Search Results (37)

This paper describes the maintenance and modernisation of custom data repositories that have supported three long-term research projects since their launch in 2007. It highlights an almost complete rewrite of the code base in 2020 and 2021. To enable research data management (RDM) that adheres to modern and FAIR standards, many features were rebuilt and streamlined for ease of use, with the goal of reducing the friction involved in RDM as much as possible. The update significantly improved the file upload by switching to a fully browser-based solution and completely overhauled the outdated metadata editor with a more interactive version. The ability to search for and find data in the repository has also been enhanced by switching to a flexible, filter-based solution which displays results in real time. It shows that older repositories can be kept in line with the changing landscape of RDM, ensuring that the research data contained therein is not lost. Through these updates and continuing maintenance, these data repositories have stayed available for almost 20 years, even after project funding has ended. Full article

Trustworthy Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a foundational requirement for federated data trading platforms, yet existing solutions often rely on centralized Identity Providers (IdPs), lack cross-border interoperability, and offer limited support for user-friendly authorization management. These limitations hinder secure onboarding, fine-grained access control, and regulatory compliance, especially within European Union (EU) data spaces governed by the Electronic Identification, Authentication, and Trust Services (eIDAS) 2.0 framework. This work presents a comprehensive IAM framework designed for federated data trading environments, developed within the EU-funded PISTIS project. The framework is based on Keycloak IAM and offers three major capabilities: (i) a novel IAM architecture tailored to distributed data trading scenarios; (ii) full integration of eIDAS-compliant cross-border authentication and initial support for European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallets; and (iii) a standalone, web-based Access Policy Editor (APE) that abstracts Keycloak’s policy engine and enables non-technical users to define fine-grained, owner-driven access rules. The approach is evaluated across real-world mobility, energy, and automotive industry pilots, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing trust, interoperability, and usability within regulated data-sharing ecosystems. Full article

The past 15 years of extensive experience teaching VR system development has taught us that haptic feedback must be more sophisticatedly integrated into VR systems, alongside the already realistic high-fidelity visual and audio feedback. The third generation of students is enhancing VR interactive experiences by incorporating haptic feedback through traditional, proven, commercially available gamepad controllers. Insights and discoveries gained through this process contributed to the development of versatile Unity custom editor tool, which is the focus of this article. The developed tool supports a wide range of use cases, enabling the visual, parametric, and descriptive creation of reusable haptic effects. To enhance productivity in commercial development, it supports the creation of haptic and haptic/audio stimulus libraries, which can be further expanded and combined based on object-oriented principles. Additionally, the tool allows for the definition of specific areas within the virtual space where these stimuli can be experienced, depending on the virtual object the avatar holds and the activities they perform. This intuitive platform allows the design of reusable haptic effects through graphical editor, audio conversion, programmatic scripting, and AI-powered guidance. The sophistication and usability of the tool have been demonstrated through several student VR projects across various application areas. Full article

While the development of the Empedocles figure in the various versions of Hölderlin’s unfinished tragedy has long been the subject of scholarship, the shifts in his relationships to the women around him have largely gone unnoticed. Yet these changes are anything but subtle: in the Frankfurt Plan, Empedocles is married with children, and his wife plays a significant role in the outline of the plot; in the first draft, Empedocles is unmarried but adored by Panthea, a young Agrigentine woman; in the last draft, the figure of Panthea has been reconfigured as Empedocles’ biological sister. With each successive draft Hölderlin imposed new barriers, the crossing of which would imply sexual transgression or incest, in order to set Empedocles apart from potential sexual or erotic entanglements with the dramatis personae. But at the same time, we observe language suited for erotic settings (and used thus by Hölderlin here and in other works) being displaced to ever new objects throughout the drafts. In other words, while the author as editor of his material successively deleted or prohibited the sexual/erotic relationships of his titular hero, at the same time he allowed this fluidly metonymic, multivalent erotic language to flow, continuously redirected, throughout the entire Empedocles project. With Empedocles’ leap into Mount Etna, we find the culmination of this meandering erotic diction, imagined in the last draft as an hybristic, incestuous union with his divine parents. Full article

Visual programming languages (VPLs) play a significant role in simplifying the process of learning to program and reducing development time. Most VPLs are developed for use in education or specific domains. Recently, some projects have aimed to provide general-purpose VPLs. Among these projects is the Programming Without Coding Technology (PWCT) project, which has been used for several years to develop and maintain the compiler and virtual machine for the Ring programming language. However, PWCT faces several issues related to code generation performance and the operating systems it supports. Additionally, its visual editor lacks many features, such as rich comments, auto-run, and the ability to import textual code, which are highly important in the era of using large language models for generating textual code. In this research, we present the PWCT2 visual programming language, which is distributed on the Steam platform. On Steam, 1772 users have launched the software, and the total usage time recorded exceeds 17,000 h. This generation provides approximately 36 times faster code generation and 20 times lower storage requirements for visual source files. It also allows for the conversion of Ring code into visual code, enabling the creation of a self-hosting VPL. It consists of approximately 92,000 lines of Ring code and comes with 394 visual components. Moreover, using Ring in this project demonstrates the feasibility of utilizing the language for projects of this scale. Ring compiles PWCT2 in less than one second, and the generated bytecode consists of approximately 724,000 instructions. Full article

