In light of the recent Ebola virus outbreak, it has to be realized that besides medical treatment, precise algorithms for the management of complicating microbial infections are mandatory for Ebola virus disease (EVD) patients. While the necessity of such diagnostics is apparent, practical details are much less clear. Our approach, established during the treatment of an EVD patient at the University Hospital in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, provides a roadmap for reliable and safe on-site microbiological testing.

Abstract Abstract 1163 Poster Board I-185 Introduction Respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV) frequently cause severe respiratory disease in allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) recipients. Within the first post-transplant month, progression of upper respiratory tract infection to life-threatening bronchiolitis and pneumonia is common and mortality rates of up to 80% have been reported if left untreated. Aerosolized ribavirin plus/minus immunoglobulins is considered the treatment of choice for RSV pneumonia. With this regimen, the 30-day all cause mortality is still 40% in immunosuppressed HSCT patients. In addition, nebulizing ribavirin may induce toxic side effects on patients and staff. Patients and treatment Concurrent with an outbreak in the community, RSV infection was diagnosed in 10 out of 29 patients (34%) undergoing allogeneic HSCT in the winter season 2008. Diagnosis was based on RSV-specific PCR of routinely collected throat swaps. Intravenous ribavirin was dosed according to Schleuning et al., 2003 (day 1: 33 mg/kg, day 2-5: 4×16 mg/kg, day 6-10: 3×8 mg/kg) for 8-10 days, followed by oral ribavirin (1800 mg per day) until recovery from symptoms. Airflow obstruction (AFO) was defined as a FEV1/FVC ratio <0.7 or a drop in FEV1 >20% from baseline. All RSV-infected patients (median age 60 years) had undergone reduced-intensity conditioning HSCT for high-risk acute myeloid leukemia (1st CR: n=2; subsequent CR: n=3; untreated or refractory relapse: n=5). GvHD prophylaxis consisted of cyclosporine A and mycophenolate mofetil with (n=8) or without (n=2) antithymocyte globulin. Donors were HLA-idential siblings (n=1), matched (n=8) or mismatched unrelated donors (n=1). Results Median time from HSCT to detection of RSV was 15 (range, 1-40) days. In 7 out of 10 patients, RSV infection was diagnosed pre-engraftment during neutropenia. Four patients had bronchiolitis or pneumonia and 6 patients suffered from tracheobronchitis. High-dose intravenous ribavirin was administered to all patients with pneumonia and/or diagnosis of RSV infection within 7 days after transplantation (n=5). These patients had hypoxia and required oxygen supplementation. Treatment with oral ribavirin was initiated in the other five patients with tracheobronchitis diagnosed on days 12-40 after HSCT. With a median follow up of 6 months, 9 out of 10 patients are alive and in complete remission of their AML. All 9 patients became RSV-negative in throat swabs after a median time of 22 days from start of therapy. Severe AFO caused by RSV pneumonia occurred in 2 patients and improved after treatment. Despite severe lymphopenia, no patient treated for tracheobronchitis progressed to RSV pneumonia. Neutrophil recovery was delayed in the three patients diagnosed with RSV pneumonia pre-engraftment until days 26, 28+ and 111 after HSCT, due to high-dose intravenous ribavirin and/or RSV infection itself. One of these patients died of septic shock associated with pseudomonas aeruginosa-induced pneumonia on day 28 after HSCT in prolonged neutropenia. No other ribavirin-associated toxicity such as hepatotoxicity or clinically relevant hemolysis was observed. Three patients developed acute intestinal GvHD, 2 of them recovering upon steroid treatment and one proceeding to chronic disease despite salvage therapy. One additional patient had steroid-responsive acute GvHD of the skin. Conclusions High-dose intravenous or oral ribavirin therapy appears to be safe and effective even if administered to neutropenic allogeneic HSCT recipients. None of these patients with RSV infection in the early post-transplant period developed bronchiolitis obliterans or persistent AFO. Based on our favourable results, further studies are required. Meanwhile, we suggest to treat all patients with symptomatic RSV infections in the early post-transplant phase with oral or intravenous ribavirin. Disclosures Off Label Use: Ribavirin is approved for inhalative treatment of RSV infections but not for systemic therapy..

Mining social networks from software repositories is becoming a popular research area. Mining approaches often use technical artifacts, such as source code, or communication artifacts, such as emails, to create social networks. The authors describe a repository-independent approach of mining task-based communication in social networks. In their approach, collaborative tasks that tools record in software engineering repositories provide the constructed networks' context that link developers' task-based social networks if they've communicated about a collaborative task. These social networks demonstrate the applicability of their approach through two research studies that mined the IBM Rational Jazz development repository. They then propose practical applications that utilize their approach to directly support development projects.

