Articles on AI governance, cybersecurity and systems architecture.
Notes on the JAMIA paper describing cTAKES (Savova et al., 2010): its UIMA annotator architecture, the UMLS dictionary lookup, NegEx-based negation, and the component figures measured on the Mayo corpus.
Read moreA technical reckoning of free software in 2010: from distributed version control to licensing, what really changed in the daily work of standing up sites and applications.
Read moreThe Open Information Security Foundation released Suricata 1.0 in July 2010: an intrusion detection engine rewritten in C with a multi-threaded architecture, port-independent protocol recognition and Snort rule compatibility. Technical notes on what changes against the single-threaded model.
Read moreMounting air-quality sensors on a vehicle produces data the fixed-station rules cannot interpret. Technical notes on measurement traceability, starting from the RIPEG system.
Read moreAdopting free software in the public sector does not end with the licence: someone has to maintain, integrate and support the code over time. A technical note on the role of firms, from the 2010 Tuscan context.
Read morePublishing source code under an open source licence is not the same as surrendering know-how: what remains protectable as a secret and what becomes public, in the light of TRIPS art. 39, Reg. EC 772/2004 and arts. 98-99 of the Italian IP Code.
Read moreROS 1.0, released in January 2010 by Willow Garage under a BSD licence, organises robot software as a graph of processes that talk via publish/subscribe to separate drivers, algorithms and hardware. Architecture, design choices and limits against Player/Stage and earlier middleware.
Read moreArticle 69 of the Italian Digital Administration Code requires public bodies to grant their commissioned software for reuse, in source form and free of charge. I trace the legal chain that led here and the points where the obligation hollows out.
Read moreDoing knowledge management in a risk-analysis setting means indexing heterogeneous, versioned documents. What the open-source stack offers in 2009: semantic wikis, Lucene, Solr.
Read moreHow the National Library of Medicine's MetaMap links English biomedical text to Concept Unique Identifiers in the UMLS Metathesaurus: the lexical-variant pipeline, and the practical limits around ambiguity, language and coverage.
Read morePuppet 0.24, by Luke Kanies and Reductive Labs, describes a system's configuration as a set of resources with a desired state. Notes on its DSL, catalog, idempotency and agent/master architecture as they stand in 2009.
Read moreHow a visual editor for scientific workflows is translated into WS-BPEL executable on a Globus grid, and why the dataflow the biologist draws does not coincide with BPEL's web-service orchestration model.
Read moreTechnical notes on Xen paravirtualisation, live migration and the running cost of a server estate, written alongside a seminar on free software in public administration.
Read moreTechnical notes on the first year of Fab Academy: the digital fabrication course derived from MIT's MAS.863, delivered in a distributed way across local Fab Labs, with the CAD/CAM chain and public documentation as the deliverable.
Read moreTechnical notes on building, in 2009, the website for a bimonthly magazine: an open-source CMS, RSS/Atom feeds, PDF distribution, and the problem of keeping the conversation alive between one issue and the next.
Read moreOpenCV 1.0 is not a medical imaging library, yet its 2D operations cover much of what mammography, retinoscopy, dermatology and microscopy actually need. What the 1.x line offers in 2008, where its domain ends, and why DICOM and CT/MR volumes stay out.
Read morePloneGov brings a co-operative model for the public sector to Italy, built on Plone: bodies pooling code instead of re-purchasing the same applications. Technical notes and the limits of the model.
Read moreCompatibility between open licences, and between open and proprietary ones, depends on the clauses, not on the code. GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, MPL 1.1, BSD and Apache 2.0 compared, with Italian law 633/1941 in the background.
Read moreOn 9 February 2008 a RepRap 1.0 Darwin produced more than half of its own printed parts. Technical notes on partial self-replication, the GPL licence and the 2008 FDM software chain.
Read moreThe day before the second PyCon Italia, Python 2.6a3 and 3.0a5 ship: notes on migrating the language and on the state of the WSGI web ecosystem.
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