Multi-source parameter estimation and tracking using antenna arrays

This thesis is concerned with multi-source parameter estimation and tracking using antenna arrays in wireless communications. Various multi-source parameter estimation and tracking algorithms are presented and evaluated. Firstly, a novel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system is proposed for multi-parameter channel estimation. A manifold extender is presented for increasing the degrees of freedom (DoF). The proposed approach utilises the extended manifold vectors together with superresolution subspace type algorithms, to achieve the estimation of delay, direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) of all the paths of the desired user in the presence of multiple access interference (MAI). Secondly, the MIMO system is extended to a virtual-spatiotemporal system by incorporating the temporal domain of the system towards the objective of further increasing the degrees of freedom. In this system, a multi-parameter es- timation of delay, Doppler frequency, DOD and DOA of the desired user, and a beamformer that suppresses the MAI are presented, by utilising the proposed virtual-spatiotemporal manifold extender and the superresolution subspace type algorithms. Finally, for multi-source tracking, two tracking approaches are proposed based on an arrayed Extended Kalman Filter (arrayed-EKF) and an arrayed Unscented Kalman Filter (arrayed-UKF) using two type of antenna arrays: rigid array and flexible array. If the array is rigid, the proposed approaches employ a spatiotemporal state-space model and a manifold extender to track the source parameters, while if it is flexible the array locations are also tracked simultaneously. Throughout the thesis, computer simulation studies are presented to investigate and evaluate the performance of all the proposed algorithms.Open Acces

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Relationship Building and Motivation in Virtual teams - Activity-based analysis on teleconference

With the technique development and globalization, international companies rely more and more on virtual teams to carry out short- and long-term projects. It is pretty challenging of leading a virtual team, with the consideration that all the communication happen through emails or over the phone. Teleconference is the focus in this thesis. An activity structure coding is offered to help analyzing pre-collected teleconference recordings with activity-base approach, which gives a better understanding of communication behavior on teleconference. Together with interviews of e-leaders, this thesis presents challenges that leader faces in leading teleconference, leader’s communicative behavior and relationship building in virtual context. The purpose of this study is to examine how is motivation generated from leader’s communicative behavior, and how relationship develops in virtual circumstances

Object detection using convolutional networks with adaptively adjusting receptive field of convolutional filter

The receptive field size of a convolutional filter in a deep convolutional network is a crucial issue for object detection task, as the output must response to a suitable size of area in the image to capture proper information. Receptive field size of convolutional filter is fixed due to the inherently fixed geometric structure in its building module. However, objects of interest vary significantly in size within the images for object detection. Different locations of images correspond to objects with different scales, and high level convolutional layers encode semantic features over spatial positions, thus adaptive determination of receptive field size of convolutional filter is desirable for object detection. The authors propose a new module to adaptively determine the receptive field size of convolutional filter, named adaptive convolution. It is based on the idea of dilating the convolutional filter with multiple dilation values and choosing the maximum activation as output, without adding any other parameters. The plain counterparts in existing convolutional neural networks can be easily replaced by adaptive convolution, giving rise to adaptive convolutional networks. Adequate experiments have proven the effectiveness of authors’ method

pH and Auxiliary Ligand Influence on the Structural Variations of 5­(2′-Carboxylphenyl) Nicotate Coordination Polymers

A ligand 5-(2′-carboxylphenyl) nicotic acid (H₂cpna) has been successfully applied to construct a series of coordination complexes {[Cd­(Hcpna)₂(H₂O)₂]·3H₂O}_<i>n</i> (<b>1</b>), [Cd­(cpna)­(H₂O)]_<i>n</i> (<b>2</b>), [M­(cpna)­(2,2′-bipy)­(H₂O)]_<i>n</i> (M = Cd (<b>3</b>), Co (<b>4</b>), and Mn (<b>5</b>)), [Co­(cpna)­(phen)­(H₂O)]_<i>n</i> (<b>6</b>), [Mn­(cpna)­(phen)­(H₂O)]_<i>n</i> (<b>7</b>), {[Nd­(Hcpna)­(cpna)­(H₂O)₂]·3H₂O}_<i>n</i> (<b>8</b>), and {[Ln­(Hcpna)­(cpna)­(phen)]·2H₂O}_<i>n</i> (Ln = Pr (<b>9</b>), Nd (<b>10</b>), Eu (<b>11</b>), and Gd (<b>12</b>), 2,2′-bipy = 2,2′-bipyridine, phen = 1,10-phenanthroline) under hydrothermal conditions. By adjusting the reaction pH, H₂cpna ligand is partially deprotonated to form Hcpna^– in <b>1</b> and completely deprotonated to create cpna^2– in <b>2</b>–<b>7</b>, and both forms are observed in <b>8</b>–<b>12</b>. Complexes <b>1</b>–<b>5</b> and <b>8</b> possess two-dimensional (2D) layered structures, which are further extended into 3D metal–organic supramolecular frameworks by C–H···O hydrogen bond and/or π–π stacking interactions. Complexes <b>6</b>, <b>7</b>, and <b>9</b>–<b>12</b> exhibit one-dimensional (1D) chain structures, which further build three-dimensional (3D) supramolecular architecture via C–H···O hydrogen-bonding and/or π–π stacking interactions. The results revealed that the pH value of the reaction system and auxiliary ligand play an important role in determining the structures of the complexes. Magnetic susceptibility measurements indicate that compounds <b>4</b>–<b>10</b> and <b>12</b> have dominating antiferromagnetic couplings between metal centers. Furthermore, thermal stabilities for <b>1</b>–<b>12</b> and luminescent properties for <b>1</b>–<b>3</b>, and <b>11</b> are also discussed in detail