In the face of geopolitical threats in Artsakh, the preservation of Armenia’s epigraphic heritage has become a mission of both historical and cultural urgency. This project delves deep into Armenian inscriptions, employing advanced digital tools and strategies like the Oxygen text editor and EpiDoc guidelines to efficiently catalogue, analyze, and present these historical treasures. Amidst the adversities posed by Azerbaijan’s stance towards Armenian heritage in Artsakh, the digital documentation and preservation of these inscriptions have become a beacon of cultural resilience. The XML-based database ensures consistent data, promoting scholarly research and broadening accessibility. Integrating the Grabar Armenian dictionary addressed linguistic challenges, enhancing data accuracy. This initiative goes beyond merely preserving stone and text; it is a testament to the stories, hopes, and enduring spirit of the Armenian people in the face of external threats. Through a harmonious blend of technology and traditional knowledge, the project stands as a vanguard in the fight to ensure that Armenia’s rich epigraphic legacy, and the narratives they enshrine remain undiminished for future generations. Full article

This study investigates whether analyzing the code comments available in the source code can effectively reveal functional similarities within software. The authors explore how both machine-readable comments (such as linter instructions) and human-readable comments (in natural language) can contribute towards measuring the code similarity. For the former, the work is relying on computing the cosine similarity over the one-hot encoded representation of the machine-readable comments, while for the latter, the focus is on detecting similarities in English comments, using threshold-based computations against the similarity measurements obtained using models based on Levenshtein distances (for form-based matches), Word2Vec (for contextual word representations), as well as deep learning models, such as Sentence Transformers or Universal Sentence Encoder (for semantic similarity). For evaluation, this research has analyzed the similarities between different source code versions of the open-source code editor, VSCode, based on existing ESlint-specific directives, as well as applying natural language processing techniques on incremental releases of Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating containerized application management. The experiments outlines the potential for detecting code similarities solely based on comments, and observations indicate that models like Universal Sentence Encoder are providing a favorable balance between recall and precision. This research is integrated into Project Martial, an open-source project for automatic assistance in detecting plagiarism in software. Full article

Due to increasing urbanization, nowadays, cities are facing challenges spanning multiple domains such as mobility, energy, environment, etc. For example, to reduce traffic congestion, energy consumption, and excessive pollution, big data gathered from legacy systems (e.g., sensors not conformant with modern standards), geographic information systems, gateways of public administrations, and Internet of Things technologies can be exploited to provide insights to assess the current status of a city. Moreover, the possibility to perform what-if analyses is fundamental to analyzing the impact of possible changes in the urban environment. The few available solutions for scenario definitions and analyses are limited to addressing a single domain and providing proprietary formats and tools, with scarce flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, we present a novel scenario model and editor integrated into the open-source Snap4City.org platform to enable several processing and what-if analyses in multiple domains. Different from state-of-the-art software, the proposed solution responds to a series of identified requirements, implements NGSIv2-compliant data models with formal descriptions of the urban context, and a scenario versioning method. Moreover, it allows us to carry out analyses on different domains, as shown with some examples. As a case study, a traffic congestion analysis is provided, confirming the validity and usefulness of the proposed solution. This work was developed in the context of CN MOST, the National Center on Sustainable Mobility in Italy, and for the Tourismo EC project. Full article

Multidrug resistance in bacterial strains known as superbugs is estimated to cause fatal infections worldwide. Migration and urbanization have resulted in overcrowding and inadequate sanitation, contributing to a high risk of superbug infections within and between different communities. The CRISPR-Cas system, mainly type II, has been projected as a robust tool to precisely edit drug-resistant bacterial genomes to combat antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains effectively. To entirely opt for its potential, advanced development in the CRISPR-Cas system is needed to reduce toxicity and promote efficacy in gene-editing applications. This might involve base-editing techniques used to produce point mutations. These methods employ designed Cas9 variations, such as the adenine base editor (ABE) and the cytidine base editor (CBE), to directly edit single base pairs without causing DSBs. The CBE and ABE could change a target base pair into a different one (for example, G-C to A-T or C-G to A-T). In this review, we addressed the limitations of the CRISPR/Cas system and explored strategies for circumventing these limitations by applying diverse base-editing techniques. Furthermore, we also discussed recent research showcasing the ability of base editors to eliminate drug-resistant microbes. Full article

This article presents an application for educational purposes in the field of engineering graphics, which corrects the dihedral projections of the sections of a plane for a part by comparing the solution provided by the student with that obtained through 3D CAD modelling software. Said application is generated as a macro in CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application), which is included as a tool in the ‘Part Design’ module. The code of this macro is written in the CATVBA language, utilizes the CATIA internal editor, and takes advantage of the capabilities offered by Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the design of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). The operation of the macro consists of obtaining the section in the 3D CAD model, projecting it onto three dihedral projections of the part (elevation, plan, and profile), and calculating the visible and hidden lines by means of a numerical process based on dividing the lines into discrete sections. Likewise, to obtain numerical results, the section obtained in CATIA (reference section) is compared with the section provided by the student (section that needed to be corrected) by means of a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel). The data of the coordinates of the points of the reference section are exported to said spreadsheet as is the data of the coordinates of the section that needed to be corrected, which is contained in a file with a dxf format (Drawing eXchange Format). From these data, by programming the appropriate formulae in the cells of the spreadsheet, the numerical values of the errors are obtained, thereby locating said errors in the dihedral projections of the section which needed to be corrected. Likewise, the application can be programmed to compare the central symmetry of both of the sections. Full article

The editor type can influence the user experience for a domain-specific language, but empirical evaluation of this factor is still quite limited. In this paper, we present the results of our empirical study, in which we compare the productivity of users with different kinds of editors for the same domain-specific language. We chose the domain of quiz definitions and used three editors: a text editor with syntax highlighting and code completion developed with the Xtext framework, a projectional editor created using JetBrains MPS, and an existing form-based editor—Google Forms. The study was performed on 37 graduate students of computer science. The measured time was lower for the text editor than for the form-based editor, and the form-based editor’s time was lower than the projectional one’s; however, the results were statistically insignificant. The experiment was also complemented with a survey providing insight into the perception of different editor types by users. Full article