We present actor services: a novel program logic for defining and verifying response and functional properties of programs which communicate via asynchronous messaging. Actor services can specify how parts of a program respond to messages, both in terms of guaranteed future messages, and relations between the program states in which messages are received and responses sent. These specifications...

Silence detection and removal is an essential building block of any multimedia video conferenc-ing system. It reduces the bandwidth requirements of the underlying network transport service and helps to maintain an acceptable end-to-end delay for audio. We analyze the requirements for a silence detection algorithm hosted on a multimedia communication system, and propose a novel low complexity al...

Ad-hoc extensions of cellular networks help reducing intra-cell interference and hence increasing the capacity of cellular systems. This paper proposes an appropriate distribution of UMTS protocols between end terminals and intermediate relaying devices aiming at increasing capacity in UMTS while following two main principles: improving robustness by using a direct cellular connection for signa...

In this work, we contribute to video saliency research in two ways. First, we introduce a new benchmark for predicting human eye movements during dynamic scene freeviewing, which is long-time urged in this field. Our dataset, named DHF1K (Dynamic Human Fixation), consists of 1K high-quality, elaborately selected video sequences spanning a large range of scenes, viewpoints, motions, object types...

Today, companies are using the Web to connect with their back-end systems and perform e-commerce transactions. The next chapter of the Internet story is the evolution of today’s access/content focused portals into eservices hubs. While many traditional services become available on the Internet as e-services, almost all of them are single point services. In order to offer higher value, end-to-en...

This paper presents the experimental results measured on the Italsat satellite when data is transmitted by using the FODA/IBEA satellite access scheme. The measures presented refer to the packet arrival time jitter, which affects the real-time data, and to the end-to-end delay of the non real-time data. The experimental results, obtained with four Italian active stations on Italsat confirm the ...

In service-oriented systems, context information can be used to select a variety of services to support the execution of processes. Yet, context information causes interdependencies between services, in the sense that they are evaluated differently – regarding their utility and feasibility when being composed with other services. Such context interdependencies have not been sufficiently address...

The convergence between business process modeling and the service-oriented architecture has created a significant opportunity for Information Technology (IT) system integrators: they can offer effective business process outsourcing for Small Medium Enterprises (SME)s that often cannot afford the cost of designing, provisioning, and operating their own software service bus. In this paper, we pre...

Many IT service departments are adopting IT service management best practice frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to improve the quality of service to customers. This study reports on recent surveys and case studies of organizations which have embarked on IT service management improvement. It highlights specific difficulties experienced by organizations. Six factors were foun...