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Exponential error bounds achievable by universal coding and decoding are derived for frame-asynchronous discrete memoryless multiple access channels with two senders, via the method of subtypes, a refinement of the method of types. An empirical entropy decoder is employed. A key tool is an improved packing lemma, that overcomes the technical difficulty caused by codeword repetitions via an induction based new argument. The asymptotic form of the bounds admits numerical evaluation. This demonstrates that error exponents achievable by synchronous transmission can be superseded via controlled asynchronism, i.e. a deliberate shift of the codewords.

Angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (AITL) and peripheral T-cell lymphoma with T follicular helper phenotype (PTCL-TFH) are a group of complex clinicopathological entities that originate from T follicular helper cells and share a similar mutation profile. Their diagnosis is often a challenge, particularly at an early stage, because of a lack of specific histological and immunophenotypic features, paucity of neoplastic T cells and prominent polymorphous infiltrate. We investigated whether the lymphoma-associated RHOA Gly17Val (c.50G>T) mutation, occurring in 60% of cases, is present in the early “reactive” lesions, and whether mutation analysis could help to advance the early diagnosis of lymphoma. The RHOA mutation was detected by quantitative polymerase chain reaction with a locked nucleic acid probe specific to the mutation, and a further peptide nucleic acid clamp oligonucleotide to suppress the amplification of the wild-type allele. The quantitative polymerase chain reaction assay was highly sensitive and specific, detecting RHOA Gly17Val at an allele frequency of 0.03%, but not other changes in Gly17, nor in 61 controls. Among the 37 cases of AITL and PTCL-TFH investigated, RHOA Gly17Val was detected in 62.2% (23/37) of which 19 had multiple biopsies including preceding biopsies in ten and follow-up biopsies in 11 cases. RHOA Gly17Val was present in each of these preceding or follow-up biopsies including 18 specimens that showed no evidence of lymphoma by combined histological, immunophenotypic and clonality analyses. The mutation was seen in biopsies 0-26.5 months (mean 7.87 months) prior to the lymphoma diagnosis. Our results show that RHOA Gly17Val mutation analysis is valuable in the early detection of AITL and PTCL-TFH.

This paper is motivated by the need of deadline-bounded applications in live mobile network environments to obtain the guarantee and the appropriate share of an input and output (I/O) data rate. However, data processing frameworks only support the request of memory and the computing capacity at present. In this paper, we propose a solution that allows the control of disk I/O and network I/O for data processing applications in YARN and Mesos frameworks. Experimental results show that our tool can provision the I/O data rate sharing of competing data processing applications.

