0000000000502097
AUTHOR
Vincenzo Agate
showing 22 related works from this author
A Reinforcement Learning Approach for User Preference-aware Energy Sharing Systems
2021
Energy Sharing Systems (ESS) are envisioned to be the future of power systems. In these systems, consumers equipped with renewable energy generation capabilities are able to participate in an energy market to sell their energy. This paper proposes an ESS that, differently from previous works, takes into account the consumers’ preference, engagement, and bounded rationality. The problem of maximizing the energy exchange while considering such user modeling is formulated and shown to be NP-Hard. To learn the user behavior, two heuristics are proposed: 1) a Reinforcement Learning-based algorithm, which provides a bounded regret and 2) a more computationally efficient heuristic, named BPT- ${K}…
A Framework for Parallel Assessment of Reputation Management Systems
2016
Several distributed applications running over the Internet use Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) to guarantee reliable interactions among unknown agents. Because of the heterogeneity of the existing RMSs, their assessment in terms of correctness and resistance to security attacks is not a trivial task. This work addresses this issue by presenting a novel parallel simulator aimed to support researchers in evaluating the performances of a RMS since the design phase. Preliminary results obtained by simulating two different attacks confirm the suitability of the proposed framework to evaluate different RMSs.
IgA antiendomysial antibodies on the umbilical cord in diagnosing celiac disease. Sensitivity, specificity, and comparative evaluation with the tradi…
1996
The possibility of assaying antiendomysial antibodies (EmA) on the human umbilical cord instead of monkey esophagus has recently been suggested. We therefore evaluated in patients with celiac disease (CD) the sensitivity and specificity of EmA and of antigliadin antibodies (AGA) for both umbilical cord and monkey esophagus.We studied 36 patients with CD and atrophy of the intestinal mucosa (median age, 1.4 years), 14 patients with CD on gluten-free diet for 8-12 months (median age, 3.0 years), 36 controls without gastrointestinal disease (median age, 4.0 years), and 72 patients with cow's milk protein enteropathy (CMPE) (median age, 1.2 years). AGA and EmA on monkey esophagus were assayed w…
A Platform for the Evaluation of Distributed Reputation Algorithms
2018
In distributed environments, where unknown entities cooperate to achieve complex goals, intelligent techniques for estimating agents' truthfulness are required. Distributed Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) allow to accomplish this task without the need for a central entity that may represent a bottleneck and a single point of failure. The design of a distributed RMS is a challenging task due to a multitude of factors that could impact on its performances. In order to support the researcher in evaluating the RMS robustness against security attacks since its beginning design phase, in this work we present a distributed simulation environment that allows to model both the agent's behaviors…
A Simulation Framework for Evaluating Distributed Reputation Management Systems
2016
In distributed environments, where interactions involve unknown entities, intelligent techniques for estimating agents’ reputation are required. Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) aim to detect malicious behaviors that may affect the integrity of the virtual community. However, these systems are highly dependent of the application domain they address; hence the evaluation of different RMSs in terms of correctness and resistance to security attacks is frequently a tricky task. In this work we present a simulation framework to support researchers in the assessment of a RMS. The simulator is organized in two logic layers where network nodes are mapped to system processes that implement the i…
Enabling peer-to-peer User-Preference-Aware Energy Sharing Through Reinforcement Learning
2020
Renewable, heterogeneous and distributed energy resources are the future of power systems, as envisioned by the recent paradigm of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs). Residential electricity generation, e.g., through photovoltaic panels, plays a fundamental role in this paradigm, where users are able to participate in an energy sharing system and exchange energy resources among each other. In this work, we study energy sharing systems and, differently from previous approaches, we consider realistic user behaviors by taking into account the user preferences and level of engagement in the energy trades. We formulate the problem of matching energy resources while contemplating the user behavior as a …
Vulnerability evaluation of distributed reputation management systems
2017
In distributed environments, Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) aim to estimate agents' trustworthiness by exploiting different sources of information. The distributed nature of these systems makes them vulnerable to several types of security attacks, and the response provided by a specific RMS depends on various factors, such as the algorithms adopted for estimating the reputation values and the communication protocols used to enable the cooperation among agents. This work examines the most important security attacks against RMSs and proposes a set of metrics for a quantitative evaluation of the RMS vulnerabilities. A parallel simulation framework is used to automatically give a vulnerab…
Uno Smart Campus per UniPA
2017
L’accesso pervasivo alla rete ha avviato una profonda trasformazione del tessuto sociale e culturale, incidendo profondamente anche sui processi di erogazione dei servizi della Pubblica Amministrazione. L’Università degli Studi di Palermo si inserisce in tale contesto, avendo recentemente intrapreso un percorso di innovazione che mira ad espandere i confini della didattica, della divulgazione del sapere scientifico, della creazione di nuova scienza e cultura, al fine di creare uno Smart Campus pronto ad accogliere gli studenti ormai “nativi digitali”.
