Immunodeficient mice engrafted with human cells and tissues have provided an exciting alternative to in vitro studies with human tissues and nonhuman primates for the study of human immunobiology. A major breakthrough in the early 2000s was the introduction of a targeted mutation in the interleukin 2 (IL-2) receptor common gamma chain (IL2rg(null)) into mice that were already deficient in T and...

Type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease associated with numerous microvascular and macrovascular complications. It affects millions of persons worldwide, posing an enormous socioeconomic burden. A growing body of evidence shows that comorbidities are greatly reduced when adequate glycemic control is achieved. Unfortunately, despite the variety of therapies currently available, the majority of pati...

This paper describes the need for a self-organising Service Level Management (SLM) in future Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Due to the complexity of SOA environments, self-management and self-organisation are fundamental requirements for an SLM architecture in this context. The SLM architecture presented consists of two types of autonomic managers. Autonomic managers on the service layer...

Lifelong reinforcement learning provides a promising framework for developing versatile agents that can accumulate knowledge over a lifetime of experience and rapidly learn new tasks by building upon prior knowledge. However, current lifelong learning methods exhibit non-vanishing regret as the amount of experience increases, and include limitations that can lead to suboptimal or unsafe control...

Business Processes for Web Services are the new paradigm for lightweight enterprise integration. They cross organizational boundaries, are provided by entities that see each other just as business partners, and require access control mechanisms based on trust management. Stateful Business Processes, enforcing separation of duties or service limitations based on past or current usage, pose addit...

The performance of current transaction processing systems largely depends on human experts for administration and tuning. These experts have to specify a multitude of internal control parameters in different subsystems for which finding appropriate settings is very difficult. Another shortcoming of manual system administration lies in its inability to quickly react to changing system and worklo...