T cell egress from the thymus is essential for adaptive immunity and involves chemotaxis along a sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) gradient. Pericytes at the corticomedullary junction produce the S1P egress signal, whereas thymic parenchymal S1P levels are kept low through S1P lyase (SPL)-mediated metabolism. Although SPL is robustly expressed in thymic epithelial cells (TECs), in this study, we sh...

The present study 1) examined speech recognition at three intensity levels and in noise for adults with bilateral hearing loss who wore amplification and were referred for cochlear implant evaluation but did not meet current audiological criteria, and 2) compared their performance to cochlear implant recipients using current implant technology. When tested at 70 dB SPL, hearing aid subjects' wo...

Variability Management (VM) in Software Product Line (SPL) is a key activity that usually affects the degree to which a SPL is successful. SPL community has spent huge amount of resources on developing various approaches to dealing with variability related challenges over the last decade. To provide an overview of different aspects of the proposed VM approaches, we carried out a systematic lite...

The architecture description of a software product line (SPL) is essential to make it clear how the architecture realizes the feature model and to represent both the domain and application engineering architectural artefacts. However, most architecture description languages (ADLs) for SPL have limited support regarding variability management and they do not express the relationship between feat...

Modelling software product line (SPL) features plays a crucial role to a successful development of SPL. Feature diagram is one of the widely used notations to model SPL variants. However, there is a lack of precisely defined formal notations for representing and verifying such models. This paper presents an approach that we adopt to model SPL variants by using UML and subsequently verify them b...

Force microscopy enables a variety of approaches to manipulate and/or modify surfaces. Few of those methods have evolved into advanced probe-based lithographies. Oxidation scanning probe lithography (o-SPL) is the only lithography that enables the direct and resist-less nanoscale patterning of a large variety of materials, from metals to semiconductors; from self-assembled monolayers to biomole...

Mainstream forces are driving Systems and Software Product Line (SPL) Engineering approaches to take a more holistic perspective that is deeply integrated into the systems and software engineering lifecycle. These forces illustrate that SPL challenges will not be solved at any one stage in the product engineering lifecycle, nor will they be solved in independent and disparate silos in each of t...

The paper proposes to integrate performance analysis in the early phases of the model-driven development process for Software Product Lines (SPL). We start by adding generic performance annotations to the UML model representing the set of core reusable SPL assets. The annotations are generic and use the MARTE Profile recently adopted by OMG. A first model transformation realized in the Atlas Tr...

Eine Software-Produktlinie (SPL) bezeichnet eine Menge ähnlicher Produktvarianten, die bei entsprechend großer Anzahl einen erheblichen Testaufwand verursachen können. Viele modellbasierte SPL-Testansätze versuchen diesen Testaufwand zu verringern, indem Testfälle und Testmodelle aus vorangegangenen Testprozessen ähnlicher Produkte, wenn möglich, wiederverwendet werden. Eine weitere Möglichkeit...

This scenario is quite common when hearing aid users are listening to music or in the presence of loud sounds or noises, since both scenarios have peaks exceeding 100 dB SPL. Examples of such environments include live music, the cinema or a sports event. To help deal with this situation, and offer a better listening experience to hearing aid users, Widex expanded the input range of the DREAM he...