It is known from recent studies that more than 90% of human multi-exon genes are subject toAlternative Splicing (AS), a key molecular mechanism in which multiple transcripts may be generated from a singlegene. It is widely recognized that a breakdown in AS mechanisms plays an important role in cellular differentiationand pathologies. Polymerase Chain Reactions, microarrays and sequencing technologies have been applied to thestudy of transcript diversity arising from alternative expression. Last generation Affymetrix GeneChip Human Exon1.0 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 userfriendlybioinformatics framework to store, analyze and visualize exon arrays datasets. It combines a datawarehouse 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 statisticalmethods and an easy-to-use graphical web front-end. BEAT has been tested on a dataset with 173 samples andtuned using new datasets of exon array experiments from 28 colorectal cancer and 26 renal cell cancer samplesproduced 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 biochemicalpathways annotations are integrated with exon and gene level expression plots. The user can customize the resultschoosing custom thresholds for the statistical parameters and exploiting the available clinical data of the samplesfor a multivariate AS analysis.Conclusions: Despite exon array chips being widely used for transcriptomics studies, there is a lack of analysistools offering advanced statistical features and requiring no programming knowledge. BEAT provides a user-friendlyplatform for a comprehensive study of AS events in human diseases, displaying the analysis results with easilyinterpretable and interactive tables and graphics.

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 to stealthy exchange 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.

Drones of various shapes, sizes, and functionalities have emerged over the past few decades, and their civilian applications are becoming increasingly appealing. Flexible, low-cost, and high-resolution remote sensing systems that use drones as platforms are important for filling data gaps and supplementing the capabilities of crewed/manned aircraft and satellite remote sensing systems. The benefits of drone remote sensing include low material and operational costs, flexible control of spatial and temporal resolution, high-intensity data collection, and the absence of risk to crews. Here, we refer to this growing remote sensing initiative as drone remote sensing and explain its unique advantages in monitoring and environmental protection research and practices: in this case study we report the application of a drone to land monitoring aimed at identifying the presence of asbestos in friable matrix in piles of waste abandoned in inaccessible areas like ephemeral watershed of the typical karst landscape of Apulia and other protected areas.

A poster about the use of marsupial robots and vehicles for next-genaration of missions in polar regions

The present invention refers to the problem of the automatic detection of events in sport field, in particular Goal/NoGoal events by signalling to the mach management, which can autonomously take the final decision upon the event. The system is not invasive for the field structures, neither it requires to interrupt the game or to modify the rules thereof, but it only aims at detecting objectively the event occurrence and at providing support in the referees' decisions by means of specific signalling of the detected events.