Neutrophils are recognised to play a pivotal role at the interface between the innate and adaptive immune responses following their rapid recruitment to inflamed tissues and lymphoid organs. Whilst neutrophil trafficking through blood vessels has been extensively studied, the molecular mechanisms regulating their migration into the lymphatic system are still poorly understood. This thesis therefore aimed to investigate the mechanisms involved in neutrophil migration across the lymphatic endothelium during TNF- or Complete Freund's Adjuvant + antigen (CFA+Ag)-induced inflammation of cremaster muscles in vivo. This work revealed that TNF- or CFA+Ag-stimulation induces a rapid but transient entry of tissue-infiltrated neutrophils into lymphatic vessels, a response associated with the regulation and redistribution of the lymphatic endothelial cell glycocalyx. Interestingly, antigen sensitisation resulted in the production of endogenous TNF within cremaster muscles. Using anti-TNF blocking antibodies and mice deficient in both TNF receptors (p55 and p75), endogenous TNF was demonstrated for the first time to be involved in priming and triggering the migration of neutrophils into tissue-associated lymphatic vessels upon antigen challenge. Additionally, the use of chimeric mice exhibiting neutrophils deficient in both TNFRs demonstrated that TNF directly acts on leukocytes to induce neutrophil migration into lymphatic vessels. Furthermore, the results show that TNF-induced migration of neutrophils into the lymphatic system occurs in a strictly CCR7-dependent manner; blocking CXCR4 or CXCL1 signalling does not affect this response. Finally, both TNF- or CFA+AG-stimulation induced ICAM-1 up-regulation on lymphatic vessels, allowing neutrophils to crawl along the lumen; a response that was demonstrated to be TNF-dependent. These results have provided new insights into the mechanisms that mediate neutrophil migration into lymphatic vessels and their subsequent crawling within these vessels during inflammation. In particular, a new role for TNF as a key regulator of these processes has been demonstrated. Taken together, this work has highlighted potential and effective targets to manipulate the role of neutrophils in adaptive immune responses in vivo.

A manutenção de sistemas legados tem se tornado uma preocupação constante das grandes empresas. O setor bancário brasileiro, por exemplo, possui milhões de linhas de código confeccionados em linguagens procedurais, essenciais para atingir os objetivos de negócios destas instituições. Muitos desses programas são considerados bem antigos, possuindo mais de 30 anos de existência e, apesar de serem extremamente úteis para estas organizações, não permitem aproveitar as vantagens das novas tecnologias, tais como o uso de interfaces gráficas, processamento distribuído, entre outros. Fazer um outro aplicativo de software a partir do início pode ser uma tarefa muito árdua e incorrer em grandes riscos para o negócio da empresa. Migrar esses sistemas aos poucos parece ser a melhor estratégia. Isso porque, a utilização dessa abordagem permite que a adaptação dos usuários ao novo sistema seja gradativa, ou seja, ocorre à medida que as funcionalidades de negócio são contempladas pelo novo sistema. Considerando a necessidade evidente que essa migração terá de ocorrer mais cedo ou mais tarde, este trabalho propõe um processo para permitir uma evolução gradual do software legado para uma plataforma mais moderna e de mais amplo uso atualmente, que possa atender melhor às novas necessidades dos negócios. Esse processo é formado por etapas de avaliação da situação atual do sistema, de transformação de arquitetura e de transformação do código funcional para o orientado a objetos. Além disso, é direcionado por indicadores de qualidade e apoiado por tipos de visão e respectivos estilos arquiteturais. O foco deste trabalho está em sistemas de instituições financeiras desenvolvidos em Mainframe ou AS/400, onde há grande incidência de códigos antigos orientados a procedimentos. / The maintenance of old legacies software has become a constant concern of the great companies. The Brazilian banking sector, for example, has millions of lines of code made under the functional paradigm, essential to reach the business-oriented objectives of these institutions. Many of these systems are very old, arriving to possess more than 30 years of existence. These programs, extremely useful for these organizations, do not allow the use of the advantages of the new technologies, such as the use of graphical interfaces, distributed processing and so on. The replacement of all old system for a new on may be a very arduous task and to incur into great risks for the company. Migrate these systems in small steps seems to a better strategy to deal with this problem that will have to be faced earlier or later. This work considers process to allow the gradual evolution of the legacy system to a better platform that allows the use of the advantages of the new technologies, through the use of quality indicators, the evaluation of the current system, the transformation of the architecture with focus at the change of functional paradigm to the object oriented one and of the use of view types and the corresponding architectural styles. This work is mainly delivered to financial institutions systems developed in Mainframe or AS/400 that have great incidence of these old legacies systems.

