Which protocols for a regional tourism platform
When a region's data comes from heterogeneous sources, integration is decided on the choice of protocols. A survey of REST, gRPC, GraphQL, MQTT and the OGC standards as of January 2017.
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Articles on AI governance, cybersecurity and systems architecture.
2017
Classifying sleep stages from biometric signals
Sleep stages are derived from physiological signals read according to codified rules. Scoring standards, data exchange formats, actigraphy and the EU regulatory path for sleep-analysis software as of early 2017.
Read more2016
Classifying sleep: from actigraphy to polysomnography
Automatic sleep staging between the historical actigraphy rules and time-series classifiers on polysomnographic signals, constrained by class imbalance and clinical validation.
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Fab Lab Cascina: reproducibility as a network requirement
A fab lab is defined by a shared inventory of machines and a common open-source toolchain. The opening of Fab Lab Toscana in Cascina is an occasion to examine what makes the nodes of the Fab network interoperable.
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Three years after Snowden: what changed in transport protocols
Since 5 June 2013 the technical community has rewritten its assumptions about the network channel: RFC 7258, forward secrecy as a default, the withdrawal of Dual_EC_DRBG, Let's Encrypt. A review of the measurable changes in protocols.
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Let's Encrypt leaves beta: a CA that renews certificates on its own
On 12 April 2016 Let's Encrypt reached general availability. Technical notes on ACME, domain validation, 90-day certificates, and the constraint that automatic renewal places on operations.
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How MITK 2016.03, the DKFZ imaging toolkit, is put together
A technical read of the Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit at release 2016.03: the ITK + VTK stack, DataStorage as the shared data model, BlueBerry sitting on the CTK Plugin Framework and CppMicroServices, and the limits that remain on the regulatory side.
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Keycloak: an Open Source identity server for delegating login and sessions
Keycloak 1.9 speaks OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and SAML 2.0 in a single Apache 2.0 server. Technical notes on SSO, identity brokering, LDAP federation and the limits of delegation.
Read more2015
The document-centric model of the Italian EHR after DPCM 178/2015
The technical rules for Italy's Electronic Health Record set out a federated architecture built on signed CDA R2 documents and IHE XDS.b/XCA profiles, with INI as an interoperability gateway between regional records.
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JWT (RFC 7519): format, registered claims and the March 2015 bugs
RFC 7519 was published in May 2015 and fixes the JSON Web Token format. Technical notes on the structure, the registered claims, and the two classes of bug Tim McLean disclosed in March.
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React Native: how the bridge between JavaScript and native widgets works
On 26 March 2015 Facebook published the iOS version of React Native on GitHub. Technical notes on native rendering, the asynchronous bridge, and the limits known so far.
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Babel 5.0: the transpiler becomes a plugin pipeline
With version 5.0 (31 March 2015) the 6to5 transpiler, renamed Babel, opens a plugin API and adopts the TC39 process stages. Technical notes on the AST architecture and the chosen defaults.
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openEHR and two-level modelling: the technical model kept apart from the clinical concept
A stable Reference Model underneath, clinician-governed archetypes in ADL on top. How openEHR keeps the software model separate from clinical concepts, and what that costs and yields for interoperability and maintenance.
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Graylog 1.0: centralised logs with Elasticsearch and MongoDB
Graylog 1.0, released 17 February 2015, keeps the search index (Elasticsearch) separate from configuration metadata (MongoDB). Notes on GELF, syslog ingestion, streams, and extractor ordering.
Read more2014
osquery: querying host state with SQL
On 29 October 2014 Facebook released osquery, which exposes a system's processes, sockets and files as queryable SQL tables. Technical notes on its architecture and limits.
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Reading FHIR DSTU 1 after years of HL7 v2 and CDA
FHIR DSTU 1 (v0.0.82) exposes clinical entities as REST resources in XML or JSON. Reading notes on its design choices against HL7 v2 and CDA R2.
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An RF field meter inside the browser: serial data with the Chrome Serial APIs
How to read a personal radiofrequency electromagnetic field sensor from a Chrome app over a USB serial port, and why V/m readings only become legible next to the thresholds of ICNIRP 1998 and the Italian DPCM of 8 July 2003.
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Supervised classifiers for in-line quality control
On a production line that uses machine learning to catch defects, the result depends more on the labels and on optical stability than on the algorithm. Technical notes on features, models and operational constraints.
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Webpack 1.0: the bundle as a dependency graph
On 19 February 2014 webpack reached version 1.0. Its graph, loaders and code splitting address problems left open by browserify and RequireJS.
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Hugo, a static site generator written in Go: the differences from Jekyll
Hugo 0.9.0 builds a static site from Markdown with no external runtime: a single Go binary, the Blackfriday engine, html/template, indexes for taxonomies. Technical notes from a hands-on trial.
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