Over the past century technology has played a decisive role in defining, driving, and reinventing procedures, devices, and pharmaceuticals in healthcare. Cloud computing has been introduced only recently but is already one of the major topics of discussion in research and clinical settings. The provision of extensive, easily accessible, and reconfigurable resources such as virtual systems, platforms, and applications with low service cost has caught the attention of many researchers and clinicians. Healthcare researchers are moving their efforts to the cloud, because they need adequate resources to process, store, exchange, and use large quantities of medical data. This Vision 20/20 paper addresses major questions related to the applicability of advanced cloud computing in medical imaging. The paper also considers security and ethical issues that accompany cloud computing.

We present a new scheduler architecture, which permits adding QoS policies to the scheduling decisions. We also present a new scheduling synthesis method which allows a designer to obtain a safe scheduler for a particular application and at the same time helps him in analysing the task interactions and the overall system behaviour. Our scheduler architecture and scheduler synthesis method have not been developed for a particular application model and, therefore, can be used for heterogeneous applications, where there are periodic tasks, event-driven ones and tasks which are always enabled and where the tasks communicate through various synchronisation primitives. Finally, we present a prototype implementation of this scheduler architecture and related mechanisms on top of an open-source OS for embedded systems.

No abstract

No abstract

Runtime monitoring is performed during system execution to detect whether the system's behaviour deviates from that described by requirements. To support this activity we have developed a monitoring framework that expresses the requirements to be monitored in event calculus -a formal temporal first order language. Following an investigation of how this framework could be used to monitor security requirements, in this paper we propose patterns for expressing three basic types of such requirements, namely confidentiality, integrity and availability. These patterns aim to ease the task of specifying confidentiality, integrity and availability requirements in monitorable forms by non-expert users. The paper illustrates the use of these patterns using examples of an industrial case study.