Personal storage services are one of the most popular applications based on the cloud computing paradigm. Therefore, the analysis of possible privacy and security issues has been a relevant part of the research agenda. However, threats arising from the adoption of information hiding techniques have been mainly neglected. In this perspective, the paper investigates how personal cloud storage services can be used for building covert channels for stealthy exchange of information through the Internet. To have a realistic use case, we consider the Dropbox application and we present the performance evaluation of two different covert communication methods. To understand the stealthiness of our approach and propose countermeasures, we also investigate some behaviors of Dropbox in a production quality deployment.

BACKGROUND: It is known from recent studies that more than 90% of human multi-exon genes are subject to Alternative Splicing (AS), a key molecular mechanism in which multiple transcripts may be generated from a single gene. It is widely recognized that a breakdown in AS mechanisms plays an important role in cellular differentiation and pathologies. Polymerase Chain Reactions, microarrays and sequencing technologies have been applied to the study of transcript diversity arising from alternative expression. Last generation Affymetrix GeneChip Human Exon 1.0 ST Arrays offer a more detailed view of the gene expression profile providing information on the AS patterns. The exon array technology, with more than five million data points, can detect approximately one million exons, and it allows performing analyses at both gene and exon level. In this paper we describe BEAT, an integrated user-friendly bioinformatics framework to store, analyze and visualize exon arrays datasets. It combines a data warehouse approach with some rigorous statistical methods for assessing the AS of genes involved in diseases. Meta statistics are proposed as a novel approach to explore the analysis results. BEAT is available at http://beat.ba.itb.cnr.it. RESULTS: BEAT is a web tool which allows uploading and analyzing exon array datasets using standard statistical methods and an easy-to-use graphical web front-end. BEAT has been tested on a dataset with 173 samples and tuned using new datasets of exon array experiments from 28 colorectal cancer and 26 renal cell cancer samples produced at the Medical Genetics Unit of IRCCS Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza.To highlight all possible AS events, alternative names, accession Ids, Gene Ontology terms and biochemical pathways annotations are integrated with exon and gene level expression plots. The user can customize the results choosing custom thresholds for the statistical parameters and exploiting the available clinical data of the samples for a multivariate AS analysis. CONCLUSIONS: Despite exon array chips being widely used for transcriptomics studies, there is a lack of analysis tools offering advanced statistical features and requiring no programming knowledge. BEAT provides a user-friendly platform for a comprehensive study of AS events in human diseases, displaying the analysis results with easily interpretable and interactive tables and graphics.

This paper describes a technological solution for the remote fruition of an archaeological site, a cave hosting pre-historical heritage of relevant importance, using a properly equipped mobile robot. The goal is twofold: to increase the fruition of these precious paintings (both off-line and on-line with the robot moving in the cave) and to collect data (about the two-dimensional map of the complex cave and about the three-dimensional structure of the wall hosting the paints) that can be important to increase the understanding of the environment by the experts. The choice of the robot is suitable for this task before it does need a very light and minimal installation of mobile and reversible infrastructures: in fact in such an environment any intervention can cause significant damages to the archaeological site. The current modules are able to explore the cave to determine the most interesting zones (with a richer content of pre-historical wall paintings), to collect three-dimensional data (using a laser range finder) that allow the reconstruction of a planar map of the cave, the navigation between these relevant zones, the fine positioning with respect to the paintings and the reconstruction of a full three-dimensional model of the walls hosting the paints starting from a set of three images acquired from slightly different points of view.

This paper is concerned with the probleni of determining the position of the vehicle both in goal-oriented and free- path navigations. A vision system for self location of a mobile robot has been devel- oped. By means of few known landmarks, the system has the ability of continuously monitoring position and compare these es- timates with the measures provided by the odometers. Besides a procedure has been im- plemented that recovers the position of the vehicle when the other sensors completely fail.