A gesture recognition framework for exploring museum exhibitions
2018
In this paper we present a gesture recognition framework for providing the visitors of a museum exhibition with a non intrusive interface for the multimedia enjoyment of digital contents. Early experiments were carried out at the Computer History Museum Exhibition of the University of Palermo.
SESAMO: An integrated framework for gathering, managing and sharing environmental data
2016
ICT systems are widely adopted for environmental management, but existing solutions address limited tasks and compose a plethora of heterogeneous tools, which impose a great additional effort on the operators. This work presents SESAMO, a novel framework to provide the operators with a unique tool for gathering, managing and merging environmental and territorial data. SESAMO uses WSNs for providing pervasive monitoring of environmental phenomena and exploits a multi-tier infrastructure in order to integrate data coming from heterogeneous information sources.
WiP: Smart services for an augmented campus
2018
Technological progress in recent years has allowed the design of new intelligent learning systems in smart environments aiming to facilitate users' lives. As a consequence, besides making use of traditional sensors for monitoring the quantities of interest, such systems can also benefit from information obtained from the users' smart devices, which can now be considered as additional sensing tools. In this article, we present the design of a novel system based on the fog computing paradigm that can improve the services offered to users on a smart campus by using different smart devices, i.e., smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, smartcameras and so on. In particular, we will describe a syste…
A Simulation Software for the Evaluation of Vulnerabilities in Reputation Management Systems
2019
Multi-agent distributed systems are characterized by autonomous entities that interact with each other to provide, and/or request, different kinds of services. In several contexts, especially when a reward is offered according to the quality of service, individual agents (or coordinated groups) may act in a selfish way. To prevent such behaviours, distributed Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) provide every agent with the capability of computing the reputation of the others according to direct past interactions, as well as indirect opinions reported by their neighbourhood. This last point introduces a weakness on gossiped information that makes RMSs vulnerable to malicious agents’ intent …
Your friends mention It. What about visiting it? A mobile social-based sightseeing application
2016
In this short poster paper, we present an application for suggesting attractions to be visited by users, based on social signal processing techniques.
Ultrasound detection of abdominal lymphadenomegaly in subjects with hepatitis C virus infection and persistently normal transaminases: a predictive i…
1998
The indications for liver biopsy in anti-HCV-positive patients with persistently normal alanine aminotransferase levels are not clearly established. Recent studies have correlated the presence of abdominal lymphoadenomegaly with disease severity in patients with chronic hepatitis C. Our study aimed to evaluate the frequency of abdominal lymphoadenomegaly in an anti-HCV positive blood donor population with persistently normal alanine aminotransferase and the relationship of abdominal lymphoadenomegaly with the severity of liver changes.Eighty-six anti-HCV positive blood donors (58 M, 28 F) with normal alanine aminotransferase were followed up for a median of 31 months (range 12-50). To evalu…
A cognitive architecture for ambient intelligence systems
2018
Nowadays, the use of intelligent systems in homes and workplaces is a well-established reality. Research efforts are moving towards increasingly complex Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems that exploit a wide variety of sensors, software modules and stand-alone systems. Unfortunately, using more data often comes at a cost, both in energy and computational terms. Finding the right trade-off between energy savings, information costs and accuracy of results is a major challenge, especially when trying to integrate many heterogeneous modules. Our approach fits into this scenario by proposing an ontology-based AmI system with a cognitive architecture, able to perceive the state of the surrounding…
A Hybrid Recommender System for Cultural Heritage Promotion
2021
Assisting users during their cultural trips is paramount in promoting the heritage of a territory. Recommender Systems offer the automatic tools to guide users in their decision process, by maximizing the adherence of the proposed contents with the particular preferences of every single user. However, traditional recommendation paradigms suffer from several drawbacks which are exacerbated in Cultural Heritage scenarios, due to the extremely wide range of users behaviors, which may also depend on their different educational backgrounds. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid recommender system which combines the four most common recommendation paradigms, namely collaborative filtering, popularit…
