Abstract

Abstract
CloudAnchor is a multi-agent brokerage platform for the negotiation of Infrastructure as a Service cloud resources between Small and Medium Sized Enterprises, acting either as providers or consumers. This project entails the research, design, and implementation of a smart contract solution to permanently record and manage contractual and behavioural stakeholder data on a blockchain network. Smart contracts enable safe contract code execution, increasing trust between parties and ensuring the integrity and traceability of the chained contents. The defined smart contracts represent the inter-business trustworthiness and Service Level Agreements established within the platform. CloudAnchor interacts with the blockchain network through a dedicated Application Programming Interface, which coordinates and optimises the submission of transactions. The performed tests indicate the success of this integration: (i) the number and value of negotiated resources remain identical; and (ii) the run-time increases due to the inherent latency of the blockchain operation. Nonetheless, the introduced latency does not affect the brokerage performance, proving to be an appropriate solution for reliable partner selection and contractual enforcement between untrusted parties. This novel approach stores all brokerage strategic knowledge in a distributed, decentralised, and immutable database. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
This study presents the dependence of strain sensitivity on cavity length in conventional Fabry-Perot (F-P) sensors. A high number of F-P sensors were required and to ensure their reproducibility, a manufacturing process was developed to obtain similar sensors but with different types of lengths. A hollow-core silica tube was used to fabricate several F-P cavities by fusion splicing it between two sections of SMF28 fiber. The fabricated F-P has a varying length ranging from 15 to 2500 mu m. The cavities were measured under a microscope and the reflected spectrum was acquired for each one. Strain measurements were performed for a maximum strain of 1000 mu epsilon. The strain sensitivity showed a highly linear correlation with increment lambda(FSR). Small length variations for short cavities heavily affect the FSR value. The smallest and longest cavities present sensitivities of 8.71 and 2.68 pm/mu epsilon, respectively. Thermal characterization for low- and high-temperature regimes was also performed and is constant for tested sensors.

Abstract
Modern online systems for user modeling and recommendation need to continuously deal with complex data streams generated by users at very fast rates. This can be overwhelming for systems and algorithms designed to train recommendation models in batches, given the continuous and potentially fast change of content, context and user preferences or intents. Therefore, it is important to investigate methods able to transparently and continuously adapt to the inherent dynamics of user interactions, preferably for long periods of time. Online models that continuously learn from such flows of data are gaining attention in the recommender systems community, given their natural ability to deal with data generated in dynamic, complex environments. User modeling and personalization can particularly benefit from algorithms capable of maintaining models incrementally and online. The objective of this workshop is to foster contributions and bring together a growing community of researchers and practitioners interested in online, adaptive approaches to user modeling, recommendation and personalization, and their implications regarding multiple dimensions, such as evaluation, reproducibility, privacy, fairness and transparency. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Abstract
Background: Approximately 62% of patients with breast cancer with a pathogenic variant (BRCA1 or BRCA2) undergo primary breast-conserving therapy. Objective: The study aims to develop a personalized risk management decision support tool for carriers of a pathogenic variant (BRCA1 or BRCA2) who underwent breast-conserving therapy for unilateral early-stage breast cancer. Methods: We developed a Bayesian network model of a hypothetical cohort of carriers of BRCA1 or BRCA2 diagnosed with stage I/II unilateral breast cancer and treated with breast-conserving treatment who underwent subsequent second primary cancer risk-reducing strategies. Using event dependencies structured according to expert knowledge and conditional probabilities obtained from published evidence, we predicted the 40-year overall survival rate of different risk-reducing strategies for 144 cohorts of women defined by the type of pathogenic variants (BRCA1 or BRCA2), age at primary breast cancer diagnosis, breast cancer subtype, stage of primary breast cancer, and presence or absence of adjuvant chemotherapy. Results: Absence of adjuvant chemotherapy was the most powerful factor that was linked to a dramatic decline in survival. There was a negligible decline in the mortality in patients with triple-negative breast cancer, who received no chemotherapy and underwent any secondary risk-reducing strategy, compared with surveillance. The potential survival benefit from any risk-reducing strategy was more modest in patients with triple-negative breast cancer who received chemotherapy compared with patients with luminal breast cancer. However, most patients with triple-negative breast cancer in stage I benefited from bilateral risk-reducing mastectomy and risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy or just risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy. Most patients with luminal stage I/II unilateral breast cancer benefited from bilateral risk-reducing mastectomy and risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy. The impact of risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy in patients with luminal breast cancer in stage I/II increased with age. Most older patients with the BRCA1 and BRCA2 pathogenic variants in exons 12-24/25 with luminal breast cancer may gain a similar survival benefit from other risk-reducing strategies or surveillance. Conclusions: Our study showed that it is mandatory to consider the complex interplay between the types of BRCA1 and BRCA2 pathogenic variants, age at primary breast cancer diagnosis, breast cancer subtype and stage, and received systemic treatment. As no prospective study results are available at the moment, our simulation model, which will integrate a decision support system in the near future, could facilitate the conversation between the health care provider and patient and help to weigh all the options for risk-reducing strategies leading to a more balanced decision.

Abstract
This research is a part of the Erasmus+ internationally funded InDo research project, involving a consortium led by an Italian higher education institution. An objective of the project is to include desk and field research on the topics of Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction, which led to this article having been produced, for knowledge transfer purposes. To carry out this research study, the Boolean operators "Understanding by design"; "Differentiated instruction"; "Higher education" and, "Cross-disciplinary material" applied to the title, abstract, and keywords in the Scopus database were used. Using all operators simultaneously returned no results. Only the Boolean operators "Differentiated instruction" AND "Higher education" and the operator "Cross-disciplinary material" alone brought results. 24 articles were found on Differentiated instruction and Higher education. This group of articles was previously analyzed in a Bibliometric way, using the "Bibliometrix" package from the free software R Studio. Regarding the searches for the term "Cross-disciplinary material", the Scopus database returned only 1 result, which was combined with the 24 articles previously identified, totaling a total of 25 articles related to the two themes. Given the difficulty of access - articles, books, and book chapters with restricted access - 6 investigations were excluded, leaving 19 potentially relevant articles, which were read in their entirety. From the analysis of the 19 articles selected for full reading, 1 investigation was excluded for not fitting the parameters of this research, resulting in a total of 18 articles that were analyzed using a meta-synthesis. After the analysis performed, it can be seen that the main theory used has been differentiated instruction coupled with issues such as standardized assessments for the identification of learning styles, personalized feedback instruments, online applications, the perception of self-efficacy, as well as concern for the development of analytical models for differentiated instruction. Less expressively, other theories that emerge from the analysis performed, are the flipped classroom, Universal Learning Design, a diagnostic assessment and interdisciplinary education.