In recent years we are witnessing a continuous growth in the amount of data that both public and private organizations collect and profit by. Search engines are the most common tools used to retrieve information, and more recently, clustering techniques showed to be an effective tool in helping users to skim query results.

In this paper we propose and study a hybrid discrete-continuous mathematical model of collective motion under alignment and chemotaxis effect. Starting from paper [23], in which the Cucker-Smale model [22] was coupled with other cell mechanisms, to describe the cell migration and self-organization in the zebrafish lateral line primordium, we introduce a simplified model in which the coupling between an alignment and chemotaxis mechanism acts on a system of interacting particles.

The popularity of the cloud computing paradigm is opening new opportunities for collaborative computing. In this paper we tackle a fundamental problem in open-ended cloud-based distributed computing platforms, i.e., the quest for potential collaborators. We assume that cloud participants are willing to share their computational resources for shared distributed computing problems, but they are not willing to disclose the details of their resources. Lacking such information, we advocate to rely on reputation scores obtained by evaluating the interactions among participants.

The integral representation of some biological phenomena consists in Volterra equations whose kernels involve a convolution term plus a non convolution one. Some significative applications arise in linearised models of cell migration and collective motion, as described in Di Costanzo et al. (Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst. Ser. B 25 (2020) 443-472), Etchegaray et al. (Integral Methods in Science and Engineering (2015)), Grec et al. (J. Theor. Biol. 452 (2018) 35-46) where the asymptotic behaviour of the analytical solution has been extensively investigated.

Social Web Services (SWSs) constitute a novel paradigm of service-oriented computing, where Web services, just like humans, sign up in social networks that guarantee, e.g., better service discovery for users and faster replacement in case of service failures. In past work, composition of SWSs was mainly supported by specialised social networks of competitor services and cooperating ones. In this work, we continue this line of research, by proposing a novel SWSs composition procedure driven by the SWSs reputation.

The anonymous marketplaces ecosystem represents a new channel for black market/goods and services, offering a huge variety of illegal items.

Two conflicting high-level goals govern the enforcement of security policies, abridged in the phrase ``high security at a low cost''. While these drivers seem irreconcilable, formal modelling languages and automated verification techniques can facilitate the task of finding the right balance. We propose a modelling language and a framework in which security checks can be relaxed or strengthened to save resources or increase protection, on the basis of trust relationships among communicating parties.

Parties of reputation systems rate each other and use ratings to compute reputation scores that drive their interactions. When deciding which reputation model to deploy in a network environment, it is important to find the most suitable model and to determine its right initial configuration. This calls for an engineering approach for describing, implementing and evaluating reputation systems while taking into account specific aspects of both the reputation systems and the networked environment where they will run.

We present a mesoscale representation of near-contact interactions between colliding droplets which permits one to reach up to the scale of full microfluidic devices, where such droplets are produced. The method is demonstrated for the case of colliding droplets and the formation of soft flowing crystals in flow-focusing microfluidic devices. This model may open up the possibility of multiscale simulation of microfluidic devices for the production of new droplet and bubble-based mesoscale porous materials.

Trust and reputation systems are decision support tools used to drive parties' interactions on the basis of parties' reputation. In such systems, parties rate with each other after each interaction.