Currently there is a large amount of educational resources available, developed by many educational institutions at all level. One of the main challenges is to make use of such wealth of material in a simple and effective way, especially when pre-university education is involved, ranging from primary schools to high schools. The main difficulties experienced by the teachers willing to tailor the available material to the specific needs of their class are typically the lack of available time and the difficulties in learning the peculiar procedures that each repository system (including CMS, LMS etc.) requires. This work presents an architecture to integrate different repository systems using the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) API, as well as an integration layer that provides a much more simplified interface suitable for the needs of the content creators (i.e., Teachers), and the users of the contents (i.e., The learners). Both the technical aspects of integration and the usability issues from the point of view of the teachers are described and considered in the design. The first experiments, evaluated by means of performance indicators and some user feedbacks, show that the platform has the potential for widespread adoption in the Italian educational environment.

The main contribution of this work in progress is an open source architecture for seamless integration of open access educational resources located in heterogeneous learning management systems (LMS) distributed across the network. One of the main advantages of the proposal is the simplicity in creating, managing and making available new content that builds on the existing material in different repositories. Some previous works addressed similar issues but either in simpler environments, i.e., when the distributed systems were homogeneous, or they require extensive knowledge to take advantages of the integration, from the point of view of both the content creator and the manager of each learning system. Our solution exploits the possibilities offered by the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) interface typically present in many content repository platforms allowing users to browse and interact with contents stored in several heterogeneous places. Some preliminary results show that it is possible to efficiently combine engineering learning material taken from our technical university with other online resources made available from different educational institutions. Moreover, two extensions, currently in development, aim at providing seamless videoconferencing integrations between the teacher and the learners as well as at supporting remote laboratory sessions by means of controlling programmable objects in remote laboratories with real-time video feedbacks for the students.

Lossless coding of video sequences is becoming increasingly attractive for applications as diverse as digital cinema, medical imaging and professional video processing. We present a new low-delay, low-complexity algorithm for lossless color video compression. The proposed technique adaptively exploits temporal, spatial and spectral redundancy. Key features of the coder are a backward-adaptive temporal predictor, an intra-frame spatial predictor and adaptive optimal weighting of both predictive components. The residual error is entropy coded by a context-based arithmetic encoder. The proposed lossless video encoder delivers significantly higher compression gains than traditional approaches at approximately the same complexity and delay, enabling efficient storage and communications for emerging lossless video applications.

We present our new low-complexity compression algorithm for lossless coding of video sequences. This new coder produces better compression ratios than lossless compression of individual images by exploiting temporal as well as spatial and spectral redundancy. Key features of the coder are a pixel-neighborhood backward-adaptive temporal predictor, an intra-frame spatial predictor and a differential coding scheme of the spectral components. The residual error is entropy coded by a context-based arithmetic encoder. This new lossless video encoder outperforms state-of-the-art lossless image compression techniques, enabling more efficient video storage and communications.

In the usual ARQ (automatic-repeat-request) communication protocols, when the receiver detects the presence of errors in a received message, it requests the retransmission of another copy of the message, and the process continues until an uncorrupted copy reaches the destination. If the quality of the channel is poor, the number of retransmissions may become very large. In order to improve the efficiency at large channel error rates, some new techniques known as Type-II Hybrid ARQ Schemes have previously been proposed. In these techniques the transmitter does not retransmit the message encoded as in the first transmission: it sends instead additional redundancy that is decoded at the destination along with the previously received information to allow error correction. In the present paper a new kind of Type-II hybrid ARQ transmission scheme is proposed. The copies of the message are encoded in different ways, so that each copy has the same information content, and the knowledge of any subset of the copies allows error correction. This transmission scheme is well suited to broadcast as well as for point to point communications. The authors have obtained through computer search a family of optimum and quasi-optimum codes for the proposed transmission scheme. They are described along with new decoding techniques of remarkable simplicity and effectiveness. These codes allow a message to be encoded in up to three different ways, and they are shown to be simple to encode and decode and to perform well over channels affected by error bursts.>

An automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) system for sequential circuits is described. Techniques such as testability measures, 9-valued functions, incompatibility function and fault simulation have been added to the basic algorithm in order to increase the fault coverage and reduce the test generation time. The entire ATPG system has been benchmarked on the set of ISCAS89 circuits.>

The authors describe an algebraic algorithm for automatic test pattern generation for sequential circuits. Three innovative concepts have been introduced in order to reduce the computational time required for pattern generation. These are: firstly, circuit partitioning in fanout-free regions; then, computation of observability and excitability functions for state propagation and justification; and finally, assignment of an observability and an excitability order to each node of the decision tree, for fast test pattern detection of each fault.>

A family of switching networks, called "arithmetic networks," is investigated. The elementary units of these networks are generalizations of full adders that can process input signals of different weights.

TOPI is a special-purpose computer for the synthesis and analysis of Boolean functions. The algorithms executed by TOPI have been developed specifically for this computer and are an evolution of the iterative consensus method. They allow the determination and classification of the prime implicants of a given Boolean function, as well as the determination of a number of irredundant normal coverings. The computer capabilities are limited to single-output functions of a maximum of 15 variables, or to n-output functions of a maximum of 15-n variables.

Abstract—A new class of modular networks, called "modular tree networks," is presented. In these circuits every input of the first-level gate is connected to the output of a different second-level unit, and, in general, every input of every ith-level unit is connected to the output of a different (i+1)th-level unit.

Some new procedures for synthetizing three-input majority gate networks have been described. Both a geometrical approach on the map of the assigned function and an algebraic procedure have been discussed. The geometrical methods give a number of different solutions and may lead to the simplest networks, but their use requires ingenuity. Therefore, some of the solutions suggested by the analysis of the maps have been translated into algebraic expressions, which may be easily used for automatic computation. The techniques described are applicable to any and all Boolean functions and lead to simple solutions. In fact, every function of n variables can be implemented by a network having (n-1) levels of gates, if n is odd, or n levels, if n is even, at the most. All the procedures are relatively simple and can be extended to the synthesis of networks of any type (m, t).