Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) represent a promising treatment option for tendon disorders and joint diseases, primarily osteoarthritis. Since MSC are highly context-sensitive to their microenvironment, their therapeutic efficacy is influenced by their tissue-specific pathologically altered targets. These include not only cellular components, such as resident cells and invading immunocompetent cells, but also components of the tissue-characteristic extracellular matrix. Although numerous in vitro models have already shown potential MSC-related mechanisms of action in tendon and joint diseases, only a limited number reflect the disease-specific microenvironment and allow conclusions about well-directed MSC-based therapies for injured tendon and joint-associated tissues. In both injured tissue types, inflammatory processes play a pivotal pathophysiological role. In this context, MSC-mediated macrophage modulation seems to be an important mode of action across these tissues. Additional target cells of MSC applied in tendon and joint disorders include tenocytes, synoviocytes as well as other invading and resident immune cells. It remains of critical importance whether the context-sensitive interplay between MSC and tissue- and disease-specific targets results in an overall promotion or inhibition of the desired therapeutic effects. This review presents the authors’ viewpoint on disease-related targets of MSC therapeutically applied in tendon and joint diseases, focusing on the equine patient as valid animal model.

Making inferences in communication is a highly context-dependent endeavor. Previous research found cultural variations for context-sensitivity as well as for communication comprehension. However, the relative impact of culture and context-sensitivity on communication comprehension has not been investigated so far. The current study aimed at investigating this interplay and tested 4- and 6-year-old children from Germany (n = 132) and China (n = 129). Context-sensitivity was measured with an adapted version of the Ebbinghaus illusion. In this task, children have to discriminate the size of two target circles that only appear to be of similar size due to context circles surrounding the target circles. As expected, performance scores indicated higher degrees of context-sensitivity in Chinese compared to German children and that 6-year-olds were more context-sensitive than 4-year-olds. Further, in an object-choice communication-comprehension task, children watched videos with puppets performing everyday activities (e.g., pet care) and had to choose between two options (e.g., dog or rabbit). A puppet expressed what she wanted either directly (“I want the rabbit”) or indirectly (“I have a carrot”). The children had to choose one option to give to the puppet. In both cultures, 6-year-olds outperformed 4-year-olds and children understood direct communication better than indirect communication. Culture was found to affect children’s processing speed of direct communication. Moreover, culture influenced children’s context-sensitivity while contextsensitivity influenced children’s accuracy in the indirect (but not the direct) communication task. These findings demonstrate that taking context into account is especially important when we are confronted with indirect communication.

The Solomon Islands (SI), a small developing nation in the South Pacific, demonstrates an emergent community-based kindergarten model with the potential to promote context and culture relevant early learning and development. SI early childhood education (ECE) particularly rose in prominence with a 2008 national policy enactment requiring all children to attend three years of kindergarten as prerequisite for primary school entry. However, these ECE programs remain severely challenged by faltering community support. Internationally, many ECE programs dramatically resemble a universalized Western-based model, with a decidedly specific discourse for “high quality” programs and practices for children ages 0-8. Often these uncritical international transfers of Euro-American ideologies promote restricted policies and practices. This has resulted in a self-perpetuating set of practices and values, which arguably prevent recognition of, and efforts to reinvent, more culturally-relevant, sustainable programs for the Majority World. Based on the Kahua region (est. pop. 4,500) of Makira-Ulawa Province, this collaborative, ethnographically-inspired, case study explores how community characteristics have affected the cultural and contextual sustainability of community-based ECE in remote villages. The study traces historical and cultural influences to present-day SI ECE. Subsequently, it explores the re-imagined SI approach to formal ECE program design, remaining challenges preventing these programs from being sustained by communities, and potential community-wide transformations arising from these initiatives. To achieve this, the study collaborated with stakeholders from all levels of SI society through extensive participant-observations, interviews, and participatory focus groups. Findings aspire to enlighten regional sustainable developments and resilient behaviors relating to ECE. Key research findings suggest five overarching principles influencing kindergarten sustainability: presence of “champion” for the ECE vision; community ownership-taking, awareness-building, and cooperation-maintenance; and program cultural/contextual sensitivity and relevance. These elements were found to be strongly linked with an intergenerational cultural decay in the Kahua region, as conceptualized through a model of Cyclically-Sustained Kindergarten Mediocrity.

Points-to analysis is a static program analysis that tries to predict the dynamic behavior of programs without running them. It computes reference information by approximating for each pointer in the program a set of possible objects to which it could point to at runtime. In order to justify new analysis techniques, they need to be compared to the state of the art regarding their accuracy and efficiency. One of the main parameters influencing precision in points-to analysis is context-sensitivity that provides the analysis of each method separately for different contexts it was called on. The problem raised due to providing such a property to points-to analysis is decreasing of analysis scalability along with increasing memory consumption used during analysis process. The goal of this thesis is to present a comparison of precision and scalability of context-sensitive and context-insensitive analysis using three different points-to analysis techniques (Spark, Paddle, P2SSA) produced by two research groups. This comparison provides basic trade-offs regarding scalability on the one hand and efficiency and accuracy on the other. This work was intended to involve previous research work in this field consequently to investigate and implement several specific metrics covering each type of analysis regardless context-sensitivity – Spark, Paddle and P2SSA. These three approaches for points-to analysis demonstrate the intended achievements of different research groups. Common output format enables to choose the most efficient type of analysis for particular purpose.

