Utilisation de l'EAD pour diminuer les frottements pédagogiques dans la mobilité internationale des étudiants. (L'expérience de la Faculté d'Economie de l'Université Pierre Mendès France de Grenoble)

La mobilité des étudiants, et surtout, la mobilité internationale demande aux universités de solutionner une multitude de problèmes de "tuyauterie" dans les deux sens (sortant et entrant) : - mise à disposition de l'information pertinente sur les universités et les conditions d'études et de vie locales ; - enregistrement, filtrage et régulation des candidatures sortantes (et, éventuellement, entrantes) ; - formalités administratives ; - préparation linguistique (et culturelle au sens large) des étudiants sortant et, dans l'autre sens, accueil des étudiants entrant. Ces problèmes sont compliqués mais les responsables et les personnels administratifs parviennent à en venir à bout. Il apparaît alors que la dimension pédagogique de la question ne se réduit pas à l'indispensable apprentissage linguistique.enseignement supérieur ; étudiant ; mobilité ; université ; France ; Grenoble

Explaining Intent of Adoption of Wireless Internet Services by Business Executives: The Case of Paris Airports’ Hotspots

According to most industry experts and researchers, wireless Internet access is seen as a promising market for mobile users in locations such as airports and other public venues [1]. According to the Gartner Group, 6,000 wireless Internet hotspots were installed in the world in 2002, 57% in Northern America and 14% in Europe. 15,000 hotspots should have been implemented in Europe by 2000, used by 11 million regular users and 12 million occasional users. Airports, because of the high density of travellers and the relatively long waiting times involved, are considered as key hotspot locations. Yet, consumption of such services is still lagging behind suppliers’ expectations. Why, and whether, consumers will use wireless Internet still remains unclear. This paper aims to contribute to answer both questions by defining a framework explaining the intent of use by consumers. To this end, we carried out market research, focused on executives attending public venues where wireless Internet services can be proposed. In this paper we first define the specific features of the wireless Internet access for airports. We then propose a framework explaining the intent to use wireless Internet services

Voltage-gated sodium channels: new targets in cancer therapy?

Early detection and treatment of cancers have increased survival and improved clinical outcome. The development of metastases is often associated with a poor prognostic of survival. Finding early markers of metastasis and developing new therapies against their development is a great challenge. Since a few years, there is more evidence that ionic channels are involved in the oncogenic process. Among these, voltage-gated sodium channels expressed in non-nervous or non-muscular organs are often associated with the metastatic behaviour of different cancers. The aim of this review is to describe the current knowledge on the functional expression of voltage-gated sodium channels and their biological roles in different cancers such as prostate, breast, lung (small cells and non-small cells) and leukaemia. In the conclusion, we develop conceptual approaches to understand how such channels can be involved in the metastatic process and conclude that blockers targeted toward these channels are promising new therapeutic solutions against metastatic cancers

A Verified CompCert Front-End for a Memory Model Supporting Pointer Arithmetic and Uninitialised Data

International audienceThe CompCert C compiler guarantees that the target program behaves as the source program. Yet, source programs without a defined semantics do not benefit from this guarantee and could therefore be miscompiled. To reduce the possibility of a miscompilation, we propose a novel memory model for CompCert which gives a defined semantics to challenging features such as bitwise pointer arithmetics and access to uninitialised data. We evaluate our memory model both theoretically and experimentally. In our experiments, we identify pervasive low-level C idioms that require the additional expressiveness provided by our memory model. We also show that our memory model provably subsumes the existing CompCert memory model thus cross-validating both semantics. Our memory model relies on the core concepts of symbolic value and normalisa-tion. A symbolic value models a delayed computation and the normalisation turns, when possible, a symbolic value into a genuine value. We show how to tame the expressive power of the normalisation so that the memory model fits the proof framework of CompCert. We also adapt the proofs of correctness of the compiler passes performed by CompCert's front-end, thus demonstrating that our model is well-suited for proving compiler transformations

Voltage-gated sodium channels potentiate the invasive capacities of human non-small-cell lung cancer cell lines.

Ionic channel activity is involved in fundamental cellular behaviour and participates in cancerous features such as proliferation, migration and invasion which in turn contribute to the metastatic process. In this study, we investigated the expression and role of voltage-gated sodium channels in non-small-cell lung cancer cell lines. Functional voltage-gated sodium channels expression was investigated in normal and non-small-cell lung cancer cell lines. The measurement, in patch-clamp conditions, of tetrodotoxin-inhibitable sodium currents indicated that the strongly metastatic cancerous cell lines H23, H460 and Calu-1 possess functional sodium channels while normal and weakly metastatic cell lines do not. While all the cell lines expressed mRNA for numerous sodium channel isoforms, only H23, H460 and Calu-1 cells had a 250 kDa protein corresponding to the functional channel. The other cell lines also had another protein of 230 kDa which is not addressed to the membrane and might act as a dominant negative isoform to prevent channel activation. At the membrane potential of these cells, channels are partially open. This leads to a continuous entry of sodium, disrupting sodium homeostasis and down-stream signaling pathways. Inhibition of the channels by tetrodotoxin was responsible for a 40-50% reduction of in vitro invasion. These experiments suggest that the functional expression of voltage-gated sodium channels might be an integral component of the metastatic process in non-small-cell lung cancer cells probably through its involvement in the regulation of intracellular sodium homeostasis. These channels could serve both as novel markers of the metastatic phenotype and as potential new therapeutic targets

A Nelson-Oppen based Proof System using Theory Specific Proof Systems

International audienceSMT solvers are nowadays pervasive in verification tools. When the verification is about a critical system, the result of the SMT solver is also critical and cannot be trusted. The SMT-LIB 2.0 is a standard interface for SMT solvers but does not specify the output of the get-proof command. We present a proof system that is geared towards SMT solvers and follows their conceptually modular architecture. Our proof system makes a clear distinction between propositional and theory reasoning. Moreover, individual theories provide specific proof systems that are combined using the Nelson-Oppen proof scheme. We propose specific proof systems for linear real arithmetic (LRA) and uninterpreted functions (EUF) and discuss proof generation and proof checking. We have evaluated the cost of generating proofs in our proof system. Our experiments on benchmarks taken from the SMT-LIB library show that the simple mechanisms used in our approach suffice for a large majority of the selected benchmarks

Result Certification of Static Program Analysers with Automated Theorem Provers

International audienceThe automation of the deductive approach to program veri- fication crucially depends on the ability to efficiently infer and discharge program invariants. In an ideal world, user-provided invariants would be strengthened by incorporating the result of static analysers as untrusted annotations and discharged by automated theorem provers. However, the results of object-oriented analyses are heavily quantified and cannot be discharged, within reasonable time limits, by state-of-the-art auto- mated theorem provers. In the present work, we investigate an original approach for verifying automatically and efficiently the result of certain classes of object-oriented static analyses using off-the-shelf automated theorem provers. We propose to generate verification conditions that are generic enough to capture, not a single, but a family of analyses which encompasses Java bytecode verification and Fähndrich and Leino type- system for checking null pointers. For those analyses, we show how to generate tractable verification conditions that are still quantified but fall in a decidable logic fragment that is reducible to the Effectively Propositional logic. Our experiments confirm that such verification conditions are efficiently discharged by off-the-shelf automated theorem provers