Angioimmunoblastic T‐cell lymphoma (AITL) is a neoplastic proliferation of T follicular helper cells with clinical and histological presentations suggesting a role of antigenic drive in its development. Genetically, it is characterized by a stepwise acquisition of somatic mutations, with early mutations involving epigenetic regulators (TET2, DNMT3A) and occurring in haematopoietic stem cells, with subsequent changes involving signaling molecules (RHOA, VAV1, PLCG1, CD28) critical for T‐cell biology. To search for evidence of potential oncogenic cooperation between genetic changes and intrinsic T cell receptor (TCR) signaling, we investigated somatic mutations and T‐cell receptor β (TRB) rearrangement in 119 AITL, 11 peripheral T‐cell lymphomas with T follicular helper phenotype (PTCL‐TFH), and 25 PTCL‐NOS using Fluidigm polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and Illumina MiSeq sequencing. We confirmed frequent TET2, DNMT3A, and RHOA mutations in AITL (72%, 34%, 61%) and PTCL‐TFH (73%, 36%, 45%) and showed multiple TET2 mutations (2 or 3) in 57% of the involved AITL and PTCL‐TFH. Clonal TRB rearrangement was seen in 76 cases with multiple functional rearrangements (2–4) in 18 cases (24%). In selected cases, we confirmed bi‐clonal T‐cell populations and further demonstrated that these independent T‐cell populations harboured identical TET2 mutations by using BaseScope in situ hybridization, suggesting their derivation from a common TET2 mutant progenitor cell population. Furthermore, both T‐cell populations expressed CD4. Finally, in comparison with tonsillar TFH cells, both AITL and PTCL‐TFH showed a significant overrepresentation of several TRB variable family members, particularly TRBV19*01. Our findings suggest the presence of parallel neoplastic evolutions from a common TET2 mutant haematopoietic progenitor pool in AITL and PTCL‐TFH, albeit to be confirmed in a large series of cases. The biased TRBV usage in these lymphomas suggests that antigenic stimulation may play an important role in predilection of T cells to clonal expansion and malignant transformation. © 2019 The Authors. The Journal of Pathology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Kinase activity is frequently altered in renal cell carcinoma (RCC), and tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are part of the standard treatment strategy in patients with metastatic disease. However, there are still no established biomarkers to predict clinical benefits of a specific TKI. Here, we performed protein tyrosine kinase (PTK) profiling using PamChip® technology. The aim of this study was to identify differences in PTK activity between normal and malignant kidney tissue obtained from the same patient, and to investigate the inhibitory effects of TKIs frequently used in the clinics: sunitinib, pazopanib, cabozantinib and tivozanib. Briefly, our results showed that 36 kinase substrates differs (FDR < 0.05) between normal and cancer kidney tissue, where members of the Src family kinases and the phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K) pathway exhibit high activity in renal cancer. Furthermore, ex vivo treatment of clear cell RCC with TKIs revealed that pathways such as Rap1, Ras and PI3K pathways were strongly inhibited, whereas the neurotrophin pathway had increased activity upon TKI addition. In our assay, tivozanib and cabozantinib exhibited greater inhibitory effects on PTK activity compared to sunitinib and pazopanib, implying they might be better suitable as TKIs for selected RCC patients.

The motivation behind this contribution was raised during the examination of the boundary value patterns of the Virtual Dictionary Extension (VDE) compression method, which is a re-weighted extension of the lossless, universal compression method, LZW. During the VDE compression method words are stored in the so called compression dictionary, therefore the base unit of the boundary value pattern is the word. The application of VDE is reasonable over patterns where the relatively long base fragments are recurring with short deviance at the end. In our earlier work we found and proved the existence of the pattern which results the best compression ratio. However, determination of the input pattern, which results the worst compression ratio (or worst case), is much more complicated, since it depends on the recursive extension of words.

In this contribution we propose an eventually consistent replica management framework providing guarantees for packet duplication avoidance in a distributed manner considering load balancing and avoiding the single point of failure. To achieve this we use a special kind of data structure, the so called Interval Merging Binary Tree.

In this contribution, we provide a detailed analysis of the search operation for the Interval Merging Binary Tree (IMBT), an efficient data structure proposed earlier to handle typical anomalies in the transmission of data packets. A framework is provided to decide under which conditions IMBT outperforms other data structures typically used in the field, as a function of the statistical characteristics of the commonly occurring anomalies in the arrival of data packets. We use in the modeling Bernstein theorem, Markov property, Fibonacci sequences, bipartite multi-graphs, and contingency tables.

State-of-the-art machine learning algorithms require large amount of high quality data. In practice, however, the sample size is commonly low and data is imbalanced along different class labels. Low sample size and imbalanced class distribution can significantly deteriorate the predictive performance of machine learning models. In order to overcome data quality issues, we propose a novel data augmentation method, Guided Deep Interpolation (GDI). It is based on a convolutional auto-encoder network, which is equipped with an auxiliary linear self-expressive layer. The network is trained by minimizing a composite objective function so that to extract the underlying clustered structure of semantic similarities of data points while high reconstruction quality is also preserved. The trained network is used to define a sampling strategy and a synthetic data generation procedure. Making use of the weights of the self-expressive layer, we introduce a measure of semantic variability to quantify how similar a data point to other data points on average. Based on the proposed measure of semantic variability, a joint distribution is defined. Using the distribution we can draw pairs of similar data points so that one point is semantically underrepresented (isolated) while its pair possesses relatively high semantic variability. A sampled pair is interpolated in the deep feature space of the network so that to increase semantic variability while preserve class label of the semantically underrepresented data point. The trained decoder is used to determine pixel space representations of latent space interpolations. The resulting data augmentation procedure generates synthetic samples by increasing the semantic variability of semantically underrepresented instances in a class label preserving way. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms traditional and generative model-based data augmentation methods on low sample size and imbalanced data sets.