Au cours des dernières décennies, Internet a connu une révolution et une croissance exponentielle.A la suite de cette croissance, un grand nombre de services web et d’applications ont émergé pour répondre aux différents besoins des consommateurs. En même temps, l’industrie du réseau mobile est devenue omniprésente, ce qui rend la plupart des utilisateurs inséparables de leurs terminaux mobiles. La combinaison de la technologie mobile et des services web fournit un nouveau paradigme appelé services web mobiles. Ainsi, la consommation des services web a` partir des appareils mobiles émerge en proposant plusieurs facilites´ aux utilisateurs et en imposant plus de manipulations de ces services.En effet, afin que les utilisateurs trouvent des services répondant a` leurs besoins, un mécanisme de découverte est nécessaire, par ailleurs, les demandes sont devenues non seulement plus complexes mais aussi plus dynamiques, un service unique qui offre une fonctionnalité simple et primitive est devenu insuffisant pour satisfaire les besoins et les exigences complexes. Par conséquent, la combinaison de multiples services pour fournir un service composite est de plus en plus utilisée demandée. Nous parlons ainsi des mécanismes de découverte et de composition des services web mobiles. Ces deux paradigmes sont mutuellement liés et complémentaires.La découverte et la composition des services web dans un environnement mobile soulèvent plusieurs défis qui n’existent pas dans un environnement classique (non mobile). Parmi ces défis se trouve les contraintes limitées de l’appareil mobile, appelé dans ce travail contexte statique, ainsi que le changement de contexte qui est duˆ principalement a` la mobilité du dispositif, appelé contexte dynamique.Ainsi, l’objet de la présente thèse est de proposer un Framework de composition de services web mobile englobant deux approches complémentaires. Une première approche proposée est consacrée a` la découverte des services web mobiles appelée MobiDisc et une deuxième qui propose une solution a` la problématique de composition dans un contexte dynamique. Notre première approche exploite le contexte statique avec les propriétés de QoS et les préférences´ utilisateurs dans les descriptions sémantiques des services et de la requête utilisateur afin d’augmenter l’exactitude du processus de découverte. Quand a` l’approche de composition, elle met l’accent sur le contexte dynamique qui peut modifier le résultat de la composition. L’objectif est de déterminer la sensibilité des services au contexte dynamique et de générer des plans de composition pour l’utilisateur tries´ selon leurs valeurs de sensibilité globale lui permettant de choisir la meilleure composition. / Over the last two decades, Internet has grown exponentially. causing the emergence of web ser-vices and applications that meet the different needs of the consumers. During the same period, the mobile network industry has become ubiquitous, making most users inseparable from their mobile devices. So the combination of mobile technology and web services provides a new paradigm named mobile web services. Thus, the consumption of web services from mobile devices emerges by offering several facilities to users and requiring greater manipulation of these services such as discovery, composition and execution.Indeed, in order for users to find services that meet their requirements, a discovery mechanism is needed. Since requests have become not only more complex, but also more dynamic, a single service that offers simple and primitive functionality has become insufficient to satisfy the complex requirements. Therefore, the combination of multiple services to provide a composite service is more and more requested. We talk about mobile web service discovery and composition. These two paradigms are mutually linked and complementary.The discovery and composition of web services in a mobile environment raise several challenges that do not exist in a traditional (non-mobile) environment. Among these challenges are the limited constraints of the mobile device, called in this work static context, as well as the change of context which is due mainly to the mobility of the device which called dynamic context.In this thesis we propose a framework for the composition of mobile web services encompassing two complementary approaches. A first proposed approach called MobiDisc, speaking about the discovery of mobile web services and a second that proposes a solution to the problem of composition in a dynamic context. Our first approach uses the static context with QoS properties and user preferences in the semantic descriptions of services and the user query to increase the accuracy of the discovery process. As for the second compositional approach, it focuses on the dynamic context that can modify the composition result. The objective is to determine the sensitivity of the services to the dynamic context and to generate composition plans to the user ordered according to a sensitivity value.

