Conceptual structures or ontologies are usually built by hand by skilled knowledge engineers. This paper presents a theory of how ontologies may be learned by intelligent agents interacting with their environment in an unsupervised way. Categories of activities are learned, then abstractions over those categories result in concepts. The entire ontology is based on activities. The meanings of co...

CONTEXT The term growing pains describes a common, benign syndrome of recurrent discomfort that occurs in young children. First described in the 1800s, the etiology of this condition remains unclear. The peak incidence does not correspond to a time of rapid growth. Children typically report bilateral pain in the lower extremities that occurs late in the day or at night. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION T...

TreeLex is a subcategorization lexicon of French, automatically extracted from a syntactically annotated corpus. The lexicon comprises 2006 verbs (25076 occurrences). The goal of the project is to obtain a list of subcategorization frames of contemporary French verbs and to estimate the number of different verb frames available in French in general. A few more frames are discovered when the cor...

Kiss of death D8 cytotoxic T cells are serial killers that slay one infected or cancerous cell after another. During each fatal encounter, an intercellular junction called the immunological synapse forms between killer and victim, according to researchers from Oxford University (Oxford, UK). Their work suggests new functions for the immunological synapse and supports the hypothesis that the imm...

Standard edge detectors usually run in two steps: (i) Detection of edge points; (ii) linking of those points to make a coherent edge feature. Optimal edge detectors were designed ([Can 86]) but this was mainly done on the basis of signal processing aspects and such detectors are often criticized for their failure to detect the most salient edges. New algorithms based on Active Contour Models ha...

Background: MeCP2, methyl-CpG-binding protein 2, binds to methylated cytosines at CpG dinucleotides, as well as to unmethylated DNA, and affects chromatin condensation. MECP2 mutations in females lead to Rett syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by developmental stagnation and regression, loss of purposeful hand movements and speech, stereotypic hand movements, deceleration of brain ...

To the casual observer, successful neonatal care may appear to end at the door of the neonatal unit along with the appreciations and farewells. However this is merely the end of the beginning, as the reality of life outside the neonatal unit commences for infant and family. This article examines the role of neonatal follow-up and some of the factors that determine how such services are currentl...