The WOOL Dialogue Platform: Enabling Interdisciplinary User-Friendly Development of Dialogue for Conversational Agents

Health coaching applications can include (embodied) conversational agents as coaches. The development of these agents requires an interdisciplinary cooperation between eHealth application developers, interaction designers and domain experts. Therefore, proper dialogue authoring tools and tools to integrate these dialogues in a conversational agent system are essential in the process of creating successful agent-based applications. However, we found no existing open source, easy-to-use authoring tools that support multidisciplinary agent development. To that end, we developed the WOOL Dialogue Platform. The WOOL Dialogue Platform provides the eHealth and conversational agent communities with an open source platform, consisting of a set of easy to use tools that facilitate virtual agent development. The platform consists of a dialogue definition language, an editor, application development libraries and a web service. To illustrate the platform’s possibilities and use in practice, we describe two use cases from EU Horizon 2020 research projects. The WOOL Dialogue Platform is an ‘easy to use, and powerful if needed’ platform for the development of conversational agent applications that is seeing a slow but steady increase in uptake in the eHealth community. Developed to support dialogue authoring for embodied conversational agents in the health coaching domain, this platform’s strong points are its ease of use and ability to let domain experts and agents technology experts work together by providing all parties with tools that support their work effectively.

Current Prospects of Herbal STW 5 Agent in Treatment of Functional Gastrointestinal Diseases

Aim. A review of current therapeutic perspectives of the herbal STW 5 medicine (Iberogast®) in functional gastrointestinal (GI) diseases.Key points. A limited remediation in most common functional GI diseases, functional dyspepsia (FD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), is conditioned by their multifactorial pathogenesis. Meanwhile, most specific medicines only target selected pathogenesis components, thus warranting a multitarget agent development. Such is Iberogast® that acts at variant components of FD and IBS pathogenesis. The article reviews the Iberogast® mechanisms of action and evaluates its treatment efficacy in FD and IBS.Conclusion. The current evidence claims that Iberogast® provides an effective and safe treatment for FD and IBS.

Diversity and function of culturable actinobacteria in the root-associated of Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge

The root-associated actinobacteria play important roles in plant growth, nutrient use, and disease resistance due to their functional diversity. Salvia miltiorrhiza is a critical medicinal plant in China. The root actinobacterial community structure has been studied; however, the functions of root-associated actinobacteria of S. miltiorrhiza have not been elucidated. This study aimed to decipher the diversity and function of the culturable root-associated actinobacteria in plant growth using culture-dependent technology and culturable microbe metagenomes. We isolated 369 strains from the root-associated actinobacteria, belonging to four genera, among which Streptomyces was dominant. Besides, the functional prediction revealed some pathways related to plant growth, nitrogen and phosphorus metabolism, and antagonistic pathogens. We systematically described the diversity and functions of the culturable root-associated actinobacteria community. Our results demonstrated that the culturable root-associated actinobacteria of S. miltiorrhiza have rich functionalities, explaining the possible contribution of culturable root-associated actinobacteria to S. miltiorrhiza’s growth and development. This study provides new insights into understanding the function of the culturable root-associated actinobacteria and can be used as a knowledge base for plant growth promoters and biological control agent development in agriculture.

Multi-Agent based Capital Market Management System: A Distributed Framework for Trading and Regulation

Stock Market plays a vital role in the economy of every nation. Having a transparent market may boost the confidence of not only stock brokers but also that of investors. One of the major problems that make investors to shy away from the market is lack of transparency. Another Problem which affect the market regulators is the lack of a system that enable them to check for compliance easily. In this work, an agent based distributed framework is presented. The idea behind the proposed system is that having one system that will serve all the market stake holders will guaranty strict compliance to the market rules, easier to manage and difficult manipulate by the market operators. The implementation of the proposed system followed Multi-Agent Software Engineering (MaSE) Methodology. The evaluation of the system show that, the distributed system developed using Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) is capable of addressing problems of reliability, compliance and transparency.

The Role of IGF/IGF-IR-Signaling and Extracellular Matrix Effectors in Bone Sarcoma Pathogenesis

Bone sarcomas, mesenchymal origin tumors, represent a substantial group of varying neoplasms of a distinct entity. Bone sarcoma patients show a limited response or do not respond to chemotherapy. Notably, developing efficient chemotherapy approaches, dealing with chemoresistance, and preventing metastasis pose unmet challenges in sarcoma therapy. Insulin-like growth factors 1 and 2 (IGF-1 and -2) and their respective receptors are a multifactorial system that significantly contributes to bone sarcoma pathogenesis. Whereas failures have been registered in creating novel targeted therapeutics aiming at the IGF pathway, new agent development should continue, evaluating combinatorial strategies for enhancing antitumor responses and better classifying the patients that could best benefit from these therapies. A plausible approach for developing a combinatorial strategy is to focus on the tumor microenvironment (TME) and processes executed therein. Herewith, we will discuss how the interplay between IGF-signaling and the TME constituents affects sarcomas’ basal functions and their response to therapy. This review highlights key studies focusing on IGF signaling in bone sarcomas, specifically studies underscoring novel properties that make this system an attractive therapeutic target and identifies new relationships that may be exploited. Potential direct and adjunct therapeutical implications of the extracellular matrix (ECM) effectors will also be summarized.

Multi-agent-based hybrid peer-to-peer system for distributed information retrieval

With the increasingly huge amount of data located in various databases and the need for users to access them, distributed information retrieval (DIR) has been at the core of the preoccupations of a number of researchers. Indeed, numerous DIR systems and architectures have been proposed including the broker-based architecture. Moreover, providing DIR with more flexibility and adaptability has led researchers thinking to build DIR with software agents. Thus, this research proposes a design and an implementation of a novel system based on the broker-based architecture and the peer-to-peer (P2P) network called broker-based P2P network. The proposed architecture is implemented with a multi-agent system (MAS) where the main agent playing the role of the broker, receives query from a peer agent and forwards them to other peer agents each with their index and resources. Upon completing retrieval process at each peer agent, results are directly sent to the peer agent that initiated the query without using the broker agent. Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE) is used to implement the agents and, for experiments, TERRIER (TERabyte RetRIEveR) is extended and used as the search engine to retrieve the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) collections dataset notably TREC-6. The peer agent that originated the query progressively collects results coming from other peer agents, normalises and merges them and then proceeds with re-ranking. For normalisation, MinMax and Sum that are unsupervised normalisation methods are used.

Rational Design of Peptide-Based Inhibitors Disrupting Protein-Protein Interactions

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are well-established as a class of promising drug targets for their implications in a wide range of biological processes. However, drug development toward PPIs is inevitably hampered by their flat and wide interfaces, which generally lack suitable pockets for ligand binding, rendering most PPI systems “undruggable.” Here, we summarized drug design strategies for developing peptide-based PPI inhibitors. Importantly, several quintessential examples toward well-established PPI targets such as Bcl-2 family members, p53-MDM2, as well as APC-Asef are presented to illustrate the detailed schemes for peptide-based PPI inhibitor development and optimizations. This review supplies a comprehensive overview of recent progresses in drug discovery targeting PPIs through peptides or peptidomimetics, and will shed light on future therapeutic agent development toward the historically “intractable” PPI systems.