Background: Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) constitute the backbone of treatment of metastatic (m) RCC. TKIs show great inter-individual variability of both efficacy and toxicity. The aim of this study was to compare the tyrosine kinase activity in normal and malignant kidney tissue and explore TKI effect on tumor tissue ex vivo. Materials and methods: Human nephrectomy samples (n = 295) consecutively collected at Akershus University Hospital from 2013 to 2019 were available. For this study, 22 samples of patients with mRCC (twenty-one clear cell and one chromophobe histology) and 3 with non-metastatic disease (two clear cell and one papillary histology) were selected. Tumor and normal tissue from each patient were prepared and assessed by an experienced pathologist, and 5µg of protein lysates was extracted. Kinase activity profiling of 144 tyrosine kinase peptides was performed using PamChip Arrays for PAMSTATION12. Protein lysates from tumors were in addition treated with four different TKIs ex vivo, based on IC50; sunitinib (2.5 µM), cabozantinib (2.5 µM), pazopanib (10 µM) and tivozanib (2 µM). All data was processed and analyzed in Bionavigator V.6 (PamGene). Results: The overall tyrosine kinase activity was increased in tumor tissue compared to normal tissue in all samples. The activity of 36 tyrosine kinases differed significantly (FDR < 0.05), with 20 kinases showing higher and 16 showing lower phosphorylation in tumor compared to normal tissue. Furthermore, adding TKIs to tumor samples ex vivo revealed different potencies of the TKIs. Tivozanib and cabozantinib showed higher inhibition potency compared to sunitinib and pazopanib. Two well-defined peptide clusters were especially affected by tivozanib and cabozantinib exposure. Compared to untreated tumor tissue, the activity of 29 kinases including common TKI targets MET, EGFR, PDGFR and FGFR was significantly reduced in cluster 1. However, we also identified reduced activity of several other kinases i.e. RB, CDK2, CLB, CAM, ZAP70 and PDK1 involved in RAS, RAP1, PI3K-AKT and prostate cancer signaling pathways. In cluster 2, 21 kinases showed increased activity upon TKI exposure, amongst them JNK, ERK, erbB1/erbB2, Shp2 and PLCγ involved in MAPK, ERBB and proteoglycans signaling pathways, and possibly accounting for subsequent TKI resistance. Conclusion: Kinase activity differs significantly between malignant and normal kidney tissue. Furthermore, we have demonstrated different inhibitory effects of TKIs ex-vivo and identified two peptide clusters significantly affected by TKI. Further analysis of affected kinases and signaling pathways as well as correlations with clinical data for the same group of patients will be performed. To our knowledge, similar systematic comprehensive analysis of tyrosine kinase activity and correlation to clinical data has not been reported previously. Citation Format: Katarina Puco, Andliena Tahiri, Faris Naji, Daniel Heinrich, Vessela N. Kristenssen, Glenny C. Alfsen, Lorant Farkas, Frode S. Nilsen, Stig Müller, Jan Oldenburg, Jürgen Geisler. Tyrosine kinome profiling of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2021; 2021 Apr 10-15 and May 17-21. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(13_Suppl):Abstract nr 2292.

The following conjectures from previous work of the authors are proven, enhancing the relevance of results there on the subject in the title: (i) The error exponents previously derived assuming that consecutive messages could be encoded using different codebooks, are also achievable with each sender using only one codebook. (ii) In case the senders could be synchronized, controlled asynchronism (a deliberate shift of codewords) may admit to achieve error exponents unachievable by synchronous transmission.

A variant of successive decoding for asynchronous multiple access channel is introduced involving constant composition codebooks and maximal mutual information decoder. This admits to improve known achievability results to universal achievability, complemented by error exponents. A further result is that when synchronization is available, a deliberate shifting of the starting times of codewords (controlled asynchronism) combined with successive decoding offers a substitute for techniques of rate splitting and time sharing.

