Efficacy of Interferons on Bowenoid Papulosis and Other Precancerous Lesions

Preliminary results of an open randomized trial of recombinant interferon gamma in patients suffering from bowenoid papulosis are described.Recombinant interferon gamma was given subcutaneously to 12 patients at a daily dose of 4 × 106 I.U. by injection. Four patients each were assigned to one of three treatment groups consisting of continuous therapy (group A) with three subcutaneous injections per week for 13 weeks; intermittent block therapy (group B) with four six-week cycles consisting of five injections on days 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 of each cycle; and intermittent single-dose therapy (group C) with six four-week cycles consisting of only one subcutaneous injection on day one of each cycle. At the twenty-sixth week after onset of therapy, complete responses were seen in three of four patients of treatment group A, whereas in the treatment groups B and C only one patient, respectively, responded partially. These results suggest that in contrast to condylomata acuminata bowenoid papulosis lesions respond better to continuous than to intermittent interferon gamma injections

A Hybrid Preference Learning and Context Refinement Architecture

Pervasive computing envisions a world where people are surrounded by numerous communication and computing interconnected devices that are invisible and assist users in their everyday tasks in a seamless unobtrusive manner. Most pervasive computing research initiatives aim towards the realization of smart spaces, i.e. fixed spaces that provide pervasive features in a static and geographically limited environment. To bridge these isolated pervasive spaces, the EU project Persist has introduced the concept of self-improving Personal Smart Spaces (PSSs) that follow their owners wherever they go. This paper provides an overview of the context and preference learning facilities that have been designed to support the realization of PSSs and enhance their proactivity and self-improvement features

Enterprise 2.0: Research challenges and opportunities

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Blending Web 2.0 technologies with enterprise information systems is setting up the stage for a new generation of information systems that will help enterprises open up new communication channels with their stakeholders. Contrary to traditional enterprises with top-down command flow and bottom-up feedback flow, the same flows in Enterprise 2.0 cross all levels and in all directions bringing people together in the development of creative and innovative ideas. The power of Web 2.0 technologies stems from their ability to capture real-world phenomena such as collaboration, competition, and partnership that can be converted into useful and structured information sources from which enterprises can draw information about markets’ trends, consumers’ habits, suppliers’ strategies, etc. This paper discusses the research efforts that our international research group has put into the topic of Enterprise 2.0 (aka Social Enterprise). In particular, our research group advocates that existing practices for managing enterprise information systems need to be re-visited in a way that permits to capture social relations that arise inside and outside the enterprise, to establish guidelines and techniques to assist IT practitioners integrate social relations into their design, development, and maintenance efforts of these information systems, and last but not least to identify and tackle challenges that prevent capturing social relations

3-Phenylcoumarins as Inhibitors of HIV-1 Replication

We have synthesized fourteen 3-phenylcoumarin derivatives and evaluated their anti-HIV activity. Antiviral activity was assessed on MT-2 cells infected with viral clones carrying the luciferase gene as reporter. Inhibition of HIV transcription and Tat function were tested on cells stably transfected with the HIV-LTR and Tat protein. Six compounds displayed NF-κB inhibition, four resulted Tat antagonists and three of them showed both activities. Three compounds inhibited HIV replication with IC50 values < 25 μM. The antiviral effect of the 4-hydroxycoumarin derivative 19 correlates with its specific inhibition of Tat functions, while compound 8, 3-(2-chlorophenyl)coumarin, seems to act through a mechanism unrelated to the molecular targets considered in this research

Design, synthesis and antiparasitic evaluation of click phospholipids

A library of seventeen novel ether phospholipid analogues, containing 5-membered heterocyclic rings (1,2,3-triazolyl, isoxazolyl, 1,3,4-oxadiazolyl and 1,2,4-oxadiazolyl) in the lipid portion were designed and synthesized aiming to identify optimised miltefosine analogues. The compounds were evaluated for their in vitro antiparasitic activity against Leishmania infantum and Leishmania donovani intracellular amastigotes, against Trypanosoma brucei brucei and against different developmental stages of Trypanosoma cruzi. The nature of the substituents of the heterocyclic ring (tail) and the oligomethylene spacer between the head group and the heterocyclic ring was found to affect the activity and toxicity of these compounds leading to a significantly improved understanding of their structure\u2013activity relationships. The early ADMET profile of the new derivatives did not reveal major liabilities for the potent compounds. The 1,2,3-triazole derivative 27 substituted by a decyl tail, an undecyl spacer and a choline head group exhibited broad spectrum antiparasitic activity. It possessed low micromolar activity against the intracellular amastigotes of two L. infantum strains and T. cruzi Y strain epimastigotes, intracellular amastigotes and trypomastigotes, while its cytotoxicity concentration (CC50) against THP-1 macrophages ranged between 50 and 100 \ub5M. Altogether, our work paves the way for the development of improved ether phospholipid derivatives to control neglected tropical diseases

Developing a Pervasive System for a Mobile Environment

The problem of personalised context aware service selection and composition is an important research area that is addressed within the pervasive service platform being developed by the Daidalos project. This paper briefly outlines the scenarios used and the overall platform architecture that underpin this development. It then describes the approach used to select service components and compose them to produce a composite service that satisfies an individual user’s needs and takes account of changing context. It also discusses the interaction between personalisation and context management,. These ideas have been extensively tested and demonstrated with the scenarios. In the second phase of Daidalos, the developments will be generalised and subjected to wider testing

Challenges for Context Management Systems imposed by Context Inference

This work gives an overview over the challenges for context management systems in Ubiquitous Computing frameworks or Personal Smart Spaces. Focused on the integration of context inference in today’s context management systems (CMSs) we address important design decisions for future frameworks. The inference system we have in mind is probabilistic and relies on the concept of Bayeslets, special inference rules extending Bayesian networks. We show that for inference rule creation, storage, inference scheduling and update frequency the best solutions are hybrid, allowing for high flexibility and performance while reducing resource costs. We also see that human expert knowledge cannot be substituted completely in an efficient context-aware system