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Although the guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of food allergy recognize the role of nutrition, there is few literature on the practical issues concerning the nutritional management of children with food allergies.This Consensus Position Statement focuses on the nutritional management and follow-up of infants and children with food allergy.It provides practical advices for the management of children on exclusion diet and it represents an evidence-based consensus on nutritional intervention and follow-up of infants and children with food allergy.Children with food allergies have poor growth compared to non-affected subjects directly proportional to the quantity of foods excluded and the duration of the diet. Nutritional intervention, if properly planned and properly monitored, has proven to be an effective mean to substantiate a recovery in growth.Nutritional intervention depends on the subject’s nutritional status at the time of the diagnosis.The assessment of the nutritional status of children with food allergies should follow a diagnostic pathway that involves a series of successive steps, beginning from the collection of a detailed diet-history.It is essential that children following an exclusion diet are followed up regularly.The periodic re-evaluation of the child is needed to assess the nutritional needs, changing with the age, and the compliance to the diet.The follow- up plan should be established on the basis of the age of the child and following the growth pattern.

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This paper presents a method for detecting edges and contours in noisy pictures. The properties of an edge are embedded in a figure of merit and the edge detection problem becomes the problem of minimizing the given figure of merit. This problem can be represented as a shortest path problem on a graph and can be solved using well-known graph search algorithms. The relations between this representation of the minimization problem and a dynamic programming approach are discussed, showing that the graph search method can lead to substantial improvements in computing time. Moreover, if heuristic search methods are used, the computing time will depend on the amount of noise in the picture. Some experimental results are given; these show how various information about the shape of the contour of an object can be embedded in the figure of merit, thus allowing the extraction of contours from noisy pictures and the separation of touching objects.

Abstract. Global choreographies define the rules that peers should respect in their interaction, with the aim of guaranteeing interoperability. An abstract choreography can be seen as a protocol specification; it does not refer to specific peers and, especially in an open application domain, it might be necessary to retrieve a set of web services that fit in it. A crucial issue, that is raising attention, is verifying whether the business process of some peers, in particular the parts that encode the communicative behavior, will produce interactions which are conformant to the agreed protocol (legality issue). Such issue is tackled by the so called conformance test, which is a means for certifying the capability of interacting of the involved parts: two peers that are proved conformant to a same protocol will actually interoperate by producing a legal conversation. This work proposes an approach to the verification of a priori conformance of a business process to a protocol, which is based on the theory of formal languages and guarantees the interoperability of peers that are individually proved conformant.

Optimal decision table conversion has been tackled in the literature using two approaches, dynamic programming and branch-and-bound. The former technique is quite effective, but its time and space requirements are independent of how “easy” the given table is. Furthermore, it cannot be used to produce good, quasioptimal solutions. The branch-and-bound technique uses a good heuristic to direct the search, but is cluttered up by an enormous search space, since the number of solutions increases with the number of test variables according to a double exponential. In this paper we suggest a heuristically guided top-down search algorithm which, like dynamic programming, recognizes identical subproblems but which can be used to find both optimal and quasioptimal solutions. The heuristic search method introduced in this paper combines the positive aspects of the above two techniques. Compressed tables with a large number of variables can be handled without deriving expanded tables first.

In this paper, we combine Answer Set Programming (ASP) with Dynamic Linear Time Temporal Logic (DLTL) to define a temporal logic programming language for reasoning about complex actions and infinite computations. DLTL extends propositional temporal logic of linear time with regular programs of propositional dynamic logic, which are used for indexing temporal modalities. The action language allows general DLTL formulas to be included in domain descriptions to constrain the space of possible extensions. We introduce a notion of Temporal Answer Set for domain descriptions, based on the usual notion of Answer Set. Also, we provide a translation of domain descriptions into standard ASP and we use Bounded Model Checking techniques for the verification of DLTL constraints.

In this paper we develop a logical framework for specifying and verifying systems of communicating agents and interaction protocols. The framework is based on Dynamic Linear Time Temporal Logic (DLTL), which extends LTL by strengthening the until operator by indexing it with the regular programs of dynamic logic. The framework provides a simple formalization of the communicative actions in terms of their effects and preconditions and the specification of an interaction protocol by means of temporal constraints. We adopt a social approach to agent communication, where communication can be described in terms of changes in the social relations between participants, and protocols in terms of creation, manipulation and satisfaction of commitments among agents. The description of the interaction protocol and of communicative actions is given in a temporal action theory, and agent programs, when known, can be specified as complex actions (regular programs in DLTL). The paper addresses several kinds of verification problems (including the problem of verifying compliance of agents with the protocol), which can be formalized either as validity or as satisfiability problems in the temporal logic and can be solved by model checking techniques. In particular, we show that the verification of the compliance of an agent with the protocol requires to move to the logic DLTL ⊗ , the product version of DLTL.