The evolution of distributed applications to reflect structural changes or to adapt to specific conditions of the run-time environment is a difficult issue especially if continuous service is required from end-users. This latter constraint implies to perform changes with minimal penalty on the service provisioning. The set of tools and services that allow such a goal to be achieved is usually d...

polysaccharide pneumococcal vaccine adults in more developed countries: the state of the evidence. Lancet Infect Dis 2003;3:71–8. 8 Alfageme I, Vazquez R, Reyes N, et al. Clinical efficacy of anti-pneumococcal vaccination in patients with COPD. Thorax 2006;61:189–95. 9 Lexau CA, Lynfield R, Danila R, et al. Changing epidemiology of invasive pneumococcal disease among older adults in the era of ...

Akamai's distributed content delivery system fights service bottlenecks and shutdowns by delivering content from the Internet's edge. A s Web sites become popular, they're increasingly vulnerable to the flash crowd problem, in which request load overwhelms some aspect of the site's infrastructure, such as the front-end Web server, network equipment, or bandwidth, or (in more advanced sites) the...

In this paper we show how to modify a large class of evolution strategies (ES’s) for unconstrained optimization to rigorously achieve a form of global convergence, meaning convergence to stationary points independently of the starting point. The type of ES under consideration recombines the parent points by means of a weighted sum, around which the offspring points are computed by random genera...

Existing autocalibration techniques use numerical optimization algorithms that are prone to the problem of local minima. To address this problem, we have developed a method where an interval branch-and-bound method is employed for numerical minimization. Thanks to the properties of Interval Analysis this method is guaranteed to converge to the global solution with mathematical certainty and arb...

Most eukaryotic protein-coding transcripts contain introns, which vary in number and position along the transcript body. Intron removal through pre-mRNA splicing is tightly linked to transcription by RNA polymerase II as it translocates along each gene. Here, we review recent evidence that transcription and splicing are functionally coupled. We focus on how RNA polymerase II elongation rates im...

This paper proposes a bisimulation theory based on multiparty session types where achoreography specification governs the behaviour of session typed processes and their observer. Thebisimulation is defined with the observer cooperating with the observed process in order to formcomplete global session scenarios and usable for proving correctness of optimisations for globallycoord...

In this paper we present a novel approach to register multiple scans from a static object. We formulate the registration problem as an optimization of the maps from all other scans to one reference scan where any map between two scans can be represented by the composition of these maps. In this way, all loop closures can be automatically guaranteed as the maps among all scans are globally consi...

We study a class of permutation-symmetric globally-coupled, phase oscillator networks on N -dimensional tori. We focus on the effects of symmetry and of the forms of the coupling functions, derived from underlying Hodgkin-Huxley type neuron models, on the existence, stability, and degeneracy of phase-locked solutions in which subgroups of oscillators share common phases. We also estimate domain...

This issue of Asia Pacific Allergy (Asia Pac Allergy) will be released at the beginning of its third year of circulation. Asia Pac Allergy is just two years old yet very active and on the way to developing into a leading publication in allergic disease research. We thank all the authors and readers for their efforts and contributions. Our current issue features two valuable reviews on the topic...