A manutenção de sistemas legados tem se tornado uma preocupação constante das grandes empresas. O setor bancário brasileiro, por exemplo, possui milhões de linhas de código confeccionados em linguagens procedurais, essenciais para atingir os objetivos de negócios destas instituições. Muitos desses programas são considerados bem antigos, possuindo mais de 30 anos de existência e, apesar de serem extremamente úteis para estas organizações, não permitem aproveitar as vantagens das novas tecnologias, tais como o uso de interfaces gráficas, processamento distribuído, entre outros. Fazer um outro aplicativo de software a partir do início pode ser uma tarefa muito árdua e incorrer em grandes riscos para o negócio da empresa. Migrar esses sistemas aos poucos parece ser a melhor estratégia. Isso porque, a utilização dessa abordagem permite que a adaptação dos usuários ao novo sistema seja gradativa, ou seja, ocorre à medida que as funcionalidades de negócio são contempladas pelo novo sistema. Considerando a necessidade evidente que essa migração terá de ocorrer mais cedo ou mais tarde, este trabalho propõe um processo para permitir uma evolução gradual do software legado para uma plataforma mais moderna e de mais amplo uso atualmente, que possa atender melhor às novas necessidades dos negócios. Esse processo é formado por etapas de avaliação da situação atual do sistema, de transformação de arquitetura e de transformação do código funcional para o orientado a objetos. Além disso, é direcionado por indicadores de qualidade e apoiado por tipos de visão e respectivos estilos arquiteturais. O foco deste trabalho está em sistemas de instituições financeiras desenvolvidos em Mainframe ou AS/400, onde há grande incidência de códigos antigos orientados a procedimentos. / The maintenance of old legacies software has become a constant concern of the great companies. The Brazilian banking sector, for example, has millions of lines of code made under the functional paradigm, essential to reach the business-oriented objectives of these institutions. Many of these systems are very old, arriving to possess more than 30 years of existence. These programs, extremely useful for these organizations, do not allow the use of the advantages of the new technologies, such as the use of graphical interfaces, distributed processing and so on. The replacement of all old system for a new on may be a very arduous task and to incur into great risks for the company. Migrate these systems in small steps seems to a better strategy to deal with this problem that will have to be faced earlier or later. This work considers process to allow the gradual evolution of the legacy system to a better platform that allows the use of the advantages of the new technologies, through the use of quality indicators, the evaluation of the current system, the transformation of the architecture with focus at the change of functional paradigm to the object oriented one and of the use of view types and the corresponding architectural styles. This work is mainly delivered to financial institutions systems developed in Mainframe or AS/400 that have great incidence of these old legacies systems.

Nowadays it is a worldwide trend to transform the government by using information and communications technology. Particularly in keen competition amongst countries in the 21st century, a country which has competitive consciousness uses information and communication technology to reform the government for improving its national competitiveness. If Taiwan intends to remold itself and improve its national competitiveness, it should establish an electronic government to develop governmental Internet service and substantially renovate the effectiveness of administrative operations. The government should break through the traditional thinking frame and redefine the role and function of the government. This is for the purpose of changing and improving the interactive relationship between the government and the public and to help the public accept the convenient service of various Internet applications offered by the government. Taiwan started the online governmental services from 1998 and has been engaged in several types of applications, such as Government to Citizen, Government to Business, and Government to Government applications. Among these applications, the convenient service of Internet application, which is most closely related to the daily life of the public, includes electronic tax filing, electronic motor vehicle & driver information system, electronic public safety, electronic industries and businesses, electronic health care, and electronic utilities, etc, which have been gradually and widely used by the public. By adopting the four phases of NEBIC Theory (Net-Enabled Business Innovation Cycle), this study will examine whether the electronic filing of individual income tax returns, which is introduced by the government, makes tax filing more efficient, lowers the cost and offers a more convenient service or not. In brief, the study is to analyze whether the needs of the public are being more fulfilled. NEBIC Theory mainly defines the four phases of the cycle, which are Choosing Enabling Information Technologies, Matching with Economic Opportunities, Executing Business Innovation for Growth and Assessing Customer Value, to create customer value. By using NEBIC Theory, this study analyzed (1) the first phase that the electronic government was engaged in convenient service of Internet application by using information technology, (2) the second phase that the government offered tax payers the electronic tax filing with a 24-hour filing system and a trial run of auto-selected optimal filing, and (3) the third phase in which the national tax information systems used by five regional National Tax Administrations and the Financial Data Center were integrated and planned anew, which was named ¡§National Tax System Migration¡¨, in which most commonly known by the public was ¡§electronic filing of individual income tax returns¡¨, and was accomplished in 6 years. This study finally analyzed the fourth phase of the value of electronic filing of income tax returns. Voluntarily providing tax payers with annual income data by tax authorities significantly saves the social cost, time cost, and manpower cost of tax withholders, payers and authorities. Tax authorities may save manpower in data recording and processing, save data storage space and improve the government¡¦s administrative effectiveness. Tax payers may save transport costs, extend the tax filing time, save time of trials and lower the possibility of rejection, which offers more convenience to the public. Therefore, electronic filing of individual income tax returns greatly increases satisfaction of the needs of the public.

