Accounting processes and their impact on the profitability of companies

The objective of the following study is to analyze the importance of accounting processes and the impact that financial statements have on the profitability of companies through a qualitative and descriptive approach, in which it is described how important it is for companies the carrying out an efficient accounting process that leads to the correct execution of the financial statements, so that it allows the managers to make better decisions, through the different criteria of authors on the subject of study it was possible to have as the Accounting processes are of great importance for every company, since by means of the efficiency that is had, the quality of the information that will be presented in the financial statements will be given, which leaves us as a conclusion that both the accounting processes and the financial statements allow to detail the financial information that is obtained by transactional operations in this way to know in a real way the company situation.

On Secure E-Voting over Blockchain

This article discusses secure methods to conduct e-voting over a blockchain in three different settings: decentralized voting, centralized remote voting, and centralized polling station voting. These settings cover almost all voting scenarios that occur in practice. A proof-of-concept implementation for decentralized voting over Ethereum’s blockchain is presented. This work demonstrates the suitable use of a blockchain not just as a public bulletin board but, more importantly, as a trustworthy computing platform that enforces the correct execution of the voting protocol in a publicly verifiable manner. We also discuss scaling up a blockchain-based voting application for national elections. We show that for national-scale elections the major verifiability problems can be addressed without having to depend on any blockchain. However, a blockchain remains a viable option to realize a public bulletin board, which has the advantage of being a “preventive” measure to stop retrospective changes on previously published records as opposed to a “detective” measure like the use of mirror websites. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy ;

Clinical procedures in stage II implant supported fixed dental prosthesis: A case report

Restoring a partially edentulous jaw with implant-supported prosthesis is a challenge. The clinical outcome will be satisfactory only when both the surgical phase as well as the prosthetic phase are planned in advance and executed while keeping in mind the aesthetic and functional necessities. In this case report we describe the steps in successfully restoring the edentulous space with implant supported FP1 prosthesis. The sequential steps that were followed in the prosthetic phase has been described in detail. From the satisfactory outcome of the case, it can be concluded that proper evaluation, prosthetically driven treatment planning and correct execution of the plan would ensure good predictability of the implant-supported prosthesis.

Research and Design of Java Timing Processing Method

There are differences among programming languages. In contrast to C/C++ in Linux, standard Java timer has some issues, such as uncontrollable execution order, unpredictable start moment and running duration, when it’s applied to handle dense timing tasks. So it could not be directly used by some military applications with strict requirements on time sequence. In this paper, its root cause is analyzed, and then an improved method based on queue and delay feedback is presented, as well as its implementation flow chart. The test results show that, this method is able to not only ensure the correct execution order, but also reduce the uncontrollable delay. So it could satisfy the time sequence demand of military applications.

Reconciling optimization with secure compilation

Software protections against side-channel and physical attacks are essential to the development of secure applications. Such protections are meaningful at machine code or micro-architectural level, but they typically do not carry observable semantics at source level. This renders them susceptible to miscompilation, and security engineers embed input/output side-effects to prevent optimizing compilers from altering them. Yet these side-effects are error-prone and compiler-dependent. The current practice involves analyzing the generated machine code to make sure security or privacy properties are still enforced. These side-effects may also be too expensive in fine-grained protections such as control-flow integrity. We introduce observations of the program state that are intrinsic to the correct execution of security protections, along with means to specify and preserve observations across the compilation flow. Such observations complement the input/output semantics-preservation contract of compilers. We introduce an opacification mechanism to preserve and enforce a partial ordering of observations. This approach is compatible with a production compiler and does not incur any modification to its optimization passes. We validate the effectiveness and performance of our approach on a range of benchmarks, expressing the secure compilation of these applications in terms of observations to be made at specific program points.

Specifying and testing GPU workgroup progress models

As GPU availability has increased and programming support has matured, a wider variety of applications are being ported to these platforms. Many parallel applications contain fine-grained synchronization idioms; as such, their correct execution depends on a degree of relative forward progress between threads (or thread groups). Unfortunately, many GPU programming specifications (e.g. Vulkan and Metal) say almost nothing about relative forward progress guarantees between workgroups. Although prior work has proposed a spectrum of plausible progress models for GPUs, cross-vendor specifications have yet to commit to any model. This work is a collection of tools and experimental data to aid specification designers when considering forward progress guarantees in programming frameworks. As a foundation, we formalize a small parallel programming language that captures the essence of fine-grained synchronization. We then provide a means of formally specifying a progress model, and develop a termination oracle that decides whether a given program is guaranteed to eventually terminate with respect to a given progress model. Next, we formalize a set of constraints that describe concurrent programs that require forward progress to terminate. This allows us to synthesize a large set of 483 progress litmus tests. Combined with the termination oracle, we can determine the expected status of each litmus test -- i.e. whether it is guaranteed to eventually terminate -- under various progress models. We present a large experimental campaign running the litmus tests across 8 GPUs from 5 different vendors. Our results highlight that GPUs have significantly different termination behaviors under our test suite. Most notably, we find that Apple and ARM GPUs do not support the linear occupancy-bound model, as was hypothesized by prior work.

Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes

In an Inter-Organizational Business Process (IOBP), independent organizations (collaborators) exchange messages to perform business transactions. With process mining, the collaborators could know what they are actually doing from process execution data and take actions for improving the underlying business process. However, process mining assumes that the knowledge of the entire process is available, something that is difficult to achieve in IOBPs since process execution data generally is not shared among the collaborating entities due to regulations and confidentiality policies (exposure of customers’ data or business secrets). Additionally, there is an inherently lack-of-trust problem in IOBP as the collaborators are mutually untrusted and executed IOBP can be subject to dispute on counterfeiting actions. Recently, Blockchain has been suggested for IOBP execution management to mitigate the lack-of-trust problem. Independently, some works have suggested the use of Blockchain to support process mining tasks. In this paper, we study and address the problem of IOBP mining whose management and execution is supported by Blockchain. As contribution, we present an approach that takes advantage of Blockchain capabilities to tackle, at the same time, the lack-of-trust problem (management and execution) and confident execution data collection for process mining (discovery and conformance) of IOBPs. We present a method that (i) ensures the business rules for the correct execution and monitoring of the IOBP by collaborators, (ii) creates the event log, with data cleaning integrated, at the time the IOBP executes, and (iii) produces useful event log in XES and CSV format for the discovery and conformance checking tasks in process mining. By a set of experiments on real IOBPs, we validate our method and evaluate its impact in the resulting discovered models (fitness and precision metrics). Results revealed the effectiveness of our method to cope with both the lack-of-trust problem in IOBPs at the time that contributes to collect the data for process mining. Our method was implemented as a software tool available to the community as open-source code.

2Vita-B Physical: An Intelligent Home Rehabilitation System Based on Microsoft Azure Kinect

Active rehabilitation is an exercise-based program designed to improve the level of function of people with motor disabilities. The effectiveness of such programs is strongly influenced by the correctness of the exercise execution. An exercise done incorrectly could even lead to a worsening of the health status. For this reason, specialists are required to guide the patient during the execution of an exercise. The drastic reduction of the costs of motion tracking systems has paved the way to the implementation of virtual assistant software able to automatically assess the correctness of an exercise. In this paper 2Vita-B Physical is presented, a rehabilitation software system properly designed to support both 1) the patients, by guiding them in the correct execution of an exercise; and 2) the physiotherapists, by allowing them to remotely check the progress of a patient. The motion capturing in 2Vita-B is performed by using the recently released Microsoft Kinect Azure DK. Thus, the system is easy to use and completely non-invasive. Besides the hardware and software requirements of the system, the results of a preliminary usability evaluation of the system conducted with 29 users is also reported. The results achieved are promising and provide evidence of the high usability of 2Vita-B Physical as home rehabilitation system.

Toward Future Automatic Warehouses: An Autonomous Depalletizing System Based on Mobile Manipulation and 3D Perception

This paper presents a mobile manipulation platform designed for autonomous depalletizing tasks. The proposed solution integrates machine vision, control and mechanical components to increase flexibility and ease of deployment in industrial environments such as warehouses. A collaborative robot mounted on a mobile base is proposed, equipped with a simple manipulation tool and a 3D in-hand vision system that detects parcel boxes on a pallet, and that pulls them one by one on the mobile base for transportation. The robot setup allows to avoid the cumbersome implementation of pick-and-place operations, since it does not require lifting the boxes. The 3D vision system is used to provide an initial estimation of the pose of the boxes on the top layer of the pallet, and to accurately detect the separation between the boxes for manipulation. Force measurement provided by the robot together with admittance control are exploited to verify the correct execution of the manipulation task. The proposed system was implemented and tested in a simplified laboratory scenario and the results of experimental trials are reported.

The Replication Stress Response on a Narrow Path Between Genomic Instability and Inflammation

The genome of eukaryotic cells is particularly at risk during the S phase of the cell cycle, when megabases of chromosomal DNA are unwound to generate two identical copies of the genome. This daunting task is executed by thousands of micro-machines called replisomes, acting at fragile structures called replication forks. The correct execution of this replication program depends on the coordinated action of hundreds of different enzymes, from the licensing of replication origins to the termination of DNA replication. This review focuses on the mechanisms that ensure the completion of DNA replication under challenging conditions of endogenous or exogenous origin. It also covers new findings connecting the processing of stalled forks to the release of small DNA fragments into the cytoplasm, activating the cGAS-STING pathway. DNA damage and fork repair comes therefore at a price, which is the activation of an inflammatory response that has both positive and negative impacts on the fate of stressed cells. These new findings have broad implications for the etiology of interferonopathies and for cancer treatment.