Accountancy na de Corporate Governance Wet

The current article aims to provide an overview of the main topics of the “Corporate Governance Law”, as well as the main bottlenecks that the application of it entails. The required changes to the Belgian Corporate Law that follow from this law can mainly be subdivided into three main topics: the structure and working of the administrative bodies, the role and position of the controllers of the accounts and the refinement of the rules concerning the working of the general assembly. As to the management, many are arguing that the one-tier-board obliged in Belgium is no longer realistic and that, as such, the way should be cleared for a two-tier-board management structure. Moreover, the responsibility of the managers should be sharpened, by obliging them to pinpoint a representative in case the manager would be an artificial person. Further, the rules with respect to intra-group transactions should be refined and cleared up. These rules build on the prescriptions concerning interest conflicts. Finally, the working rules concerning the general assembly of the shareholders have been adapted in order to indulge the needs of the international shareholders. For example, by foreseeing the possibility for shareholders to organize a general assembly on paper.

Quasi-passive and reconfigurable optical node: implementations with discrete latching switches

Quasi-Passive and Reconfigurable (QPAR) optical nodes are implemented using two different discrete optical latching switches based on Micro-Opto-Mechanical and Magneto-Optic principles. A clear trade-off between speed and power consumption is noticed for those QPAR realizations

Energy efficiency considerations in integrated IT and optical network resilient infrastructures

The European Integrated Project GEYSERS - Generalised Architecture for Dynamic Infrastructure Services - is concentrating on infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources in support of the Future Internet with special emphasis on cloud computing. More specifically GEYSERS proposes the concept of Virtual Infrastructures over one or more interconnected Physical Infrastructures comprising both network and IT resources. Taking into consideration the energy consumption levels associated with the ICT today and the expansion of the Internet in size and complexity, that incurring increased energy consumption of both IT and network resources, energy efficient infrastructure design becomes critical. To address this need, in the framework of GEYSERS, we propose energy efficient design of infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources, supporting resilient end-to-end services. Our modeling results quantify significant energy savings of the proposed solution by jointly optimizing the allocation of both network and IT resources

A novel context ontology to facilitate interoperation of semantic services in environments with wearable devices

The LifeWear-Mobilized Lifestyle with Wearables (Lifewear) project attempts to create Ambient Intelligence (AmI) ecosystems by composing personalized services based on the user information, environmental conditions and reasoning outputs. Two of the most important benefits over traditional environments are 1) take advantage of wearable devices to get user information in a nonintrusive way and 2) integrate this information with other intelligent services and environmental sensors. This paper proposes a new ontology composed by the integration of users and services information, for semantically representing this information. Using an Enterprise Service Bus, this ontology is integrated in a semantic middleware to provide context-aware personalized and semantically annotated services, with discovery, composition and orchestration tasks. We show how these services support a real scenario proposed in the Lifewear project

Peripheral proinsulin expression controls low-avidity proinsulin-reactive CD8 T Cells in type 1 diabetes

Low-avidity autoreactive CD8 T cells (CTLs) escape from thymic negative selection, and peripheral tolerance mechanisms are essential for their regulation. We report the role of proinsulin (PI) expression on the development and activation of insulin-specific CTLs in the NOD mouse model of type 1 diabetes. We studied insulin B-chain–specific CTL from different T-cell receptor transgenic mice (G9Cα−/−) expressing normal PI1 and PI2 or altered PI expression levels. In the absence of PI2 (Ins2−/−), CTL in pancreatic lymph nodes (PLNs) were more activated, and male G9Cα−/− mice developed T1D. Furthermore, when the insulin-specific CTLs developed in transgenic mice lacking their specific PI epitope, the CTLs demonstrated increased cytotoxicity and proliferation in vitro and in vivo in the PLNs after adoptive transfer into NOD recipients. Dendritic cell–stimulated proliferation of insulin-specific T cells was reduced in the presence of lymph node stromal cells (LNSCs) from NOD mice but not from mice lacking the PI epitope. Our study shows that LNSCs regulate CTL activation and suggests that exposure to PI in the periphery is very important in maintenance of tolerance of autoreactive T cells. This is relevant for human type 1 diabetes and has implications for the use of antigen-specific therapy in tolerance induction