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Cellular reprogramming through targeting microRNAs (miRNAs) holds promise for regenerative therapy due to their profound regulatory effects in proliferation, differentiation, and function. We hypothesized that transdifferentiation of vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) into endothelial cells (ECs) using a miRNA cassette may provide a novel approach for use in vascular disease states associated with endothelial injury or dysfunction. miRNA profiling of SMCs and ECs and iterative combinatorial miRNA transfections of human coronary SMCs revealed a 4-miRNA cassette consisting of miR-143-3p and miR-145-5p inhibitors and miR-146a-5p and miR-181b-5p mimics that efficiently produced induced endothelial cells (iECs). Transcriptome profiling, protein expression, and functional studies demonstrated that iECs exhibit high similarity to ECs. Injected iECs restored blood flow recovery even faster than conventional ECs in a murine hindlimb ischemia model. This study demonstrates that a 4-miRNA cassette is sufficient to reprogram SMCs into ECs and shows promise as a novel regenerative strategy for endothelial repair. © 2022 Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

The purpose of the Strategic Workshop in Information Retrieval in Lorne is to explore the long-range issues of the Information Retrieval field, to recognize challenges that are on - or even over - the horizon, to build consensus on some of the key challenges, and to disseminate the resulting information to the research community. The intent is that this description of open problems will help to inspire researchers and graduate students to address the questions, and will provide funding agencies data to focus and coordinate support for information retrieval research.

A number of recent studies have investigated the relation be-ween URLs and associated query terms from search engine log files. In [5], the query terms associated with the domain of a URL were used as features for a URL classification task. The idea is that query terms that lead to successful classification of a URL are reliable semantic descriptors of the URL content. We follow up on this work by investigating which properties of a URL and its associated query terms predict the classification success. We construct a number of URL and query properties as predictors and proceed to analyze these in-depth. We conclude that the classification success | and thus the reliability of the query terms as URL descriptors | cannot easily be predicted from properties of the URL and the queries.

Stephen Robertson retired from the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge during the summer of 2013 after a long career as one of the most influential, well-liked and eminent researchers in Information Retrieval throughout the world.

Two key, but usually ignored, issues for the evaluation of methods of personalization for information retrieval are: that such evaluation must be of a search session as a whole; and, that people, during the course of an information search session, engage in a variety of activities, intended to accomplish differ- ent goals or intentions. Taking serious account of these factors has major impli- cations for not only evaluation methods and metrics, but also for the nature of the data that is necessary both for understanding and modeling information search, and for evaluation of personalized support for information retrieval (IR). In this position paper, we: present a model of IR demonstrating why these fac- tors are important; identify some implications of accepting their validity; and, on the basis of a series of studies in interactive IR, identify some types of data concerning searcher and system behavior that we claim are, at least, necessary, if not necessarily sufficient, for meaningful evaluation of personalization of IR., Comment: Working Notes of CLEF 2017 - Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum

The Third WEPIR 2020 workshop builds on the success of the first two WEPIR meetings held at CHIIR 2018 and CHIIR 2019. WEPIR 2020 again brings together researchers from different backgrounds interested in continuing to explore and advance the evaluation of personalisation in information retrieval. Similar to the first two workshops, WEPIR 2020 has a strong emphasis on active participation by workshop attendees. This was very successfully achieved in the first two workshops by the use of workshop breakout groups exploring topics related to personalisation and information retrieval, and the evaluation of personalisation in information retrieval in general, with subsequent report back to the workshop as a whole. However, a key difference for WEPIR 2020 is that while the first two workshops focused on developing and articulating principles and ideas relating general topics relating to these topics, identified as interesting and important by the attendees at the workshops, WEPIR 2020 focuses breakout discussion on a number of relevant specific use cases of the evaluation of personalisation in information retrieval. A use case is assigned to each breakout group with the plan being to have more than one group work on each use case. The task for each group is to identify specific relevant factors relating to the use case in terms of user activities, data to be collected, ethical issues, and evaluation metrics. Groups will make reports of their discussions to the assembled workshop in the final session with discussion of the alternative solutions relating to the same use case, and contrasting the issues raised by the different use cases. The overall goal of the workshop is to work towards developing a general set of principles and guidelines for addressing the evaluation of specific instances of the use of personalisation in information retrieval tasks. This is consistent with the activities and goals of the first two workshops, but represents a significant progression of the activities towards concrete outcomes of benefit to those exploring personalisation in search, the issues arising in its evaluation, and how researchers might go about tackling this in specific situations.

The Third Workshop on Evaluation of Personalisation in Information Retrieval (WEPIR 2021) was held in conjunction with the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval (CHIIR 2021) in Canberra, Australia, as a virtual event. WEPIR 2021 followed on from the first and second WEPIRs held at CHIIR 2018 and 2019. The purpose of the workshop was again to bring together researchers from different backgrounds, interested in advancing the evaluation of personalisation in information retrieval. The workshop focused on further development of a common understanding of the challenges, requirements and practical limitations of personalisation in information retrieval and its evaluation.