A critical factor in work group coordination, communication has been studied extensively. Yet, we are missing objective evidence of the relationship between successful coordination outcome and communication structures. Using data from IBM's Jazz™ project, we study communication structures of development teams with high coordination needs. We conceptualize coordination outcome by the result of their code integration build processes (successful or failed) and study team communication structures with social network measures. Our results indicate that developer communication plays an important role in the quality of software integrations. Although we found that no individual measure could indicate whether a build will fail or succeed, we leveraged the combination of communication structure measures into a predictive model that indicates whether an integration will fail. When used for five project teams, our predictive model yielded recall values between 55% and 75%, and precision values between 50% to 76%.

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Nowadays, distributed development is common in software development. Besides many advantages, research in the last decade has consistently found that distribution has a negative impact on collaboration in general, and communication and task completion time in particular. Adapted processes, practices and tools are demanded to overcome these challenges. We report on an empirical study of communication structures and delay, as well as task completion times in IBM's distributed development project Jazz. The Jazz project explicitly focuses on distributed collaboration and has adapted processes and tools to overcome known challenges. We explored the effect of distance on communication and task completion time and use social network analysis to obtain insights about the collaboration in the Jazz project. We discuss our findings in the light of existing literature on distributed collaboration and delays.

Nowadays, distributed development is common in software development. Besides many advantages, research in the last decade has consistently found that distribution has a negative impact on collaboration in general, and communication delay and time to complete tasks in particular. Adapted processes, practices, and tools are demanded to overcome these challenges. We report on an empirical study of communication structures and delay in IBM's distributed development project Jazz. The Jazz project explicitly focuses on distributed collaboration and has adapted processes and tools to overcome known challenges. We explore the effect of distance on communication and task completion time and use social network analysis to obtain insights about the collaboration in the Jazz project. We discuss our findings in the light of existing literature on distributed collaboration and delays. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A human CD4‐positive T cell line from a donor homozygous negative for the chemokine receptor CCR5 was established, characterized, and used for determining the coreceptor usage of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV‐1) isolates. Clones of this IL‐2 dependent human T‐cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV‐I) immortalized cell line, named IsnoR5 clones 1 and 2, are susceptible to infection by HIV‐1 isolates that use CXCR4 as a coreceptor but resistant to infection by CCR5 tropic HIV‐1 viruses. HIV‐1 isolates whose replication is inhibited in IsnoR5 cells in the presence of the bicyclam AMD 3100, a CXCR4 specific inhibitor, utilize a coreceptor distinct from CCR5 and CXCR4. Using a panel of primary HIV‐1 isolates we have shown that a single T cell line is sufficient to discriminate between use of CCR5, CXCR4 or an alternative coreceptor. As IsnoR5 clone 1 cells revealed the existence of even minor populations of CXCR4‐using virus variants, they could be useful for the early identification of changes in coreceptor usage in HIV infected individuals facilitating the timely introduction of appropriate clinical treatments. J. Med. Virol. 80:192–200, 2008. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

This work addresses two problems of distributed software development projects: Inconsistencies between related artifacts such as documents and models and inefficient collaboration of distributed project participants. In particular informal communication is reduced and project knowledge gets lost. We claim that a consistent representation, supporting a unified data model for all documents and models including collaboration artifacts, helps to overcome these problems. As all artifacts are represented in one unified model, it is possible to implicitly capture dependency traces, which support consistency of related artifacts. Informal collaboration artifacts, such as comments, and formal discussions for representing rationale, are externalized and also part of the unified data model. We describe an extendable meta-model as a single consistent representation. Based on the meta-model we introduce the RUSE model, which integrates system, collaboration and organizational models. The models are realized in a tool called Sysiphus, which was used in academic and industrial software development projects. Selected projects are used to evaluate the proposed concepts.

