlikely abandon a pricing mechanism which is ve...

Nowadays sensors and sensor networks are deployed in many application domains to accomplish well defined, field-oriented monitoring tasks. Very often, sensors which have been deployed to monitor specific contexts are required to interoperate to third-party sensor systems to serve more complex and demanding monitoring tasks. The heterogeneity of sen...

Current markets of cloud resources are mainly based on a fixed pricing model. In the recent literature several market-based resource allocation models and algorithms have been proposed, showing that dynamic pricing models could result more profitable for both providers and consumers. In this paper we propose a market of resources where the demand a...

Cloud computing technology has definitely reached a high level of maturity. This is witnessed not just by the interest of the academic community around it, but also by the wide adoption in commercial scenarios. Today many big IT players are making huge profits from leasing their computing resources "on-demand", i.e., letting customers ask for the a...

To date a few, big providers dominate the market of Cloud resources. They provide proprietary solutions through inflexible pricing and SLA schemes. On the research side, the community is working to define specifications and standards on several aspects of the cloud technology. When standards will get mature, interoperability among clouds will be a...

Sensors populate our environment in a pervasive way. You may find them at home, in your car, in streets, or even in your smartphone. They are usually employed to measure various kind of phenomena, and can serve very specific purposes such as monitoring, surveillance, prediction, controlling. In the IoT vision, the potential represented by the huge...

The deep knowledge of internal and external business processes, along with the capability of governing them, are a key requirement for enterprises to survive. In the dynamic and unpredictable worldwide market, the achievement of business goals depends on the ability of enterprises to adapt to new market conditions by promptly re-engineering their p...

Currently in the cloud market resources are mainly allocated according to the fixed-price, direct selling model. Market principles such as the supply-demand rate are not taken into consideration by cloud providers. In the literature several marketbased resource allocation models and algorithms have been proposed, showing that dynamic pricing models...

Recent works in ubiquitous computing have addressed analysis of electric power for energy conservation by detailing and studying consumption of electrical appliances. Consumer systems for home energy management can provide significant potential energy saving. But most people have only an approximate idea of how much energy they are using and what i...

Cloud computing is often seen as a part of larger development towards long-dreamed vision of society where computing is delivered as a utility. However, we argue that more research on the business side of cloud computing need to be done to help service providers to create innovative cloud business models and to get cloud computing to grow and devel...

We are witnessing a widespread deployment of sensors and sensor networks in any application domain. These sensors produce huge amounts of raw data that need to be structured, stored, analyzed, correlated and mined in a reliable and scalable way. Some application environments also add real-time requirements which make things even harder to manage. T...

Despite its technological advances, cloud computing's adoption is not as wide as expected. Security is still a big concern that prevents many to "cloudify" their applications and put their data in the hands of a cloud provider. Also, interoperable scenarios fostered by SOA technologies exacerbate the security question, as customers have to deal wit...

Today a few providers dominate the market of cloud services. Very often, services advertised by different commercial providers are comparable in terms of offered features (both functional and non-functional) and price. We believe the lack of interoperability among cloud platforms is the main cause for this panorama of flattened cloud offers. Luckil...

The Internet of Things vision has recently stimulated many research efforts in different communities. The collection of diverse information produced by the proliferation of inter-connected sensing entities is one of the biggest challenge that should be adequately addressed. The huge amounts of raw data produced by IoT devices need to be structured,...

When interoperability among cloud systems will be fully achieved, a new scenario of business opportunities will open up. The competition among cloud providers will be played on the ground of the QoS to be delivered to customers. Future cloud markets will have to be provided with new tools to help players express their business requirements, and to...

The Cloud Computing paradigm attracts many customers because of the potentialities it promises. Despite of many benefits, a widespread adoption is limited by many issues that potential customers still have to face. Security in the cloud is one of the main concern for the customer. The Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is responsible of providing securit...

Over the past few years, an increasing number of organizations have been considering the use of some form of cloud computing for their business purpose. However, the market of cloud resources is still in its infancy due to, among other reasons, the lack of interoperability among existing cloud platforms. In this paper we argue that a successful ope...

Cloud computing has reached a high level of acceptance, both in academia and in industry. The maturity of the technology, along with the considerable business opportunity that has been promised, is the main responsible for its success. Nevertheless, today only few, very big players dominate the commercial panorama and take over market shares. From...

To date a few, big providers dominate the market of Cloud resources. They provide proprietary solutions through inflexible pricing and SLA schemes. On the research side, the community is working to define specifications and standards on several aspects of the cloud technology. When standards will get mature, interoperability among clouds will be a...

The breakthrough of Cloud comes from its service oriented perspective where everything, including the infrastructure, is provided “as a service”. This model is really attractive and convenient for both providers and consumers, as a consequence the Cloud paradigm is quickly growing and widely spreading, also in non commercial contexts. In such a sce...

In SOA environments, as the number of published Web Services grows, the provision of a robust, scalable and efficient discovery service is still an unresolved issue. In this paper we present a P2P-based infrastructure that leverages the semantic technologies to support a scalable and accurate service discovery process. The key concept of the presen...

Cloud is strongly emerging as the new deal of distributed computing. One of the reason behind the Cloud success is its business/commercial-oriented nature, proof of its effectiveness and applicability to real problems. There are actually a lot of open-private Cloud infrastructures aiming at providing dynamic-on demand resource provisioning accordin...

Cloud computing poses several new security and privacy challenges, mainly related to resource sharing, interoperability and dinamicity among different providers. Although policy specification languages address some of these challenges,many issues still have to be faced with. Policy matching is today performed by way of syntactical approaches, which...

Resource and service discovery in SOAs: A P2P oriented semantic approach An intense standardization process is favouring the convergence of grids and Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). One of the benefits of such technological convergence is that grid resources and applications can be virtualized by services and offered through the SOA paradigm...

Service computing technology enables B2B scenarios where the provision of a service may require a collaboration among several service providers across multiple independent and heterogeneous administrative domains. In these environments, several new security and privacy challenges arise, mainly related to resource sharing and interoperability among...

The increasing adoption of service oriented architectures across different administrative domains forces service providers to use effective mechanisms and strategies of resource management in order to guarantee the quality levels their customers demand during service provisioning. Service level agreements (SLA) are the most common mechanism used to...

Cloud Computing is emerging as a promising paradigm capable of providing a flexible, dynamic, resilient and cost effective infrastructure for both academic and business environments. The aim of this project is to create a new Cloud paradigm, “Cloud@Home”, in which both the commercial/business and the volunteer/scientific viewpoints coexist. The Clo...

Semantic web services have recently appeared as an enabling technology for the challenging task of automated service discovery and composition. In addition, the growing number of web services demands for distributed discovery mechanisms which do not suffer of the scalability problems of the centralized ones. A framework based on the P2P paradigm to...

In service-oriented environments the service discovery mechanisms adopting a key-word based and centralised approach are not able to provide the users' requests with accurate results, nor are any longer able to scale against the increasing number of Web Services provided by service providers. Distributed, semantics-enabled infrastructures for servi...

The increasing number of Web Services provided by several service providers demands for effective, scalable and accurate mechanisms to search and select the most appropriate service, fulfilling some user requirements. Distributed, semantics-enabled infrastructures for service discovery could satisfy these requirements, even if the promise of dynami...