A new universal coding/decoding scheme for random access with collision detection is given in the case of two senders. The result is used to give an achievable joint source-channel coding error exponent for multiple access channels in the case of independent sources. This exponent is improved in a modified model that admits error free 0 rate communication between the senders., Comment: This paper is submitted to IEEE transactions on information theory. It was presented in part at ISIT2013 (IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Istanbul)

Csiszar's channel coding theorem for multiple code-books is generalized allowing the codeword lengths differ across codebooks. Also in this case, for each codebook an error exponent can be achieved that equals the random coding exponent for this codebook alone, in addition, the overload detection failure probability tends to 0. This is proved even for sender and receiver not knowing the channel. As a corollary, a substantial improvement is obtained when the sender knows the channel.

Scalability is an important requirement in the development and the operation of applications in a cloud environment. To handling heavy concurrency in the input load, many design-related and operational factors should be considered. The microservice architecture patterns provide better means to increase the scalability than traditional software architecture patterns. However, certain aspects of applications such as the need to persist/maintain the application state require additional measures in the design and the supporting mechanism. We propose a scalable routing mechanism for applications designed according to the microservice architecture. In particular, a cloud infrastructure resource reservation application has been designed with some stateful services. The proposed approach maintains a good scalability, which provides a mean to achieve the efficient usage of the infrastructure resources.

In order to communicate with another service, a service needs to know the address of other services. This knowledge can be acquired by a process called service discovery (SD). In a microservice architecture (MSA), unlike SOA, a service discovery framework has not been provided out of the box. In a telecom environment additional requirements may arise, besides the basic one of discoverability. In this paper we shortly present the state of the art in service discovery with reflections on the specific needs of MSA and in particular in the context of telecom applications. In this context open source frameworks are investigated and compared.

The general area of the paper is methods and data structures to efficiently avoid data duplication. In telecommunication networks operation support systems (OSS) process time series of counters related to the behaviour of network elements, such as failed location updates over the last 5 min. In general we may assume time series of key-value pairs with the key encoding the ordered sequence number of the particular counter.

The application of lossless data compression methods may significantly decrease the required storage space or throughput. The quality of the compression ratio is influenced by several factors, like the available space and processing resources and the statistical characteristic of the data to be compressed. In this contribution we will perform the boundary analysis of Virtual Dictionary Extension(-VDE), which is an LZW based lossless compression method. The analysis will be performed along the previously mentioned factors. During the examinations the algorithmic approach will be applied. This means that the required space and time complexity will be determined as the dependency of the input length. Virtual Dictionary Extension is a parametric method with two extreme values. If the parameter is set to one extremity VDE acts as LZW. Therefore LZW will be used as a reference method and the results will be compared to it. The analysis is called transient since our examinations are limited to the dictionary construction period.

We present an overview of NP-hard problems and methods related to deployment, resource sharing, load balancing and fairness among multiple users in 5G mobile networks. We provide a general model of the system considering the E2E computational latency of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) applications. An evaluation of a multi-user MEC offloading model reducible to the Multiple Knapsack Problem (MKP) is performed. We study the behaviour of an exact and a heuristic algorithm. We also show the performance results of these in a real-life small-cell deployment scenario.

A set of smart phones distributed in space may constitute a powerful recording device that is able to create audio/video recordings of social events in a location-aware manner. Such events are formal and informal meetings with 2 or more participants. If each person has a smart phone, this can be programmed to record his speech and skip the speech of the rest of people. Proximity networking capabilities let the individually recorded content be aggregated and distributed to each smart phone. In this paper we analyze such a scenario in which Symbian S60 platforms with Bluetooth version 1.2 stack were used. A distributed recording and content delivery framework is proposed and its performance analyzed by means of simulation and measurements. The validation of our algorithm has been performed using a prototype implementation over these platforms.

YARN is an emerging resource management in the Hadoop ecosystem, where big data in the scale of petabytes/day are processed with the use of commercial off-the-shelf servers. At present YARN supports only RAM and CPU reservation/control. However, the reservation and the control of disk I/O throughput are also needed to provide a satisfactory performance for MapReduce applications. In this paper, we propose a solution with software components that can be integrated into YARN to support the reservation of disk I/O throughput in YARN. Experiments show that a proposed solution can provide a disk I/O throughput guarantee for MapReduce applications.