As the size and complexity of a software system increases, the design problem goes beyond the algorithms and data structures of the computation. Designing and specifying the overall system structure -- or software architecture -- becomes the central problem. A system's architecture provides a model of the system that hides implementation detail, allowing the architect to concentrate on the analyses and decisions that are most crucial to structuring the system to satisfy its requirements. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, current exploitation of software architecture and architectural style is informal and ad hoc. The lack of an explicit, independent characterization of architecture and architectural style significantly limits the extent to which software architecture can be exploited using current practices. Architecture Description Languages(ADL) result from a linguistic approach to the formal description of software architectures. ADLs should facilitate building of architectures, not just specification. Further, they should also address the compositionality, substitutability, and reusability issues, which are the key to successful large-scale software development. A software architecture description language with a well defined type system can facilitate compositionality, substitutability, and usability, the three keys to successful large-scale software development. Our contribution is a new software architecture description language, TriSL, which supports these features. In this talk we describe the design and implementation of TriSL and its type system. We demonstrate the power of our language and its expressiveness through case studies of real world applications.

隨著資訊策略的轉換，資訊科技在企業中往往有著不同的定位，加上環境與科技的改變，因而衍生出資訊系統轉型的問題。從流程再造的角度，企業在進行資訊系統轉型的規劃時，若不考慮將流程作重新審視，而只是作一般的技術轉換，如此轉型後的資訊系統，或許符合科技的潮流，卻可能無法回應環境變化所帶來的衝擊，亦難以滿足企業真正的需求。 本研究將以流程再造導向，輔以流程分析工具，探討現行系統的作業問題，配合理論的觀點，以及實務的作法，進行衡量項目的設定，作為評估的參考，同時確立在流程改善時，需依循的規範與原則，以尋求可行且具體的改進方針，從而規劃出未來資訊系統的作業流程和處理程序，並進一步地審視比較資訊系統轉型後，各方面可以預見的成效。

Upgrading or migrating a build system can be a daunting task. Complete build system migration requires significant effort. To make the process more effective, we automated the first steps of migration, and attempted to analyze the new build results to find anomalies. Our findings show promise for automation as a first step of migration, and we see that automated evaluation could have some potential.

Fler människor börjar använda olika mobila operativsystem i mobiltelefonen samt appar som enbart fungerar på plattformen. Det leder till att app-leverantörer måste utveckla varje app till varje specifik plattform vilket är dyrt. De vanligaste operativsystemen som används idag är Android samt IOS men hösten 2012 släpptes Windows Phone 8 vilket innebär ytterligare en plattform att ta hänsyn till. I sammarbete med företaget Sogeti Jönköping fokuserar studien på att hitta en metod som gör det möjligt att migrera appar mellan plattformar och till Windows Phone 8. Studien innefattar också att identifiera för och nackdelar med olika app-typer genom en litteraturstudie och intervjuer samt att testa om migrationsmetoderna fungerar praktisk genom en implementation. Resultatet har påvisat att det finns två stycken olika metoder för migration vilket är PhoneGap och Xamarin. Genom implementationstester har Xamarin visat sig vara mest lämplig att använda i ett framtida större app-projekt. / More people are starting to use different mobile operating systems in their mobile phones and apps that only work on the specific platform. This leads to app-developers must develop each app on each specific platform which is expensive. The most common operating systems today are Android and iOS, but during fall of 2012 Windows Phone 8 was released, which means yet another platform to consider. In cooperation with the company Sogeti Jönköping this study focuses on finding a method that makes it possible to migrate applications between platforms and Windows Phone 8. The study also includes identifying the pros and cons of different app-types through a literature review and interviews, as well as testing whether the migration methods work through a practical implementation. The results have shown that there are two different solutions to migration which is PhoneGap and Xamarin. Through implementation tests Xamarin was the most suitable for future app-projects.

