Les progrès réalisés en immunologie ont orienté les recherches vers des approches et des stratégies de plus en plus prometteuses et innovantes afin de mieux manipuler la réponse immunitaire. Le but de nos recherches est la prévention et le traitement des maladies liées aux dysfonctionnements du système immunitaire, telles que les maladies auto-immunes, inflammatoires et malignes. Bien que l'inflammation constitue un processus physiologique indispensable au maintien de l'homéostasie suite à une infection ou à une lésion, elle est également associée à des pathologies infectieuses, auto-immunes et tumorales. Les stratégies thérapeutiques les plus utilisées pour traiter l'inflammation sont basées sur la neutralisation des médiateurs inflammatoires par des anticorps, des antagonistes moléculaires, des immunoglobulines intraveineuses, des corticostéroïdes, des médicaments anti-inflammatoires non stéroïdiens. En plus des traitements mentionnés, des produits issus de la phytothérapie ont été largement utilisés afin d'atténuer l'inflammation et la douleur dans plusieurs maladies inflammatoires et dans le cancer. Depuis des décennies, les préparations de Viscum album, connu sous le nom de " gui européen ", sont largement utilisées dans le traitement du cancer comme thérapie auxiliaire. Bien que les mécanismes d'action soient partiellement connus, plusieurs hypothèses ont été proposées. En effet, les mécanismes anti-tumoraux du Viscum album impliquent des propriétés induisant une cytotoxicité, l'apoptose, l'inhibition de l'angiogenèse et plusieurs autres mécanismes immunomodulateurs. Ce travail décrit un nouveau mécanisme anti-inflammatoire de Viscum album, qui participe à l'effet thérapeutique de ces préparations. De plus, l'effet bénéfique anti-inflammatoire observé est associé à l'inhibition des voies pro- inflammatoires de COX2 et PGE2 dans les cellules épithéliales issues d'adénocarcinome du poumon. Ce travail a identifié un des mécanismes moléculaires de Viscum album associé à son effet anti-inflammatoire participant à ses bénéfices thérapeutiques. Ainsi, ces préparations pourraient être utilisées en combinaison avec d'autres traitements dans des maladies inflammatoires et dans le cancer.

This thesis explores the geographic complexity of English identity in the High Middle Ages by examining texts that reflect moments and spaces of cultural contact. While interaction with a cultural Other is often thought to reinforce national identity, I challenge this notion, positing instead that, in the texts analysed here, cultural meetings prompt the formation or consolidation of regional identities. These identities are often simultaneously local and cross-cultural, inclusive but based in community ties and a shared sense of place. Each of the four chapters examines a different kind of regional identity and its relation to Englishness through romances and historiographical texts in Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English. Discussion primarily focuses on the Gesta Herwardi, Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, Gui de Warewic, Boeve de Haumtone, Le roman de toute chevalerie, and Richard Coer de Lyon. Each of these texts negotiates English identity in relation to a cultural Other, and balances various aspects of cultural identity and scales of geographic affiliation. While some focus exclusively on a particular locality, others create inclusive regional identities, draw together the foreign and the familiar, or depict England as a region on the edge of an interconnected world. These texts show that Englishness can carry different meanings, nuances, and identitary strategies that depend on context, location, or ideology. Together, they forge an image of England that is diverse and multinucleated. Its borders become spaces of meeting, connection, and cultural overlap, as well as division. These works establish a strong English identity while articulating England's necessary relationship with other places, spaces, and peoples, challenging not the borders of England, but the borders of Englishness.

Today’s massive usage of smartphones has put a high demand on all application developers in the matter of security. For us to be able to keep using all existing and new applications, a process that removes significant security vulnerabilities is essential. To remove these vulnerabilities, the applications have to be tested. In this thesis, we identify six methods for functional and security testing of client-server applications running Android and Python Flask. Regarding functional testing, we implement Espresso testing and RESTful API testing. In regards to the security testing of the system, we do not only implement fuzz testing, sniffing, reverse engineering and SQL injection testing on a system developed by a student group in a parallel project, but also discover a significant security vulnerability that directly affects the integrity and reliability of this system. Out of the six identified testing techniques, reverse engineering exposed the vulnerability. In conjunction with this, we verified that the system’s functionality works as it is supposed to.