Improved exponential error bounds are derived for frame-asynchronous discrete memoryless multiple access channels with two senders. By numerical evaluation for a particular case, it follows that the best error exponent known for synchronous transmission may be beaten if the senders are allowed to transmit with a chosen delay.

In recent years, the study of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients has revealed a central role for type I interferon (IFN) in disease pathogenesis. IFN induces the unabated activation of peripheral dendritic cells, which select and activate autoreactive T cells rather than deleting them, thus failing to induce peripheral tolerance. IFN also directly affects T cells and B cells. Furthermore, immune complexes binding to FcgammaR and Toll-like receptors provide an amplification loop for IFN production and B-cell activation in SLE. Polymorphisms in genes that control IFN production or its downstream signaling pathway, such as IRF5, might be responsible for some of these alterations. This novel information is leading to the development of IFN antagonists as a potential therapeutic intervention in SLE, thus bringing hope to SLE patients.

Inherent properties of dendritic cell (DC) subsets are important in the regulation of naïve T-cell differentiation (e.g. Th1 versus Th2 cells), whereas effector memory T cells are believed to produce a fixed cytokine repertoire independent of the type of antigen presenting cell. Here we show that two distinct human DC subsets, plasmacytoid DC (PDC) and myeloid CD11c+ DC, induced autologous mumps virus-specific memory CD4(+) T cells to produce markedly different cytokine patterns upon antigen stimulation. PDC stimulated the T cells to produce gamma-interferon (IFN-gamma) and interleukin-(IL)-10, whereas CD11c+ DC induced lower levels of IFN-gamma, virtually no IL-10, but significant levels of IL-5. Analysis of intracellular cytokine production showed simultaneous production of IL-10 and IFN-gamma in mumps-specific T cells activated by PDC, a cytokine pattern similar to that described for Th1-like regulatory cells. Introduction of CpG oligodeoxynucleotides in PDC/T-cell co-cultures had synergistic effect on virus-dependent IFN-gamma production, whereas the other cytokines remained unchanged. Together, our results show that the type of DC involved in reactivation of previously primed T cells may have significant impact on the resulting cytokine response and suggest that targeting of viral antigens and adjuvant to specific DC subsets should be considered in the design of therapeutic antiviral vaccines.

It has been suggested that human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) evades the immune system by infecting and paralyzing antigen-presenting cells. This view is based mainly on studies of dendritic cells (DCs) obtained after culture of monocytes (moDCs). It is contradicted by the asymptomatic course of HCMV infection in healthy persons, indicating that other key antigen-presenting cells induce an efficient immune response. Here we show that HCMV activates CD11c+ DCs and plasmacytoid DCs (PDCs). In contrast to moDCs, CD11c+ DCs and PDCs produced interferon (IFN) type 1 when exposed to HCMV. Autocrine IFN type 1 partially protected CD11c+ DCs against infection, whereas PDCs were resistant to HCMV even when IFN type 1 activity was inhibited. HCMV exposure induced the maturation of CD11c+ DCs by IFN type 1-dependent and -independent mechanisms. Importantly, CD11c+ DCs infected by inhibiting IFN type 1 activity retained full capacity to stimulate T cells. Renal transplant recipients receiving immunosuppressive treatment had lower frequencies of CD11c+ DCs and PDCs in blood than did healthy controls. The results show that HCMV activates the immune system by interacting with CD11c+ DCs and PDCs and that recipients of renal transplants have low frequencies of these cell types in blood.

