Remembering Migration

The experiences of migration are key to Australian oral history collections held in national and state institutions, and in community-based organizations. These memories have been widely utilized in research projects, books, radio programmes, websites, films and documentaries, museum collections and exhibitions, and heritage sites associated with migration. Digital technologies have had a recent impact on memory practices relating to migration. This chapter surveys these developments in Australia, arguing that oral testimonies have influenced the commemoration of migration to Australia, and contributed to public debates about migration, multiculturalism and the reception and treatment of refugees and asylum seekers

Decidable Verification of Agent-Based Data-Aware Systems

International audienceIn recent years the area of knowledge representation and reasoning (KR&R) has witnessed a growing interest in the modelling and analysis of data-driven/data-centric systems. These are systems in which the two tenets of data and processes are given equal importance, differently from traditional approaches whereby the data content is typically abstracted away in order to make the reasoning task easier. However, if data-aware systems (DaS) are to be deployed in concrete KR&R scenarios, it is key to develop tailored verification techniques, suitable to account for both data and processes. In this contribution we consider for the first time to our knowledge the parameterised verification of DaS. In particular, we prove that – under specific assumptions – this problem is decidable by computing a suitable cut-off value. We illustrate the proposed approach with a use case from the literature on business process modelling

Age-related shift in LTD is dependent on neuronal adenosine A2A receptors interplay with mGluR5 and NMDA receptors

Synaptic dysfunction plays a central role in Alzheimer's disease (AD), since it drives the cognitive decline. An association between a polymorphism of the adenosine A2A receptor (A2AR) encoding gene-ADORA2A, and hippocampal volume in AD patients was recently described. In this study, we explore the synaptic function of A2AR in age-related conditions. We report, for the first time, a significant overexpression of A2AR in hippocampal neurons of aged humans, which is aggravated in AD patients. A similar profile of A2AR overexpression in rats was sufficient to drive age-like memory impairments in young animals and to uncover a hippocampal LTD-to-LTP shift. This was accompanied by increased NMDA receptor gating, dependent on mGluR5 and linked to enhanced Ca(2+) influx. We confirmed the same plasticity shift in memory-impaired aged rats and APP/PS1 mice modeling AD, which was rescued upon A2AR blockade. This A2AR/mGluR5/NMDAR interaction might prove a suitable alternative for regulating aberrant mGluR5/NMDAR signaling in AD without disrupting their constitutive activity