Software testing is something that is very common and is done to increase the quality of and confidence in a software. In this report, an idea is proposed to create a software for GUI regression testing which uses image recognition to perform steps from test cases. The problem that exists with such a solution is that if a GUI has had changes made to it, then many test cases might break. For this reason, REGTEST was created which is a GUI regression testing tool that is able to handle one type of change that has been made to the GUI component, such as a change in color, shape, location or text. This type of solution is interesting because setting up tests with such a tool can be very fast and easy, but one previously big drawback of using image recognition for GUI testing is that it has not been able to handle changes well. It can be compared to tools that use IDs to perform a test where the actual visualization of a GUI component does not matter; It only matters that the ID stays the same; however, when using such tools, it either requires underlying knowledge of the GUI component naming conventions or the use of tools which automatically constructs XPath queries for the components. To verify that REGTEST can work as well as existing tools a comparison was made against two professional tools called Ranorex and Kantu. In those tests, REGTEST proved very successful and performed close to, or better than the other software.

New technologies are constantly being developed and their success depends highly on finding applications that uses them. A couple of the latest additions to this category are mobile positioning via the GSM-net and mobile Internet. They are both predicted to play an important role in the future. The problem of developing applications for these technologies are many but the most important ones are the limited performance on the current PDA?s. These limitations force the applications to be extremely cheap both on the usage of memory and the use of processor capacity. This affects which kind of applications that are possible to implement on the PDA?s. This report offers a description of a project that aimed at developing applications using mobile Internet and mobile positioning. We focus on the development of the parts that include user involvement and describe our way of dealing with a design process that aims at designing for a nonexistent context. But this report also provides an attempt at identifying what is important when designing applications for a future context. We argue the importance of both practical attempts like the Mapster project and ethnographical studies of situations in the present similar to the future context where the applications are to work. / Daniel Stranne, tel. 031-259812 Magnus Eklund, tel. 08-59087969

This report, in which we have put an emphasis on the word communication, is based on a student software development project conducted during spring 2002. We describe how the use of design tools plays a key role in supporting communication in group activities and to what extent communication can be supported and enhanced by tools such as mock-ups and metaphors in a group project. We also describe a design progress from initial sketches to a final mock-up of a GUI for a postcard demo application. / I denna rapport, som baserar sig på ett studentprojekt utfört under våren 2002, har vi fokuserat på ordet kommunikation. Vi beskriver hur användande av designverktyg kan spela en nyckelroll när det gäller att stöda kommunikation i gruppaktiviteter och i vilken utsträckning kommunikation kan stödas och förstärkas av verktyg som mockuper och metaforer. Vi beskriver också en designprogress från initiala skisser till färdig mockup av ett grafiskt användargränssnitt för en demoapplikation av en vykortstjänst.

Gränssnittsdesign är en av de viktigaste aktiviteterna vid systemutveckling, eftersom gränssnittet utgör den beståndsdel för vilket slutanvändare kommer göra sin primära helhetsbedömning av systemet utefter. Det innebär att gränssnittsdesignarbetet har en avgörande roll för hur systemet kommer att mottas och bedömas vid leverans och upphandlingar av system. Att designa tillfredställande gränssnitt handlar om att ta hänsyn till en rad olika human computer interaction (HCI)-aspekter. Dessa är användbarhet, användarupplevelse samt estetik, det vill säga hur visuellt tilltalande gränssnittet är. Följande tre aspekter kommer på olika sätt påverka hur en användare upplever ett system, vilket i sin tur kommer påverka huruvida en beställare är beredd att investera i ett system. Att utveckla gränssnitt för system innebär ofta att designers och utvecklare måste göra avvägningar kring i vilken mån en designer skall få realisera gränssnittsdesign. Detta eftersom en samansättning av för många visuella gränssnittselement kan få inverkan på systemets prestanda. Stundtals hamnar de två elementen, visuella designattribut och systemkrav, i konflikt med varandra och i de fall där de senare föregår designattribut ställs gränssnittsdesigners inför en utmaning eftersom att de bli begränsade i sitt arbete. Trots detta ställs dock samma krav på att designers skall uppnå tilltalande gränssnitt som väcker känslor av professionalism, samtidigt som systemet skall bibehålla optimal systemprestanda och funktionalitet.Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur ett tillfredställande gränssnitt i aspekter av estetik, användbarhet och användarupplevelse kan designas i ett standardsystem när designarbete begränsas till att enbart kunna justera placering och färg av gränssnittselement. Detta har inneburit en designforskningsansats bestående av en iterativ utvecklingsprocess där ett gränssnitt designat och realiserat baserat på av teorin förslagna riktlinjer för gränssnittsdesign som fortfarande har varit möjliga att tillämpa trots designarbetets begränsningar. Gränssnittet har därefter utvärderats genom experiment i form av användbarhetstester och expertutvärdering. Empirisk data från utvärderingarna har därefter analyserats och införlivats i gränssnittet och slutligen har en slutsats genererats och presenterats.Studiens resultat visar att genom en kombination av befintliga teoribaserade riktlinjer kommer designers en god bit på väg för att lyckas design tillfredställande gränssnitt i aspekter av estetik, användbarhet och användarupplevelse. I slutet av studien presenteras detta i form av sju nya riktlinjer. Variabeln användarupplevelse visade sig dock vara svårare att designa för i studiens begränsade kontext. Detta beror på att användarupplevelse är en svår variabel att utvärdera på grund av dess subtila natur. Slutligen presenteras förslag för framtida forskning och på vilket sätt studiens resultat vidare bör beprövas. / User-Interface design is one of the most important aspects of development of a system, as the user-interface is one of the elements that the user primarily will take in consideration when assessing a system. This means that user-interface design plays an important role in how the system will be received and assessed at procurement. A designer has to consider a couple of human computer interaction (HCI)-aspects such as usability, user experience, and aesthetics, in order to design a satisfactory user-interface. These three aspects of human computer interaction affect user experience of a system, which will influence a client’s decision on investment in the system. Designing a user-interface of a system often means that designers and developers have to consider the extent to which a designer can implement their version of the interface. A composition of many visual interface elements can have an impact on the systems performance. Sometimes the visual design attributes can conflict with the system requirements. If designers are challenged system requirements are prioritised because they will be limited in their work. Despite those limitations, the designers are still needed to design an appealing user-interface that can invoke feelings of professionalism, parallel to the system requirement of optimal performance and functionality.The purpose of this study was to explore how an appealing user-interface with regards to aesthetics, usability and user experience can be designed when the design work is limited to only be able to adjust placement and visual appearance in terms of names and colour of UI elements. This has been explored by doing an iterative development process in which an interface has been designed and developed based on guidelines from theory on user-interface design which the authors has been able to implement based on the limitations on the design work. The interface has subsequently been evaluated by experiments in terms of usability tests and an expert evaluation in the form of a heuristic evaluation. The evaluations resulted in empirical data which has been analysed and set against existing theory upon which a conclusion has been generated and presented.The result of the study show that designers are well on the way to successfully design an appealing user-interface in relation to aesthetic, usability and user experience, which the authors presents in the form of seven new guidelines. The variable user experience turned out to be more difficult to design in the study’s limited context. The authors believe that one of the reasons for this is that user experience is difficult to evaluate because of its subtle nature. Lastly we present suggestions for future research and how the results of the study should be further proved.