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Dans le domaine des TIC, les services de demain seront certainement basés sur des systèmes ubiquitaires, omniprésents et pervasifs. Ces systèmes devront prendre en considération différents paramètres provenant de l’environnement de l’utilisateur, c’est à dire son contexte. Le contexte de l’utilisateur peut être composé d’informations statiques ou dynamiques, objectives ou subjectives, quantitatives ou qualitatives. Il peut inclure des données telles que la localisation géographique, les caractéristiques du terminal utilisé, la température ambiante, l’humeur de l’utilisateur. Afin d’améliorer la QoS et la QoE, les services et les systèmes doivent être adaptés aux changements du contexte des utilisateurs. Le contexte doit donc être collecté et interprété et les règles d’adaptation du système doivent être définies. Sur les systèmes étendus, riches, dynamiques et hétérogènes, tels que ceux considéré dans le cadre de cette thèse, ces opérations doivent être automatisées. Vu la quantité et la complexité des données contextuelles à considérer, l’utilisation de la sémantique dans la gestion de contexte peut faciliter cette automatisation et ouvrir la porte au raisonnement et à l’adaptation automatiques. Aujourd’hui, peu de solutions viables existent pour cette problématique. Nous proposons alors d’utiliser et d’adapter des mécanismes et technologies provenant du web sémantique pour décrire et manipuler les informations de contexte. Dans un premier temps, nous avons proposé une méthodologie de conception qui nous permit de proposer « Ubiquity-Ont » : une ontologie générique au domaine des TIC, flexible et extensible. Les données de contexte ont alors été décrites sous forme de concepts et d’instances, reliés par des relations sémantiques. Nous avons ensuite proposé une architecture overlay, composée de deux niveaux de vitalisation et permettant d’intégrer un gestionnaire de contexte, basé sur la sémantique, sur des environnements réseaux et services. Cette solution overlay permet de (a) masquer l’hétérogénéité des composants du système et (b) d’augmenter virtuellement les entités du système existant par les capacités nécessaires à la manipulation et au raisonnement sur les données sémantiques du contexte. Nos propositions ont étés implémentées et testées sur une plateforme réelle et appliquées à deux cas d’études : Gestion de la mobilité sur des environnements de réseaux d’accès hétérogènes et Optimisation de la consommation d’énergie dans les terminaux mobiles / Future Information and Telecommunication Systems are expected to be pervasive and ubiquitous solutions, able to consider users’ context and to automatically adapt to their environments. Traditional configuration and management tools are not adapted. The richness, the heterogeneity and the complexity of the upcoming systems require automated solutions able to gather contextual information, to reason on them and to make the appropriate adaptation decisions. The representation and the sharing of contextual information is a key issue. In this thesis, we proposed and used a methodology to conceive « Ubiquity-Ont », a generic ontology dedicated to Information and Telecommunication Systems. Contextual information are the described through semantic concepts, instances and relations. We then proposed an overlay architecture, composed of two virtualization layers that can integrate a semantic context management framework over existing networking environments. This architecture is able (a) to hide any heterogeneity among the system components and (b) to augment the different entities with additional capacities for context gathering, reasoning and sharing operations. The proposed solutions were then implemented and tested in Lab for two applications. The fisrt is related to mobility management over heterogeneous Wireless Networks and the second aims to power optimization on mobile terminals. These two case studies helped in proving and enhancing the proposed solutions

This dissertation is about the nature of perspectival thoughts and the context-sensitivity of the language used to express them. It focuses on two kinds of perspectival thoughts: ‘subjective' evaluative thoughts about matters of personal taste, such as 'Beetroot is delicious' or 'Skydiving is fun', and first-personal or de se thoughts about oneself, such as 'I am hungry' or 'I have been fooled.' The dissertation defends of a novel form of relativism about truth - the idea that the truth of some (but not all) perspectival thought and talk is relative to the perspective of an evaluating subject or group. In Part I, I argue that the realm of ‘subjective' evaluative thought and talk whose truth is perspective-relative includes attributions of knowledge of the form 'S knows that p.' Following a brief introduction (chapter 1), chapter 2 presents a new, error-theoretic objection against relativism about knowledge attributions. The case for relativism regarding knowledge attributions rests on the claim that relativism is the only view that explains all of the empirical data from speakers' use of the word "know" without recourse to an error theory. In chapter 2, I show that the relativist can only account for sceptical paradoxes and ordinary epistemic closure puzzles if she attributes a problematic form of semantic blindness to speakers. However, in 3 I show that all major competitor theories - forms of invariantism and contextualism - are subject to equally serious error-theoretic objections. This raises the following fundamental question for empirical theorising about the meaning of natural language expressions: If error attributions are ubiquitous, by which criteria do we evaluate and compare the force of error-theoretic objections and the plausibility of error attributions? I provide a number of criteria and argue that they give us reason to think that relativism's error attributions are more plausible than those of its competitors. In Part II, I develop a novel unified account of the content and communication of perspectival thoughts. Many relativists regarding ‘subjective' thoughts and Lewisians about de se thoughts endorse a view of belief as self-location. In chapter 4, I argue that the self-location view of belief is in conflict with the received picture of linguistic communication, which understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. I argue that understanding mental content and speech act content in terms of sequenced worlds allows a reconciliation of these views. On the view I advocate, content is modelled as a set of sequenced worlds - possible worlds ‘centred' on a group of individuals inhabiting the world at some time. Intuitively, a sequenced world is a way a group of people may be. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on sequenced worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. In chapter 5, I show that one of the advantages of this model is its compatibility with both nonindexical contextualism and truth relativism about taste. I argue in chapters 5 and 6 that the empirical data from eavesdropping, retraction, and disagreement cases supports a relativist completion of the model, and I show in detail how to account for these phenomena on the sequenced worlds view.