'Crowdsourcing' is a relatively recent concept that encompasses many practices. This diversity leads to the blurring of the limits of crowdsourcing that may be identified virtually with any type of internet-based collaborative activity, such as co-creation or user innovation. Varying definitions of crowdsourcing exist, and therefore some authors present certain specific examples of crowdsourcing as paradigmatic, while others present the same examples as the opposite. In this article, existing definitions of crowdsourcing are analysed to extract common elements and to establish the basic characteristics of any crowdsourcing initiative. Based on these existing definitions, an exhaustive and consistent definition for crowdsourcing is presented and contrasted in 11 cases.

/pdf/towards-an-integrated-crowdsourcing-definition-3qoy6yinnl.pdf

Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition

The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure

We study the interaction of the "new" construct with a rich but common form of (first-order) communication. This interaction is crucial in security protocols, which are the main motivating examples for our work; it also appears in other programming-language contexts. Specifically, we introduce a simple, general extension of the pi calculus with value passing, primitive functions, and equations among terms. We develop semantics and proof techniques for this extended language and apply them in reasoning about some security protocols.

/pdf/mobile-values-new-names-and-secure-communication-r85hn7w4ep.pdf

Mobile values, new names, and secure communication

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, was first delivered to congress in 1996 and consisted of just two Titles. It was designed to protect health insurance coverage for workers and their families while between jobs. It establishes standards for electronic health care transactions and addresses the issues of privacy and security when dealing with Protected Health Information (PHI). HIPAA is applicable only in the United States of America.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

We investigate the issue of designing a kernel programming language for mobile computing and describe KLAIM, a language that supports a programming paradigm where processes, like data, can be moved from one computing environment to another. The language consists of a core Linda with multiple tuple spaces and of a set of operators for building processes. KLAIM naturally supports programming with explicit localities. Localities are first-class data (they can be manipulated like any other data), but the language provides coordination mechanisms to control the interaction protocols among located processes. The formal operational semantics is useful for discussing the design of the language and provides guidelines for implementations. KLAIM is equipped with a type system that statically checks access right violations of mobile agents. Types are used to describe the intentions (read, write, execute, etc.) of processes in relation to the various localities. The type system is used to determine the operations that processes want to perform at each locality, and to check whether they comply with the declared intentions and whether they have the necessary rights to perform the intended operations at the specific localities. Via a series of examples, we show that many mobile code programming paradigms can be naturally implemented in our kernel language. We also present a prototype implementation of KLAIM in Java.

/pdf/klaim-a-kernel-language-for-agents-interaction-and-mobility-3uvri0k45q.pdf

KLAIM: a kernel language for agents interaction and mobility

We introduce COWS (Calculus for Orchestration of Web Services), a new foundational language for SOC whose design has been influenced by WS-BPEL, the de facto standard language for orchestration of web services. COWS combines in an original way a number of ingredients borrowed from well-known process calculi, e.g. asynchronous communication, polyadic synchronization, pattern matching, protection, delimited receiving and killing activities, while resulting different fromany of them. Several examples illustrates COWS peculiarities and show its expressiveness both for modelling imperative and orchestration constructs, e.g. web services, flow graphs, fault and compensation handlers, and for encoding other process and orchestration languages.

/pdf/a-calculus-for-orchestration-of-web-services-2n5nfwed6v.pdf

A calculus for orchestration of web services

/pdf/leveraging-applications-of-formal-methods-verification-and-2jz05aj0gt.pdf

Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation

The autonomic computing paradigm has been proposed to cope with size, complexity, and dynamism of contemporary software-intensive systems The challenge for language designers is to devise appropriate abstractions and linguistic primitives to deal with the large dimension of systems and with their need to adapt to the changes of the working environment and to the evolving requirements We propose a set of programming abstractions that permit us to represent behaviors, knowledge, and aggregations according to specific policies and to support programming context-awareness, self-awareness, and adaptation Based on these abstractions, we define SCEL (Software Component Ensemble Language), a kernel language whose solid semantic foundations lay also the basis for formal reasoning on autonomic systems behavior To show expressiveness and effectiveness of SCEL;’s design, we present a Java implementation of the proposed abstractions and show how it can be exploited for programming a robotics scenario that is used as a running example for describing the features and potential of our approach

/pdf/a-formal-approach-to-autonomic-systems-programming-the-scel-hid03lev5r.pdf

A Formal Approach to Autonomic Systems Programming: The SCEL Language

Contextual equivalences for cryptographic process calculi can be used to reason about correctness of protocols, but their definition suffers from quantification over all possible contexts. Here, we focus on two such equivalences, may-testing and barbed equivalence, and investigate tractable proof methods for them. To this aim, we develop an 'environment-sensitive' labelled transition system, where transitions are constrained by the knowledge the environment has of names and keys. On top of the new transition system, a trace equivalence and a co-inductive weak bisimulation equivalence are defined, both of which avoid quantification over contexts. Our main results are soundness of trace semantics and of weak bisimulation with respect to may-testing and barbed equivalence, respectively. This leads to more direct proof methods for equivalence checking. The use of such methods is illustrated via a few examples concerning implementation of secure channels by means of encrypted public channels. We also consider a variant of the labelled transition system that gives completeness, but is less handy to use.

http://people.cs.aau.dk/~hans/Dat5/Artikler2005/short-italo.pdf

Rosario Pugliese

Papers

KLAIM: a kernel language for agents interaction and mobility

A calculus for orchestration of web services

Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation

A Formal Approach to Autonomic Systems Programming: The SCEL Language

Proof techniques for cryptographic processes