The amount and variety of visual information presented on electronic displays is ever-increasing. Finding and acquiring relevant information in the most effective manner possible is of course desirable. While there are advantages to presenting a large number of information objects on a screen at the same time, it can also hinder fast detection of objects of interest. One way of addressing that problem is Voice Assisted Visual Search (VAVS). A user supported by VAVS calls out an object of interest and is immediately guided to the object by a highlighting cue. This thesis is an initial study of the VAVS user interface technique. The findings suggest that VAVS is a promising approach, supported by theory and practice. A working prototype shows that locating objects of interest can be sped up significantly, requiring only half the amount of time taken without the use of VAVS, on average. / Voice-Assisted Visual Search

A pragmatic method for designing compliant mechanisms is developed in this thesis, by selecting among existing mechanisms one that may be modified as required. This method complements existing techniques by answering questions of the existence and multiplicity of solutions for the given specifications of a practical problem. The premise for the method is a 2D map that juxta- poses the problem-specifications and the characteristics of compliant mechanisms in a database. The selection of the most suitable mechanisms is similar to Ashby's method of material selection. In our method, stuffiness, inertia, and the inherent kinematic characteristics of compliant mechanisms are analogous to material properties in Ashby's method. These characteristics capture the lumped behavior of compliant mechanisms in static and dynamic situations using spring-lever (SL) and spring-mass-lever (SML) models. The work includes the development of computation- ally efficient methods to compute the SL and SML model characteristics of single-input and single-output compliant mechanisms. Also developed in this work is a method to determine a feasible map by solving the governing equations of equilibrium and several inequalities pertaining to problem- specifications. The map helps not only in assessing the feasibility of the specifications but also in re-designing the mechanisms in predetermined ways to nd multiple solutions, all of which account for practical considerations. The method pays due attention to the overall size, strength considerations, manufacturability, and choice of material. It also enables minimal alterations of the problem-specifications when the user prefers a particular mechanism in the database. All these features are implemented in a web-based Java program with a graphical user interface that can be accessed at http://www.mecheng.iisc.ernet.in/ m2d2/CM design. Six case- studies that include micro machined inertial sensors, miniature valve mechanisms, ultra-sensitive force sensors, etc., are documented in detail to demonstrate the usefulness of the method in practice.

