The functions of mucosal T cells in containing the indigenous commensal flora of the intestine

There is an immense load of non-pathogenic commensal bacteria in the distal small intestine and the colon of mammals. The physical barrier that prevents penetration (translocation) of these organisms into the body is a simple epithelium comprised of the single enterocyte/colonocyte cell layer with its overlying mucus. In this review, we discuss the roles of intestinal T cells in initiating and regulating innate and adaptive mucosal immune responses of the mucosal immune system that avoid or limit penetration of the commensal intestinal bacteria. Received 9 August 2002; accepted 9 September 2002 RID="*" ID="*"Corresponding author.     

ENTROPY,INFORMATION,NOISE—STUDIES ON SYSTEM EVOLUTION

Universe, ecosystem, social system, etc. are evolving systems. The evolving processes of thesesystems have gradual small changes and rapid drastic changes with uncertainties under the constraintsof environment. Systems, as a whole, are evolving toward complexity, diversity and variety withfluctuations and jumps. New order emerges from "mutations". The evolution is bothchance-dependent and path-dependent. In this paper three basics: entropy, information and noise areemphasized with regard to system evolution which is a field that can give people wisdom to solvesystem problems with domain knowledge.     

Separating Latent Classes by Information Criteria

This study evaluates performance of information criteria used to separate latent classes. In the evaluations, various numbers of latent classes, sample sizes, parameter structures and latent-class complexities were designed to simulate datasets. The average accuracy rates of information criteria in selecting the designed numbers of latent classes were the core results in this experiment. The study revealed that widely used information criteria, e.g., AIC, BIC, CAIC, could perform poorly under some circumstances. By including a sample size adjustment (Rissanen, 1978), the unsatis-factory performances could be improved considerably. The sample size adjustment provides a plausible solution for separating latent classes. Guidelines are provided to help achieve optimum use of the model fit indices.     

A situation calculus based approach to dynamic management of e-business services

In the era of e-businesses, the traditional business services are greatly challenged by the ever-increasing demands from customers with various backgrounds and personalities. Large numbers of new e-businesses are driven by the needs of customers. The existing dynamics inherent in the customer needs require the corresponding dynamic management of services. Attempting to respond to customers in a rapid and intelligent way, this paper proposes a situation calculus based approach for dynamically managing e-Business services in the ubiquitous environment. By employing the formalism of the situation calculus to enable intelligence and automation, the approach can implement. the functions of service automatic composition and model verification. These functions will improve the degree of customer-orientation and enable fast responsiveness in the emerging e-service systems.     

Conflict analysis approaches for investigating attitudes and misperceptions in the War of 1812

Formal systems engineering approaches to modeling misperceptions and attitudes are employed within the framework of the graph model for conflict resolution to systematically study the War of 1812 between the United States of America and Great Britain in order to provide enhanced insights into the causes of the war. More specifically, relational definitions for preferences, movements and stability concepts are defined for describing the attitudes and associated behavior of decision makers involved in a conflict. To capture misperceptions of decision makers in the War of 1812, attitudes are studied within the structure of a hypergame. Combining attitudes and misperceptions within the paradigm of the graph model furnishes the flexible analytical tool which demonstrates that misunderstanding of attitudes by Great Britain and the United States may have contributed to the outbreak of this nasty war.     

THE λ-GROBNER BASES UNDER POLYNOMIAL COMPOSITION

Polynomial composition is the operation of replacing variables in a polynomial with other polynomials. λ-Grgbner basis is an especial Grobner basis. The main problem in the paper is： when does composition commute with λ-Grobner basis computation？ We shall answer better the above question. This has a natural application in the computation of λ-Grobner bases.     

A multiple intelligent agent system for credit risk prediction via an optimization of localized generalization error with diversity

Company bankruptcies cost billions of dollars in losses to banks each year. Thus credit risk prediction is a critical part of a bank＇s loan approval decision process. Traditional financial models for credit risk prediction are no longer adequate for describing today＇s complex relationship between the financial health and potential bankruptcy of a company. In this work, a multiple classifier system （embedded in a multiple intelligent agent system） is proposed to predict the financial health of a company. In our model, each individual agent （classifier） makes a prediction on the likelihood of credit risk based on only partial information of the company. Each of the agents is an expert, but has limited knowledge （represented by features） about the company. The decisions of all agents are combined together to form a final credit risk prediction. Experiments show that our model out-performs other existing methods using the benchmarking Compustat American Corporations dataset.     

Using Action Research to Improve Communication and Facilitate Group Work in a Multicultural Classroom: A South African Case Study

This study started with problems that my colleagues (and I) were experiencing with interaction and intercultural communication among students in our diverse classrooms. Educators were also experiencing difficulties in motivating students to work effectively in groups. The purpose of this paper was to seek solutions to these problems by exploring variations of the group oral assessment structure in a multilingual and multicultural context. Four phases of assessments were conducted at two tertiary institutions in South Africa using a combination of action research and a participatory approach. Not only did this study succeed in addressing the problems but it also revealed the added benefits of using an action research methodology.     

EXPLORATION/EXPLOITATION TRADEOFF WITH CELL-SHIFT AND HEURISTIC CROSSOVER FOR EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS

In order to tradeoff exploration/exploitation and inspired by cell genetic algorithm a cellshift crossover operator for evolutionary algorithm （EA） is proposed in this paper. The definition domain is divided into n-dimension cubic sub-domains （cell） and each individual locates at an ndimensional cube. Cell-shift crossover first exchanges the cell numbers of the crossover pair if they are in the different cells （exploration） and subsequently shift the first individual from its initial place to the other individual＇s cell place. If they are already in the same cell heuristic crossover （exploitation） is used. Cell-shift/heuristic crossover adaptively executes exploration/exploitation search with the vary of genetic diversity. The cell-shift EA has excellent performance in terms of efficiency and efficacy on ten usually used optimization benchmarks when comparing with the recent well-known FEP evolutionary algorithm.     

INFORMATION CHARACTERIZATION OF COMMUNICATION CHANNELS FOR SYSTEM IDENTIFICATION

This paper studies identification of systems in which the system output is quantized, transmitted through a digital communication channel, and observed afterwards. The concept of the CR Ratio is introduced to characterize impact of communication channels on identification. The relationship between the CR Ratio and Shannon channel capacity is discussed. Identification algorithms are further developed when the channel error probability is unknown.