The hygiene hypothesis implies that the increasing prevalence of allergy in 'westernized' countries is explained by reduced bacterial exposure in early life, but the underlying mechanism remains elusive. We therefore wanted to study the effect of bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) on the generation of regulatory T (T R ) cells in neonates, and to analyze differences between neonates with allergy risk because of a family history of atopy (FH + ) and controls without such hereditary risk (FH - ). Cord blood mononuclear cells from the FH + and FH - groups were stimulated with β-lactoglobulin in the presence of LPS. T-cell phenotypes suggestive of T R cells [CD25 + , CD25 high and integrin α E (CD103 + )], and the intracellular proliferation antigen Ki-67 were quantified by flow cytometry. Release of the immunosuppressive cytokine transforming growth factor β1 (TGF-β1) from its inactive complex was determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The analyses revealed the generation of T-cell phenotypes suggestive of T R cells including a CD25 high T-cell subset which was inversely related to T-cell proliferation (r = -0.54, p < 0.05) and to activation-induced release of TGF-β1 (r = -0.80, p < 0.001). The CD25 high T-cell subset tended to be impaired in the FH + group (% of CD3 + T cells: FH + , 5.1% vs. FH-, 12.6%), and notably, the FH + group showed a significantly reduced capacity for generation of both CD25 + (FH + , 16.2% vs. FH - , 34.9%; p < 0.01) and α + E T cells (FH + , 2.1% vs. FH - , 3.9%; p < 0.05). Our findings suggested that early-life exposure to a dietary antigen in the presence of LPS might modulate the immune system by generating T R cells. This capacity was impaired in neonates with hereditary allergy risk, but clinical follow-up will be required to determine a possible effect on allergy emergence.

Background Plasmacytoid dendritic cells (PDCs) accumulate in the nasal mucosa of allergic rhinitis patients, but their function in upper airway allergy has not been determined. CpG oligodeoxynucleotides, potent adjuvants in immunotherapeutic strategies in animal models, are especially effective at activating PDCs. These cells are therefore potential targets for immunomodulation in humans. Objective In this study, PDCs were compared with CD11c + dendritic cells (DCs), a very potent antigen-presenting cell type, for their capacity to induce allergen-dependent activation of T H 2 memory cells. Then, we investigated whether CpG-activated PDCs were able to modulate the allergen-specific T H 2 memory response. Methods DCs were isolated from patients with upper airway allergy and cocultured with autologous CD4 + T cells with or without grass pollen extract and CpG. In some experiments cells were restimulated with allergen-pulsed monocyte-derived DCs. T-cell activation was measured by their proliferative response and cytokine production. Results PDCs stimulated allergen-dependent T-cell proliferation and T H 2 cytokine production as efficiently as CD11c + DCs. CpG-activated PDCs inhibited allergen-dependent proliferation of T H 2 memory cells and markedly increased IFN-γ production in PDC/T-cell cocultures; the former effect depended on the CpG-induced IFN-α/β production by the PDCs. Conclusion Our results demonstrated that PDCs efficiently drive allergen-dependent T H 2 memory responses, suggesting that they play an active role in the allergic reaction. However, in the presence of CpG, PDCs were responsible for increased production of the T H 1-related cytokines IFN-α and IFN-γ, indicating that mucosal PDCs may be targets for CpG-based immunotherapeutic strategies against airway allergy.

Resource management is one of the most indispens- able components of cluster-level infrastructure layers. Users of such systems should be able to specify their job requirements as a configuration parameter (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network I/O) that are translated into an appropriate resource reservation and resource allocation decision by the resource management function. YARN is an emerging resource management framework in the Hadoop ecosystem, which supports only memory and CPU reservation at present. In this paper, we propose a solution that takes into account the operation of the Hadoop Distributed File System to control the data rate of applications in the framework of a Hadoop compute platform. We utilize the property that a data pipe between a container and a DataNode consists of a disk I/O subpipe and a TCP/IP subpipe. We have implemented building block software components to control the data rate of data pipes between containers and DataNodes and provide a proof-of-concept with measurement results.

Complex Event Processing deals with the detection of complex events based on rules and patterns defined by domain experts. Many complex events require real-time detection in order to have enough time for appropriate reactions. However, there are several events (e.g. credit card fraud) that should be prevented proactively before they occur, not just responded after they happened. In this paper, we briefly describe Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Predictive Analytics (PA). Afterwards, we focus on a major future direction of CEP, namely the inclusion of PA technologies into CEP tools and applications. Involving PA opens a wide range of possibilities in several application fields. However, we have observed that only few solutions apply PA techniques. In this paper, we define a conceptual framework which combines CEP and PA and which can be the basis of generic design pattern in the future. The conceptual framework is demonstrated in a proof--of--concept experiment. Finally we provide the results and lessons learned.