Les préparations de Viscum album (VA), connu sous le nom vernaculaire de gui européen, sont fréquemment utilisées en support des traitements anticancéreux, principalement pour améliorer la qualité de vie des malades et réduire la croissance des tumeurs. Elles sont connues pour exercer des effets anti-tumoraux. Il existe de plus en plus de données scientifiques faisant état de liens étroits entre cancer et inflammation. Étant donné que la prostaglandine E2 (PGE2) induite par la cyclo-oxygénase 2 (COX-2) joue un rôle clef dans l’inflammation, j’ai exploré la régulation du système COX-2-PGE2 par VA et ses mécanismes sous-jacents. J’ai montré que VA exerce ses effets anti-inflammatoires en inhibant sélectivement l’expression de COX-2 et en diminuant la production de PGE2 qui en découle, par le biais d’une déstabilisation de l’ARNm de COX-2. En plus de leurs propriétés cytotoxiques, il a été montré que les préparations de VA ont également des effets immunostimulants. Les différentes préparations de VA sont hautement hétérogènes du fait de leurs compositions biochimiques qui varient selon la récolte, l’espèce de l’arbre hôte et les méthodes de préparation qui peuvent influer sur leur efficacité clinique. De ce fait, j’ai réalisé une étude comparative sur cinq préparations de VA dans le but d’analyser leurs capacités de maturation et d’activation des cellules dendritiques (DC) qui peuvent à leur tour présenter une réponse immunitaire anti-tumorale. Les résultats ont montré que parmi les cinq préparations,VA Qu Spez induit de manière significative l’activation des DC et la sécrétion de cytokines pro-inflammatoires telle que l’IL-6, l’IL-8 et le TNF-α qui induisent la production d’IFN-γ,orientant de ce fait la réponse immunitaire vers une réponse Th1. L’orchestration de la11fonction des cellules myélomonocytiques est un élément central à l’interface entre inflammation et cancer. Il constitue un paradigme expliquant la plasticité et la fonction des macrophages. Mon étude met en évidence l’influence de VA Qu Spez sur la polarisation des macrophages qui passent d’un état alternatif (M2) à un état dit classique (ou M1). Les macrophages M2 sont connus pour polariser les réponses immunitaires Th2, pour participer à l’élimination des parasites, pour diminuer l’inflammation, pour promouvoir le remodelage tissulaire et la progression des tumeurs et pour avoir des fonctions immunorégulatrices. Les macrophages M1 sont impliqués dans la réponse Th1, favorisent la résistance aux pathogènes intracellulaires et aux tumeurs et promeuvent des réactions de désagrégation tissulaires. L’ensemble de ces résultats permet de comprendre les propriétés anti-inflammatoires et immunostimulantes des préparations de VA. Des recherches complémentaires permettront d’améliorer les stratégies d’utilisation thérapeutique de VA et son utilisation dans les soins de support aux traitements anticancéreux. / Viscum album (VA) preparations, commonly known as European mistletoe, are frequentlyused as complementary therapy in cancer, mainly to improve quality of life of the patients andto reduce the tumor growth. They are known to exert anti-tumoral effects. There is increasing evidence of the convoluted connection of cancer and inflammation. As cyclooxygenase-2(COX-2)-induced prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) plays a key role in the inflammation, I explored the regulation of COX-2-PGE2 axis by VA and underlying mechanisms. I found that VA exerts anti-inflammatory effects by selectively inhibiting COX-2 expression and ensuing PGE2 production. Inhibition of COX-2 expression implicates COX-2 mRNA destabilisation. In addition to their cytotoxic properties, they have also been shown to have immunostimulatory properties. Each VA preparations are highly heterogeneous because oftheir chemical composition which varies depending on the time of harvest, species of host treeand manufacturing methods, together which might influence clinical efficacy of VA.Therefore I performed a comparative study involving five different preparations of VA concerning maturation and activation of dendritic cells (DCs) which in turn may manifestanti-tumoral immune response. Results showed that among all five preparations, VA Qu Spez significantly induces DC activation, secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines such as IL-6, Il-8 and TNF-α, enhancing IFN-γ production hence promoting Th1 immune response. The orchestration of myelomonocytic cell function is a key element that links inflammation and cancer and provides a paradigm for macrophage plasticity and function. My study reveals the effect of VA Qu Spez in switching the M2 macrophages which are known to participate inpolarizing Th2 responses, help with parasite clearance, dampen inflammation, promote tissue remodelling and tumor progression and have immunoregulatory functions, towards classicallyactivated M1 macrophages which are part of a polarized Th1 response and mediate resistance13to intracellular pathogens and tumors and elicit tissue-disruptive reactions. These results together should assist in understanding the anti-inflammatory and immunostimulatory properties of VA preparations and further research is warranted to improve the therapeutic strategies of use of VA and their role as complimentary therapy in cancer.