Unraveling the Immune Microenvironment of Thymic Epithelial Tumors: Implications for Autoimmunity and Treatment

Thymic Epithelial Tumors (TETs) represent a rare tumor family, originating from the epithelial component of the thymus gland. Clinicopathologically, they are segregated into six major subtypes, associated with distinct histological features and clinical outcomes. Their emergence and evolution are accompanied by the generation of a complex tumor microenvironment (TME), dominated by phenotypically and functionally divergent immune cellular subsets, in different maturation states and in analogies that vary significantly among different subtypes. These heterogenous leukocyte populations exert either immune-permissive and tumor-suppressive functions or vice versa, and the dynamic equilibrium established among them either dictates the tumor immune milieu towards an immune-tolerance state or enables the development of a productive spontaneous tumoricidal response. The immunologically “hot” microenvironment, defining a significant proportion of TETs, makes them a promising candidate for the implementation of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). A number of phase I and II clinical trials have already demonstrated significant, type-specific clinical efficacy of PD-L1 inhibitors, even though substantial limitations in their utilization derive from their immune-mediated adverse effects. Moreover, the completed clinical studies involved relatively restricted patient samples and an expansion in the enrolled cohorts is required, so that more trustworthy conclusions regarding the benefit from ICIs in TETs can be extracted.     

Modification of chlorinated poly(vinyl chloride) by blending with epoxidized polybutadiene

The compatibility of epoxidized poly(cis-1,4-butadiene) (EPB) with chlorinated polyvinylchloride (CPVC) was investigated. Blends studied covered the complete composition range using EPB at two degrees of epoxidation: 20 and 43 mol % oxirane units. Tensile properties of EPB (63)/CPVC were also studied at the 50/50 composition. Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) showed that both sets of blends were miscible at the segmental level except for the rich CPVC compositions. All blends showed good tensile properties. even those where DMA indicated phase separation. This may be attributed to strong segmental interactions of the donnor-acceptor type between the oxirane and acidic-hydrogen-containing groups of these complementary dissimilar blend partners.     

Efficient and secure BIG data delivery in Cloud Computing

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Big Data (BD) is a new technology which rapidly growing in the telecommunications sectors, especially in the contemporary field of wireless telecommunications....     

Scalable entity-based summarization of web search results using MapReduce

Although Web Search Engines index and provide access to huge amounts of documents, user queries typically return only a linear list of hits. While this is often satisfactory for focalized search, it does not provide an exploration or deeper analysis of the results. One way to achieve advanced exploration facilities exploiting the availability of structured (and semantic) data in Web search, is to enrich it with entity mining over the full contents of the search results. Such services provide the users with an initial overview of the information space, allowing them to gradually restrict it until locating the desired hits, even if they are low ranked. This is especially important in areas of professional search such as medical search, patent search, etc. In this paper we consider a general scenario of providing such services as meta-services (that is, layered over systems that support keywords search) without a-priori indexing of the underlying document collection(s). To make such services feasible for large amounts of data we use the MapReduce distributed computation model on a Cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2). Specifically, we show how the required computational tasks can be factorized and expressed as MapReduce functions. A key contribution of our work is a thorough evaluation of platform configuration and tuning, an aspect that is often disregarded and inadequately addressed in prior work, but crucial for the efficient utilization of resources. Finally we report experimental results about the achieved speedup in various settings.     

PROTON: A Prolog Reasoner for Temporal ONtologies in OWL

We present PROTON, a reasoner for managing temporal information over OWL ontologies. We adopt the so called 4d-fluent or 4-dimensionalist approach for representing temporal information in ontologies i.e. for time points or intervals and for events that occur in time points or intervals. Also, we propose an extension to the situation calculus in order to encapsulate time. PROTON is implemented using this extension.     

Overlay networks for task allocation and coordination in large-scale networks of cooperative agents

This paper proposes a novel method for scheduling and allocating atomic and complex tasks in large-scale networks of homogeneous or heterogeneous cooperative agents. Our method encapsulates the concepts of searching, task allocation and scheduling seamlessly in a decentralized process where no accumulated or centralized knowledge or coordination is necessary. Efficient searching for agent groups that can facilitate the scheduling of tasks is accomplished through the use of a dynamic overlay structure of gateway agents and the exploitation of routing indices. The task allocation and the scheduling of complex tasks are accomplished by combining dynamic reorganization of agent groups and distributed constraint optimization methods. Experimental results display the efficiency of the proposed method.     

Mapping of soil nutrients in an abandoned Chinese coal mine and waste disposal site

The present paper attempts to identify the spatial patterns of soil nutrients in the abandoned Haizhou opencast coal mine and waste disposal site, in China. A geostatistical approach was used to overcome problems due to the heterogeneity of the site (some parts have been abandoned for more than 30 years, lack of clean soil, presence of overburden and low-grade ore, co-disposal of wastes from adjacent sites) and the limited number of available samples. One hundred and eight soil samples were collected from an area of 332 ha and analyzed for pH, organic matter (OM), NH₄–N, available phosphorus (AP) and available potassium (AK). The results indicate that nutrients exhibit different spatial distribution and only NH₄–N showed strong spatial dependence and a relatively large nugget effect. Relatively high content of OM, NH₄–N, AP and AK was seen in the northeastern part, whereas pH was higher in central north and southern parts of the site. The determination of the spatial variability and heterogeneity of nutrients in mining and waste disposal sites assesses the need for amendments and assists in the selection of the most feasible revegetation scheme.     

Design of efficient shape feature for object-based watermarking technology

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The accelerated development of IT technologies on the Internet for fast provision of commercial multimedia services has stimulated an urgent demand for reliable...     

Multi-robot multiple hypothesis tracking for pedestrian tracking

In this paper the problem of tracking walking people with multiple moving robots is tackled. For this purpose we present an adaptation to the Multiple Hypothesis Tracking method, which unlike classic MHT, allows for one-to-many associations between targets and measurements in each hypothesis production cycle and is thus capable of operating in a scenario involving multiple sensors. Derivation of hypotheses probabilities accounts for the continuously changing overlapping areas in fields of view of the robots sensors and for detection uncertainty. In the context of three experiments involving people walking among moving robots, the successful integration of our tracking algorithm to a real-world setup is assessed.