AIDS: a first cure

From slashdot  news http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/09/1558241

 A very interesting step forward in AIDS cure… the news says:

 “HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Until now, HIV has no cure and has led to the deaths of over 25 million people. However, a possible cure has appeared. Dr. Gero Hutter, a brilliant physician in Germany, replaced the bone marrow of an HIV patient with the bone marrow of a donor who has natural immunity to HIV. The new bone marrow in the patient then produced immune-system cells that are immune to HIV. Being unable to hijack any immune cell, the HIV has simply disappeared. The patient has been free of HIV for about 2 years. Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it.”

 

2009 ICDE 2009: “The PRISM Workwench: Database Schema Evolution Without Tears”

“The PRISM Workwench: Database Schema Evolution Without Tears” Carlo A. Curino, Hyun J. Moon, MyungWon Ham, Carlo Zaniolo, DEMO paper at ICDE 2009

 

Information Systems are subject to a perpetual evolution, which is particularly pressing in Web Information Systems, due to their distributed and often collaborative nature. Such continuous adaptation process, comes with a very high cost, because of the intrinsic complexity of the task and the serious ramifications of such changes upon database-centric Information System softwares.  Therefore, there is a need to automate and simplify the schema evolution process and to ensure predictability and logical independence upon schema changes. Current relational technology makes it easy to change the database content or to revise the underlaying storage and indexes but does little to support logical schema evolution which nowadays remains poorly supported by commercial tools. The PRISM system demonstrates a major new advance toward automating schema evolution (including query mapping and database conversion), by improving predictability, logical independence, and auditability of the process. In fact, PRISM exploits recent theoretical results on mapping composition, invertibility and query rewriting to provide DB Administrators with an intuitive, operational workbench usable in their everyday activities—thus enabling graceful schema evolution. In this demonstration, we will show (i) the functionality of PRISM and its supportive AJAX interface, (ii) its architecture built upon a simple SQL–inspired language of Schema Modification Operators,  and (iii) we will allow conference participants to directly interact with the system to test its capabilities.  Finally, some of the most interesting evolution steps of popular Web Information Systems, such as Wikipedia, will be reviewed in a brief “Saga of Famous Schema Evolutions”. 

Data Integration

The current business reality induces frequent acquisitions and merges of companies and organizations, and more and more tight interaction between information systems of cooperating companies. We present our contributions to Context-ADDICT, a framework supporting on-the-fly (semi-) automatic data integration, context modeling and context-aware data filtering. Data Integration is achieved in Context-ADDICT by means of automatic ontology-based data source wrapping and integration. While this approach lays its foundations in a solid theoretical background, it also provides heuristics to solve the practical aspects of data integration in a dynamic context. 

More details on this research effort can be found at: http://kid.dei.polimi.it/

 

Java for HW reconfigurable architectures

Another research topic I have worked on is the exploitation of the Java language as an Hardware Description Language for IP-Core definition in the context of the DRESD project. The main advantage will be the leveraging of the familiarity of the developer with an existing language, and the exploitation of existing IDE for the Java language, while maintaining the performance typical of the Caronte architecture, developed in the DRESD project.

More details can be found at: http://www.dresd.org/

2008: “Improving search and navigation by combining Ontologies and Social Tags”

 “Improving search and navigation  by combining Ontologies and Social Tags“, Silvia Bindelli,  Claudio Criscione,  Carlo A. Curino,  Mauro L. Drago,  Davide Eynard,  Giorgio Orsi, OTM Workshop:  Ambient Data Integration (ADI) 2008
 
ABSTRACT: 
The Semantic Web has the ambitious goal of enabling complex autonomous applications to reason on a machine-processable version of the World Wide Web. This, however, would require a coordinated effort not easily achievable in practice. On the other hand, spontaneous communities, based on social tagging, recently achieved noticeable consensus and diffusion. 
The goal of the TagOnto system is to bridge between these to realities by automatically mapping (social) tags to more structured domain ontologies, thus, providing assistive, navigational features typical of the Semantic Web. These novel searching and navigational capabilities are complementary to more traditional search engine functionalities. The system, and its intuitive AJAX interface, are released and demonstrated on-line. 
 
 Demo on-line available at: http://kid.dei.polimi.it/tagonto/