This thesis deals with the theme Moving information system in the cloud. The paper first describes the issue theoretically. It is defined and characterized by cloud computing as the current major trend in the implementation of information technology. A description of individual actors and models emerging in cloud computing, its brief history, related technology underlying or expand cloud computing, client issues and reference architecture model. It also includes an analysis of the current state offered cloud services, compared to open source and proprietary solutions, and was implemented insight into the upcoming National Strategy for Cloud Computing The case study move e-mail system to a hosted private cloud is demonstrated by the complexity of the entire process and the rugged environment of government institutions. On the basis of theoretical knowledge and case studies in the last chapter proposes a model that would in general help in deciding whether the institutions of government information systems migrate to cloud computing, which is also in line with the forthcoming national strategy.

The history of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is often considered to be tightly intertwined to that of European security, and late developments in European cooperation indeed seem to demonstrate that asylum has become first and foremost a matter of security in Europe. Yet, this tightening of policies contrasts with the flourishing of proposals claiming to mainstream equality throughout European legislation. This dissertation examines the way a politicized issue in the field of equality—LGBTI rights—has become incorporated into a cooperation mechanism that is itself divisive among Member States, the CEAS. It answers the following question: what does the European LGBTI asylum debate demonstrate about the role played by politicization in shaping the meaning and form taken by equality in European policies? Through a qualitative inquiry, it shows that while the CEAS has been a key space of renegotiation of LGBTI equality in Europe, this deepening came at the cost of the disarticulation of LGBTI emancipation from migrants’ rights. Contrarily to what has been assumed by the literature on homonationalism, this disarticulation was not strategically constructed by LGBTI activists. It rather originated from the predominance of the paradigm of “migration governance”, which depoliticizes exclusions and divides causes to better manage populations. Consequently, even though politicization is often perceived as a negative phenomenon by policymakers, this dissertation shows that what is needed to make the CEAS hold its promises of protection is not less, but more political debate. Only through this re-politicization will new and collective forms of equality emerge. / Le Régime d’Asile Européen Commun (RAEC) est souvent critiqué pour la vision sécuritaire de l’asile qu’il incarne. Il est vrai que son histoire reste marquée par la volonté des Etats-Membres de contrôler la mobilité humaine sur le sol européen. Toutefois, bien que les récents durcissements des politiques communautaires semblent confirmer cette sécuritisation du droit d’asile, ceux-ci contrastent avec l’affirmation croissante de la nécessité de « mainstreamer » le principe d’égalité au sein du droit européen. Prenant cette contradiction pour point de départ, cette thèse examine la manière dont un enjeu controversé au sein du champ de l’égalité – les droits LGBTI – fut incorporé au sein d’un mécanisme de coopération lui-même conflictuel pour les Etats-Membres, le RAEC. Elle répond à la question suivante : en quoi le débat européen sur l’asile LGBTI interroge-t-il le rôle joué par la politisation dans la redéfinition des politiques d’égalité en Europe ? A partir d’une enquête qualitative, cette thèse montre que si le RAEC fut un espace-clé de l’approfondissement de l’égalité LGBTI en Europe, ce fut au prix de la construction des droits LGBTI et des droits des migrants comme deux enjeux distincts. Cette division, toutefois, prend sa source non pas dans une instrumentalisation homonationaliste, mais plutôt dans les dispositifs dépolitisants de gouvernance et de triage des populations qui prédominent désormais au sein des politiques européennes, dépolitisant les exclusions et fragmentant les causes. Face à cette logique individualisante, seule la repolitisation du débat permettra d’inventer de nouvelles formes de politiques d’égalité porteuses d’émancipation collective.