Bayesian Modeling for Differential Cryptanalysis of Block Ciphers: A DES Instance
2023
Encryption algorithms based on block ciphers are among the most widely adopted solutions for providing information security. Over the years, a variety of methods have been proposed to evaluate the robustness of these algorithms to different types of security attacks. One of the most effective analysis techniques is differential cryptanalysis, whose aim is to study how variations in the input propagate on the output. In this work we address the modeling of differential attacks to block cipher algorithms by defining a Bayesian framework that allows a probabilistic estimation of the secret key. In order to prove the validity of the proposed approach, we present as case study a differential att…
DRESS: A Distributed RMS Evaluation Simulation Software
2020
Distributed environments consist of a huge number of entities that cooperate to achieve complex goals. When interactions occur between unknown parties, intelligent techniques for estimating agent reputations are required. Reputation management systems (RMS's) allow agents to perform such estimation in a cooperative way. In particular, distributed RMS's exploit feedbacks provided after each interaction and allow prediction of future behaviors of agents. Such systems, in contrast to centralized RMSs, are sensitive to fake information injected by malicious users; thus, predicting the performance of a distributed RMS is a very challenging task. Although many existing works have addressed some c…
SecureBallot: A secure open source e-Voting system
2021
Abstract Voting is one of the most important acts through which a community can make a collective decision. In recent years, many works have focused on improving traditional voting mechanisms and, as a result, a wide range of electronic voting (e-Voting) systems have been proposed. Even though some approaches have achieved a proper level of usability, the main challenges of e-Voting are essentially still open: protect the privacy of participants, guarantee secrecy, anonymity, integrity, uniqueness, and authenticity of votes, while making e-Voting as trustful as voting. In order to address this issue, we present SecureBallot, a secure open-source e-Voting system that completely decouples the…
Evaluation by Ultrasound of Abdominal Lymphadenopathy in Chronic Hepatitis C
1999
Objective: Abdominal ultrasound has shown a frequent association between abdominal lymphadenopathy (LA) and chronic liver disease, but contradictory data have been reported on its relationship with the main parameters of hepatic function. The aim of this study was to correlate the prevalence of LA in patients who were chronic hepatitis-anti-hepatitis C virus positive prospectively followed-up over the last 3 years and its relationship with biochemical and histological data. Methods: 136 RIBA II confirmed positive patients with ALT levels >2N were included. None of these had been or was at the time of study on interferon treatment. Ultrasound was performed using a Toshiba SSA 240 A apparatus…
A Resilient Smart Architecture for Road Surface Condition Monitoring
2022
Nowadays, road surface condition monitoring is a challenging problem that cannot be addressed with traditional techniques. In this paper we propose an architecture for monitoring the condition of road surfaces based on the paradigm of Mobile Crowdsensing. First, a surface detection module extracts high level features from raw data, indicating the presence of hazards. Then, in order to make the system resilient to attacks, the system exploits a reputation module to identify malicious users and filter out unreliable data. Finally, a truth discovery module aggregates the resulting information to obtain the desired truth values. Experiments carried out on a real world dataset prove the resilien…
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT ALGORITHMS IN DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS
2020
Nowadays, several distributed systems and applications rely on interactions between unknown agents that cooperate in order to exchange resources and services. The distributed nature of these systems, and the consequent lack of a single centralized point of control, let agents to adopt selfish and malicious behaviors in order to maximize their own utility. To address such issue, many applications rely on Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) to estimate the future behavior of unknown agents before establishing actual interactions. The relevance of these systems is even greater if the malicious or selfish behavior exhibited by a few agents may reduce the utility perceived by cooperative agents…