Interleukin 2: from immunostimulation to immunoregulation and back again

Interleukin 2: from immunostimulation to immunoregulation and back again.

Interleukin 2 (IL-2) was one of the first cytokines to be discovered. However, the complex role of IL-2 and its receptor in the regulation of immune responses is only now emerging. This review explores the various signals triggered by IL-2 and discusses their translation into biological function. A model is outlined that accommodates the seemingly contradictory functions of IL-2, and explains h...

From Notions to Models and Back Again, Again

A typical thread in research relies on the maturing of ideasthrough an iterative process of construction, testing and refinement.In this talk I will trace some such trajectories of ideas by illustrationfrom some of my own and others’ experiences in agent-based modelling.I draw inspiration from previous commentaries, including from thosewho generated the mottos: “No Notation ...

From Paragraphs to Vectors and Back Again

I investigate some methods of encoding text into vectors and decoding these vector representations. The purpose of decoding vector representations is two fold. Firstly, I could apply unsupervised learning algorithms to the paragraph vectors to find significant ”new” vectors and decode them into paragraphs of text. Effectively, I could process text and generate ”new” ideas. Secondly, I could dec...

From Local to Global and Back Again

This paper considers the cost of preprocessing a digital terrain model (DTM) represented as a trian-gulated irregular network (TIN) so that drainage queries|e.g., what is the watershed of a query point, or how much water passes through a point given that rain is falling at a known rate|can be answered by simply evaluating a summary function. Although the worst-case storage and preprocessing cos...

From bedside to bench and back again.