Abstract

Abstract
This study involves several theories, namely: the theory of reasoned action, the technology acceptance model, the theory of planned behavior and the internet banking acceptance model. It aims to understand the relationships between the virtual atmosphere and emotional states, how the individual characteristics (social identity, altruism and telepresence) and emotional states influence attitudes, and how attitudes, past experience and trust influence actual use of a site. To this end, the authors developed three conceptual models explaining the relationships among the above-mentioned variables. Methodologically, descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and the generalized maximum entropy estimator are used to test the three models in a wedding site. Of the eight hypotheses proposed, one can only partially validate hypotheses h1, h2, h3 and h6, while hypothesis h7 is accepted and the remaining are rejected.

Abstract
This paper describes the assessment of performance of educational services recurring to benchmarking. We adopted two perspectives for the evaluation of secondary schools, aligned with the objectives of different stakeholders. In the society perspective schools are viewed as promoting students achievement ( ideally including not only academic results but also interpersonal capacities) given the students characteristics in terms of academic abilities and socio-economic backgrounds. In the educational authorities perspective schools are viewed as transforming a set of resources ( including students with given characteristics in terms of academic abilities and socioeconomic backgrounds and also school resources, such as teachers) into students achievement. The relative performance assessment was carried out using Data Envelopment Analysis models, followed by an exploratory analysis of contextual indicators that potentially affect schools' performance, in order to understand their impact on the educational process.

Abstract
To help laypeople surpass the common difficulties they face when searching for health information on the Web, we built Health Suggestions, an extension for Google Chrome to assist users obtaining high-quality search results in the health domain. This is achieved by providing users with suggestions of queries formulated in different terminologies and languages. Translations of health expressions might not be obvious and queries in languages with a strong presence on the Web facilitate the access to high-quality health contents. On the other hand, the use of lay terminology might contribute to increase users' comprehension and medico-scientific terminology to obtain more detailed and technical contents. Results show a good acceptance of the suggestions, confirm the utility of a multilingual and multi-terminology approach and show its usefulness to more successful searches.

Abstract
This paper presents a new methodology to solve the reconfiguration problem of electrical distribution systems (EDSs) with variable demand, using the artificial immune algorithm Copt-aiNet (Artificial Immune Network for Combinatorial Optimization). This algorithm is an optimization technique inspired by immune network theory (aiNet). The reconfiguration problem with variable demand is a complex problem of a combinatorial nature. The goal is to identify the best radial topology for an EDS in order to minimize the cost of energy losses in a given operation period. A specialized sweep load flow for radial systems was used to evaluate the feasibility of the topology with respect to the operational constraints of the EDS and to calculate the active power losses for each demand level. The algorithm was implemented in C++ and was evaluated using test systems with 33, 84, and 136 nodes, as well as a real system with 417 nodes. The obtained results were compared with those in the literature in order to validate and prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

Abstract
State-based CRDTs allow updates on local replicas without remote synchronization. Once these updates are propagated, possible conflicts are resolved deterministically across all replicas. d-CRDTs bring significant advantages in terms of the size of messages exchanged between replicas during normal operation. However, when a replica joins the system after a network partition, it needs to receive the updates it missed and propagate the ones performed locally. Current systems solve this by exchanging the full state bidirectionally or by storing additional metadata along the CRDT. We introduce the concept of join-decomposition for state-based CRDTs, a technique orthogonal and complementary to delta-mutation, and propose two synchronization methods that reduce the amount of information exchanged, with no need to modify current CRDT definitions. © 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).