Abstract
A new configuration for volatile organic compound sensing is proposed. A sub-milimiter four-hole suspended core optical fiber tip, spliced to a standard single mode fiber, is dipped in a liquid volatile compound and the reflected signal is continuously interrogated. When the fiber is immersed in acetone it suffers a 1 4 dB signal drop. Different menisci form in each cladding cavity, with different evaporation times and rates. The signal restores its initial state not when the evaporation process is complete but after the collapse of a dominant meniscus.

Abstract
To cope with the needs raised by the demographic changes in our society, several Ambient-Assisted Living (AAL) technologies have emerged in recent years, but those 'first offers' are often monolithic, incompatible and thus expensive and potentially not sustainable. The AAL4ALL project aims at improving that situation through the development of an open ecosystem of interoperable AAL components (products and services), tied together by an integration infrastructure, comprising a message-queue based service bus and gateways bridging the communication with devices. To that end, the project encompasses the specification of interfaces and requirements for interoperable components, against which candidates can be tested and certified before entering the ecosystem. This paper proposes a testing and certification methodology for such an ecosystem. Besides fulfilling specified pre-requisites, candidate components must pass unit tests that check their conformance with interface specifications and integration tests that check their semantic interoperability with other components in specified orchestration scenarios.

Abstract
We present a comparative analysis of PARK2 genetic variants based on genotype data from HapMap. We focused our study on the association between missense mutations and all other variations within the same gene to uncover patterns of hidden genetic variation. Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) are the main neurodegenerative diseases and represent a growing health concern worldwide, with the increase in the elderly population. Mutations in several genes have been associated with either AD or PD, and the number of novel genetic variants characterized is expanding rapidly with the introduction of next generation sequencing technologies. Most of these variants, however, are of unknown consequences as their effect might be mediated through association with additional mutations. Our results show that significant correlation between genetic variants exists and their co-occurrence might contribute to previously unidentified risk increase.

Abstract

Abstract
A multi-robot system is formed when a group of robots interact with the environment as a single system. This system can also be in formation in order to accomplish tasks rather difficult or impossible to achieve with a single robot. A nonlinear model predictive formation control (NMPFC) was used to converge a group of middle sized mobile soccer robots towards a desired target using the concept of active target tracking. This paper presents a novel approach on formation controller's weight tuning in order to minimize an objective function that reflects the controller's efficiency with respect to a given criteria. Furthermore, the results of simulation and experiment with real robots are presented and discussed.

Abstract
This paper proposes a method for computing the expectation for the length of a maximum set of vertex-disjoint cycles in a digraph where vertices and/or arcs are subject to failure with a known probability. This method has an immediate practical application: it can be used for the solution of a kidney exchange program in the common situation where the underlying graph is unreliable. Results for realistic benchmark instances are reported and analyzed.