The Crosstalk of Adipose-Derived Stem Cells (ADSC), Oxidative Stress,and Inflammation in Protective and Adaptive Responses

The potential use of stem cell-based therapies for the repair and regeneration of various tissues and organs is a major goal in repair medicine. Stem cells are classified by their potential to differentiate into functional cells. Compared with other sources, adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) have the advantage of being abundant and easy to obtain. ADSCs are considered to be tools for replacing, repairing, and regenerating dead or damaged cells. The capacity of ADSCs to maintain their properties depends on the balance of complex signals in their microenvironment. Their properties and the associated outcomes are in part regulated by reactive oxygen species, which mediate the oxidation-reduction state of cells as a secondary messenger. ADSC therapy has demonstrated beneficial effects, suggesting that secreted factors may provide protection. There is evidence that ADSCs secrete a number of cytokines, growth factors, and antioxidant factors into their microenvironment, thus regulating intracellular signaling pathways in neighboring cells. In this review, we introduce the roles of ADSCs in the protection of cells by modulating inflammation and immunity, and we develop their potential therapeutic properties.     

Efficient similarity-based operations for data integration

Dealing with discrepancies in data is still a big challenge in data integration systems. The problem occurs both during eliminating duplicates from semantic overlapping sources as well as during combining complementary data from different sources. Though using SQL operations like grouping and join seems to be a viable way, they fail if the attribute values of the potential duplicates or related tuples are not equal but only similar by certain criteria. As a solution to this problem, we present in this paper similarity-based variants of grouping and join operators. The extended grouping operator produces groups of similar tuples, the extended join combines tuples satisfying a given similarity condition. We describe the semantics of this operator, discuss efficient implementations for the edit distance similarity and present evaluation results. Finally, we give examples of application from the context of a data reconciliation project for looted art.     

Provable security of a pairing-free one-pass authenticated key establishment protocol for wireless sensor networks

Designing efficient as well as secure cryptographic protocols for resource-constrained applications is a challenging task. In this paper, we formally analyze the security of an efficient one-pass authenticated key establishment protocol, the 1P-AKE protocol, which is primarily proposed for resource-constrained sensor nodes devices in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In contrast to the existing identity-based one-pass key establishment protocols, the 1P-AKE protocol does not require any bilinear pairing computation in order to establish a key. This feature makes it really attractive for resource-constrained application environments, such as WSNs, where pairing computations are too expensive. We show that in the random oracle model, the 1P-AKE protocol is a secure authenticated one-pass key establishment protocol under the computational Diffie–Hellman assumption. The performance of the 1P-AKE protocol is also discussed and compared with the existing relevant protocols.     

The impact of tangled code changes on defect prediction models

When interacting with source control management system, developers often commit unrelated or loosely related code changes in a single transaction. When analyzing version histories, such tangled changes will make all changes to all modules appear related, possibly compromising the resulting analyses through noise and bias. In an investigation of five open-source Java projects, we found between 7 % and 20 % of all bug fixes to consist of multiple tangled changes. Using a multi-predictor approach to untangle changes, we show that on average at least 16.6 % of all source files are incorrectly associated with bug reports. These incorrect bug file associations seem to not significantly impact models classifying source files to have at least one bug or no bugs. But our experiments show that untangling tangled code changes can result in more accurate regression bug prediction models when compared to models trained and tested on tangled bug datasets—in our experiments, the statistically significant accuracy improvements lies between 5 % and 200 %. We recommend better change organization to limit the impact of tangled changes.     

Automatisches Sicherheitstesten

Moderne Testgeneratoren finden Schwachstellen in Eingabeschnittstellen von Programmen, indem sie in Sekunden tausende Eingaben zufällig erzeugen. Die Werkzeuge lassen sich leicht von jedermann einsetzen–zum Angriff oder zur Verteidigung.     

Interaction of guided light in rib polymer waveguides with dielectrophoretically controlled nanoparticles

This work demonstrates an optofluidic system, where dielectrophoretically controlled suspended nanoparticles are used to manipulate the properties of an optical waveguide. This optofluidic device is composed of a multimode polymeric rib waveguide and a microfluidic channel as its upper cladding. This channel integrates dielectrophoretic (DEP) microelectrodes and is infiltrated with suspended silica and tungsten trioxide nanoparticles. By applying electrical signals with various intensities and frequencies to the DEP microelectrodes, the nanoparticles can be concentrated close to the waveguide surface significantly altering the optical properties in this region. Depending on the particle refractive indices, concentrations, positions and dimensions, the light remains confined or is scattered into the surrounding media in the microfluidic channel.     

Visualization of myocardial perfusion derived from coronary anatomy

Visually assessing the effect of the coronary artery anatomy on the perfusion of the heart muscle in patients with coronary artery disease remains a challenging task. We explore the feasibility of visualizing this effect on perfusion using a numerical approach. We perform a computational simulation of the way blood is perfused throughout the myocardium purely based on information from a three-dimensional anatomical tomographic scan. The results are subsequently visualized using both three-dimensional visualizations and bull's eye plots, partially inspired by approaches currently common in medical practice. Our approach results in a comprehensive visualization of the coronary anatomy that compares well to visualizations commonly used for other scanning technologies. We demonstrate techniques giving detailed insight in blood supply, coronary territories and feeding coronary arteries of a selected region. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach through visualizations that show information which commonly cannot be directly observed in scanning data, such as a separate visualization of the supply from each coronary artery. We thus show that the results of a computational simulation can be effectively visualized and facilitate visually correlating these results to for example perfusion data.     

A formal model of atomicity in asynchronous systems

Summary We propose a generalisation of occurrence graphs as a formal model of computational structure. The model is used to define the atomic occurrence of a program, to characterise interference freeness between programs, and to model error recovery in a decentralised system.