Frame asynchronous discrete memoryless multiple access channels are analyzed, where some groups of senders are synchronized but the groups are not synchronized with each other. A single-letter characterization of the capacity region is obtained.

A general formalization is given for asynchronous multiple access channels which admits different assumptions on delays. This general framework allows the analysis of so far unexplored models leading to new interesting capacity regions. In particular, a single letter characterization is given for the capacity region in case of 3 senders, 2 synchronous with each other and the third not synchronous with them., Comment: It has been presented in part at ISIT 2011, Saint Petersburg. This extended version is accepted for publication in Kybernetika

Motivated by the importance of asynchronous multiple access channels we give an exact formalization. This formalization admits different distributions on delays. The two classical settings when the delay is uniformly distributed and when it is bounded are discussed as special cases of this model. Our method also allows for the analysis of a so far unexplored class of models, where the known distribution of the delay has a special form, leading to new interesting capacity regions.

For Complex Event Processing (CEP), the synergy with Predictive Analytics (PA) is a promising research direction. In this paper we focus on the inclusion of PA technologies into CEP applications. Involving PA opens a wide range of possibilities in several application fields. However, we have observed that only a few CEP solutions apply PA techniques. We extended a CEP solution with predictive capabilities, defined the key aspects of the combination of these techniques, and summarized how CEP and PA could gain from the joint solution. Our approach is demonstrated in a proof-of-concept experiment and simulation results are provided.

Evolved HSPA is a distributed, packet based radio access system that provides high user data rate and low latency. In our contribution the performance of streaming applications over Evolved HSPA is analyzed in realistic network scenarios. The simulation results indicate that in certain scenarios the adaptation latency experienced in case of applying 3GPP PSS Release 8-compliant streaming adaptation is excessively high, causing stream degradation and thus contributing to an end user experience of lower quality. Possible ways of mitigation are briefly outlined.

To understand the technical feasibility and user perception of mobile video, we conducted a two-week trial where a student community used mobile phone and web technologies to share the events of a campus festival. The questions we investigated included the capability of contemporary smart phones to capture and share the events via real time and stored video; the usage patterns that arise within mobile video community; and the social connections between shooters and viewers. Outcomes on the technical level indicate that challenges remain. The bandwidth of 3G cellular connections limits the quality of live videos and video transfer via public WLAN networks is unreliable causing lost connections. The best results today can be achieved by sending the captured videos from mobile phones to the server in the background and providing video-on-demand rather than live video service. The observed consumption patterns show that freshness of the videos is the least important selection factor while manual and automatic textual tagging is important. Seamless integration of video sharing to camera application would improve the user experience.

This paper targets mobile streaming in which Series 60 smart phones are the stream creators and PC-s are the stream consumers. The aim is to provide experimental data reflecting under which conditions video streaming from smart phones is feasible and whether duplex interactive video between a phone and a PC can be achieved or not. Phones used corporate WiFi and UMTS, PC-s were on the corporate Intranet and respectively on an ADSL connection. The outcomes of the experiments indicate that using the considered technologies and experimental setups in most scenarios video streaming from smart phones over WiFi and UMTS is feasible today, for about an hour. However, providing the level of interactivity needed for video calls is challenging, requiring additional measures. As for the extension of the streaming duration to several hours a technological breakthrough would be required.

BACKGROUND: It has been suggested that allergic diseases are caused by defective suppression of allergen-specific Th2 cells by CD4(+)CD25(+) regulatory T cells. However, such studies have been hampered by the difficulty in distinguishing regulatory T cells from CD25-expressing activated T cells. Recently, it was shown that conventional T cells expressed high levels of CD127, whereas regulatory T cells were CD127(lo), allowing discrimination between these distinct T cell subpopulations. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to study whether the putative regulatory subset defined as CD4(+)CD25(+)CD127(lo) was involved in grass pollen-reactive T cell responses. METHODS: Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were obtained from allergic donors and non-atopic controls out of season. Grass pollen-induced cytokine production and proliferation were compared in cultures of undepleted cells and cells depleted of CD4(+)CD25(+), CD4(+)CD25(+)CD127(hi) or CD4(+)CD25(+)CD127(lo) T cells. RESULTS: Undepleted cell cultures from allergic patients showed significantly increased proliferation and Th2 cytokine production compared with non-atopic controls. Depletion of all CD25(+) T cells did not increase cytokine production or proliferation, and more importantly, no increase in Th2 cytokine production or proliferation was observed in cell cultures depleted of CD4(+)CD25(+)CD127(lo) cells (putative regulatory T cells) compared with undepleted PBMCs in both the allergic and the non-atopic group. CONCLUSION: Our study showed that T cells from grass pollen-allergic patients and non-atopic controls responded very differently to grass pollen extract, but this difference could not be explained by differences in regulatory T cell function. Further studies are needed to understand the importance of regulatory T cells in allergy.