Comparison of the linear and non-linear SGS models in simulating the internal flow in a centrifugal pump impeller

International audienceIn this paper, the performances of linear and non-linear SGS models are compared by simulating a centrifugal pump impeller at both design load and quarter load. The mesh convergence is studied to choose the mesh with 2.05 million. At design load, the flow behaves well in both channels and the two models perform similarly. While at quarter load, the “two-channel” flow pattern occurs. Although this phenomenon is detected by both models, the peak value of the velocity profile moves towards the pressure side, showing opposite tendency to PIV. Comparing the two models under this condition, DNM shows significant priority over DSM due to the improved relation between the SGS stress, the rate-of-strain and the vorticit

pH and Auxiliary Ligand Influence on the Structural Variations of 5­(2′-Carboxylphenyl) Nicotate Coordination Polymers

A ligand 5-(2′-carboxylphenyl) nicotic acid (H₂cpna) has been successfully applied to construct a series of coordination complexes {[Cd­(Hcpna)₂(H₂O)₂]·3H₂O}_<i>n</i> (<b>1</b>), [Cd­(cpna)­(H₂O)]_<i>n</i> (<b>2</b>), [M­(cpna)­(2,2′-bipy)­(H₂O)]_<i>n</i> (M = Cd (<b>3</b>), Co (<b>4</b>), and Mn (<b>5</b>)), [Co­(cpna)­(phen)­(H₂O)]_<i>n</i> (<b>6</b>), [Mn­(cpna)­(phen)­(H₂O)]_<i>n</i> (<b>7</b>), {[Nd­(Hcpna)­(cpna)­(H₂O)₂]·3H₂O}_<i>n</i> (<b>8</b>), and {[Ln­(Hcpna)­(cpna)­(phen)]·2H₂O}_<i>n</i> (Ln = Pr (<b>9</b>), Nd (<b>10</b>), Eu (<b>11</b>), and Gd (<b>12</b>), 2,2′-bipy = 2,2′-bipyridine, phen = 1,10-phenanthroline) under hydrothermal conditions. By adjusting the reaction pH, H₂cpna ligand is partially deprotonated to form Hcpna^– in <b>1</b> and completely deprotonated to create cpna^2– in <b>2</b>–<b>7</b>, and both forms are observed in <b>8</b>–<b>12</b>. Complexes <b>1</b>–<b>5</b> and <b>8</b> possess two-dimensional (2D) layered structures, which are further extended into 3D metal–organic supramolecular frameworks by C–H···O hydrogen bond and/or π–π stacking interactions. Complexes <b>6</b>, <b>7</b>, and <b>9</b>–<b>12</b> exhibit one-dimensional (1D) chain structures, which further build three-dimensional (3D) supramolecular architecture via C–H···O hydrogen-bonding and/or π–π stacking interactions. The results revealed that the pH value of the reaction system and auxiliary ligand play an important role in determining the structures of the complexes. Magnetic susceptibility measurements indicate that compounds <b>4</b>–<b>10</b> and <b>12</b> have dominating antiferromagnetic couplings between metal centers. Furthermore, thermal stabilities for <b>1</b>–<b>12</b> and luminescent properties for <b>1</b>–<b>3</b>, and <b>11</b> are also discussed in detail

Constitutively active BRS3 is a genuinely orphan GPCR in placental mammals.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play an important role in physiology and disease and represent the most productive drug targets. Orphan GPCRs, with their endogenous ligands unknown, were considered a source of drug targets and consequently attract great interest to identify their endogenous cognate ligands for deorphanization. However, a contrary view to the ubiquitous existence of endogenous ligands for every GPCR is that there might be a significant overlooked fraction of orphan GPCRs that function constitutively in a ligand-independent manner only. Here, we investigated the evolution of the bombesin receptor-ligand family in vertebrates in which one member-bombesin receptor subtype-3 (BRS3)-is a potential orphan GPCR. With analysis of 17 vertebrate BRS3 structures and 10 vertebrate BRS3 functional data, our results demonstrated that nonplacental vertebrate BRS3 still connects to the original ligands-neuromedin B (NMB) and gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP)-because of adaptive evolution, with significantly changed protein structure, especially in three altered key residues (Q127R, P205S, and R294H) originally involved in ligand binding/activation, whereas the placental mammalian BRS3 lost the binding affinity to NMB/GRP and constitutively activates Gs/Gq/G12 signaling in a ligand-independent manner. Moreover, the N terminus of placental mammalian BRS3 underwent positive selection, exhibiting significant structural differences compared to nonplacental vertebrate BRS3, and this domain plays an important role in constitutive activity of placental mammalian BRS3. In conclusion, constitutively active BRS3 is a genuinely orphan GPCR in placental mammals, including human. To our knowledge, this study identified the first example that might represent a new group of genuinely orphan GPCRs that will never be deorphanized by the discovery of a natural ligand and provided new perspectives in addition to the current ligand-driven GPCR deorphanization