CloudNeg: An autonomous multi issue negotiation system, with preference elicitation component, for trading cloud services

Cloud services provide its users with flexible resource provisioning. But in the current market, a user has to choose from a limited set of configurations at a fixed price. This paper presents an autonomous negotiation system termed CloudNeg for negotiating cloud services. CloudNeg provides buyers and sellers of cloud services with autonomous agents to negotiate on the specifications of a cloud instance, including price, on their behalf. These agents elicit their buyers’ time preferences and use them in negotiations. Further, this paper presents two artifacts: a negotiation algorithm and a prototype which together form CloudNeg.

Design history: exploring corporate communities

A design history is a narrative involving a multitude of social groups, interpretive flexibility, and eventual stabilization of shared understanding. Design history surfaces the practices that help shape and define engagements and can increase not only our theoretical understanding of what design is, but also our capacity to realize this understanding in practice. We use a design history perspective to examine how corporate technology initiatives establish and support open source communities and the crafting of relevant design practices that enable their advancement. We foster an evolving expression of design research that treats artifacts not as stable objects to be singularly evaluated, but as evolving systems contingent on historical trajectories.

Effectuation and its implications for socio-technical design science research in information systems

We study the implications of the effectuation concept for socio-technical artifact design as part of the design science research (DSR) process in information systems (IS). Effectuation logic is the opposite of causal logic. Ef-fectuation does not focus on causes to achieve a particular effect, but on the possibilities that can be achieved with extant means and resources. Viewing so-cio-technical IS DSR through an effectuation lens highlights the possibility to design the future even without set goals. We suggest that effectuation may be a useful perspective for design in dynamic social contexts leading to a more dif-ferentiated view on the instantiation of mid-range artifacts for specific local ap-plication contexts. Design science researchers can draw on this paper’s conclu-sions to view their DSR projects through a fresh lens and to reexamine their re-search design and execution. The paper also offers avenues for future research to develop more concrete application possibilities of effectuation in socio-technical IS DSR and, thus, enrich the discourse.

Insights into the mechanisms of eukaryotic translation gained with ribosome profiling

The development of Ribosome Profiling (RiboSeq) has revolutionized functional genomics. RiboSeq is based on capturing and sequencing of the mRNA fragments enclosed within the translating ribosome and it thereby provides a â snapshotâ of ribosome positions at the transcriptome wide level. Although the method is predominantly used for analysis of differential gene expression and discovery of novel translated ORFs, the RiboSeq data can also be a rich source of information about molecular mechanisms of polypeptide synthesis and translational control. This review will focus on how recent findings made with RiboSeq have revealed important details of the molecular mechanisms of translation in eukaryotes. These include mRNA translation sensitivity to drugs affecting translation initiation and elongation, the roles of upstream ORFs in response to stress, the dynamics of elongation and termination as well as details of intrinsic ribosome behavior on the mRNA after translation termination. As the RiboSeq method is still at a relatively early stage we will also discuss the implications of RiboSeq artifacts on data interpretation.