Nowadays, distributed development is common in software development. Besides many advantages, research in the last decade has consistently found that distribution has a negative impact on collaboration in general, and communication delay and time to complete tasks in particular. Adapted processes, practices, and tools are demanded to overcome these challenges. We report on an empirical study of communication structures and delay in IBM’s distributed development project Jazz. The Jazz project explicitly focuses on distributed collaboration and has adapted processes and tools to overcome known challenges. We explore the effect of distance on communication and task completion time and use social network analysis to obtain insights about the collaboration in the Jazz project. We discuss our findings in the light of existing literature on distributed collaboration and delays. Copyright  2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In global development projects, different modeling techniques are used to create and manage the requirements, analyze the problem domain, identify potential hazards and develop the system design. For each modeling technique, separate tools (e.g. UML case tool, requirements database, Word) are used. Each tool comes with its own meta-model, which hinders the interchange of models across tools and makes automated traceability and quality analysis across all models unmanageable. We propose the integration of different modeling techniques by adding new relationships. The integrated requirements model supports complete traceability across feature modeling, use case modeling, requirements and hazard analysis, detailed requirements and system design. We propose design rules and metrics for a formal and automated quality assurance, project monitoring and control. The model is implemented in a central repository, accessible from distributed sites. Synchronous online collaboration, asynchronous offline access and model-based configuration management is supported for the entire unified requirements model.

Architectural knowledge consists of architecture design as well as the design decisions, assumptions, context, and other factors that together determine why a particular solution is the way it is. Except for the architecture design part, most of the architectural knowledge usually remains hidden, tacit in the heads of the architects. We conjecture that an explicit representation of architectural knowledge is helpful for building and evolving systems. If we had a repository of architectural knowledge for a system, what would it ideally contain, how would we build it, and exploit it in practice? In this paper we describe a use case model for an architectural knowledge system.

In global software projects, informal communication across sites is severely hampered, making it difficult to disseminate implicit knowledge. Participants have a partial view of the overall organization, do not have access to the complete rationale behind decisions, and when changes arise, participants from other sites are surprised. Consequently, issues that could be clarified almost immediately require days until the relevant stakeholders are identified, the issues are understood, and a resolution is agreed upon. We focus on the specific problem of externalizing issues with their context, stakeholders, and organizational roles in distributed settings. The challenge is to capture sufficient knowledge as a side effect of development, while structuring it for long-term use. We describe Sysiphus, a distributed environment providing a uniform framework for system models, collaboration artifacts, and organizational models. Sysiphus encourages participants to make communication and issues explicit in the context of system models and become aware of relevant stakeholders

Software engineering courses often use industrial modeling tools for their infrastructure, as it exposes students to the state-of-the practice and increases their awareness about the complexity of their craft. However, this approach has the risk of expending a disproportionate amount of effort on tools as opposed to teaching concepts. Moreover, industrial tools often do not include didactic concepts needed for education. In this paper, we discuss our experience with an integrated, rationale-based modeling tool in a variety of software engineering courses. By providing an integrated modeling environment, students use a single tool for requirements, system design, test planning, and collaboration. By attaching rationale to the models, students are encouraged to reflect on their work while instructors can monitor them and provide more insightful feedback

The Rationale-based Analysis Tool (RAT) supports analysts, developers, clients and end users during the object-oriented requirements analysis activity. The tool enables different stakeholders to create, generate and refine a consistent and traceable analysis model, from a use case model. The analysis model consists of UML classes and sequence diagrams. The tool uses traceability links to propagate modifications by automated actions and to enable users to navigate through different models and to detect their interrelations. Moreover, RAT integrates requirements analysis with rationale information to support and capture model negotiations consisting of alternatives, assessments, arguments and justifications. RAT is a location independent multi-user tool that supports synchronous and asynchronous group collaboration.

Sysiphus, a suite of tools developed at the Technische Universitat Munchen [3,1], enables users to develop and share system models and to discuss, justify, and collaborate within the same environment. On the one hand, users create model elements (e.g., use cases, subsystem decompositions, class models, test specifications) and organize them into documents. On the other hand, they discuss models informally using discussion threads, extract design decisions into more formal rationales, and plan and track their work using action items. Discussion threads, rationales, and action items are linked to the relevant model elements, capturing the context in which decisions are made. The originality of sysiphus is that it puts equal importance on system modeling, collaboration, and rationale.

A major roadblock for fundamentally secure computing environments is the limited ability of indiviual users to specify personal data distribution. This is in part due to a lack of a consistent, complete and explicit way to define access rights on an appropriate level. A key property that is missing in current models are the dynamic aspects of evolving organizations. We propose a directed graph-based model for making organizational and personal relationships, particularly their durations, explicit. By sharing this data across relevant support tools via a centralized directory service, we expect informational self-determination of users to increase. The key benefit of a shared, explicit model lies in the ability to support consistent authorization across a diversity of tools. The necessary security concepts are explained in detail and substantiated by an example of use in the field of software development.

CMV-colitis is rare in HIV positive patients with CD4 counts higher than 100 μl−1. We report a patient who was suffering from extensive CMV-colitis despite modest immune defect. The diagnosis was confirmed by repeated biopsies. The patient experienced an unusually long recovery which was only achieved after initiation of HAART.