In this brief summary we show an alternate prove for the fundamental theorem of quantum channel coding. This new prove is stronger then the previously known results because it is used von Neumann measurement. Moreover, the compound quantum channel is defined, and its capacity deduced, with the help of this new measurement.

In this paper a local connectivity solution is presented in which smart phones and PDA-s can connect to the enterprise intranet using either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi proximity networking via access points. The contribution highlights the differences at various levels of the implementation between the Bluetooth-based and Wi-Fi based components in our attempt to create a unified service level for Bluetooth-based, Wi-Fi based and both Bluetooth- and Wi-Fi based terminals (newer generation smart phones). Finally use cases and a list of applications are presented that can benefit from our solution in the enterprise segment.

Dendritic cells (DCs) are believed to regulate T cell-mediated immunity primarily by directing differentiation of naive T cells. Here, we show that a large fraction of CD4+ memory cells produce IL-10 within the first hours after interaction with plasmacytoid DCs (PDCs). In contrast, CD11c+ DCs induce IFN-γ and little IL-10. IL-10–secreting T cells isolated after 36 hours of culture with PDCs suppressed antigen-induced T-cell proliferation by an IL-10–dependent mechanism, but were distinct from natural and type 1 regulatory T cells. They proliferated strongly and continued to secrete IL-10 during expansion with PDCs, and after restimulation with immature monocyte-derived DCs or CD11c+ DCs. The IL-10–producing T cells acquired the ability to secrete high levels of IFN-γ after isolation and subsequent coculture with PDCs or CD11c+ DCs. Compared to CD11c+ DCs, PDCs were superior in their ability to selectively expand T cells that produced cytokines on repeated antigenic challenge. The DC-dependent differences in cytokine profiles were observed with viral recall antigen or staphylococcal enterotoxin B and were independent of extracellular type I interferon or IL-10. Our results show that DCs can regulate memory responses and that PDCs rapidly induce regulatory cytokines in effector T cells that can suppress bystander activity.

This work studies a special multicasting problem in Bluetooth networks supporting point-to-point connections and piconets. The reason for the topic choice relies in the fact that Bluetooth, a de-facto proximity communication technique widely available in smart phones today, supports piconets, but sending content to more than 7 nodes is cumbersome. It turns out that by using a non-standard approach, that of parallel piconets of two nodes each, we can obtain a more efficient multicasting than through the legacy multicasting approach

During the planning of an UMTS radio network, there is a natural need for a base station positioning procedure. Good coverage at an acceptable level of network installation and maintaining costs, low interference and uniform interface load are the main requirements. In this paper we present an approach based on simulated annealing.

We present a point-multipoint system optimisation based on simulated annealing heuristics. The system is intended to operate in the 3.5 GHz frequency band mainly in densely built-up environments.

In vitro studies have reported that plasmacytoid dendritic cells (PDCs) exert multiple functions, including production of interferon (IFN)-alpha as effector cells and regulation of T-cell responses as mature DCs. Here we review recent data obtained in situ showing that PDCs accumulate in lesions of type I IFN-related disorders (virus infections and lupus erythematosus), Th2 cell-dominated allergic reactions, and ovarian carcinoma. These results demonstrate that PDCs do migrate to peripheral tissues during inflammation, which lends further support to the view that PDCs most likely are important players in innate and adaptive immunity in vivo. Future research should aim at defining the exact pathogenic or defense roles of PDCs in such disorders and determine whether these cells are potential targets for therapeutic intervention in microbial infections, allergy, autoimmunity, or cancer.