Autoimmune diseases are typically characterized by a persistent inflammatory self-recognition process that ultimately leads to chronic progressive disability. Over the past several years we have addressed the fundamental question of why autoimmune diseases are chronic. Our working hypothesis in these studies has been that autoimmunity involves a continuous acquisition of new self-recognition ev...

The social aspects of the group members are usually omitted in today’s group recommenders. In this paper we propose novel approach for the intergroup processes modeling, while the friendship type, user’s personality and the group context is considered in order to reflect the group member influence. Moreover, the bi-directional emotional contagion is reflected by the spreading activation over th...

The first longitudinal, controlled experiment of a video game explored the presence of cultivation effects due to play. Over the course of 1 month, participants in an online game changed their perceptions of real-world dangers. However, these dangers only corresponded to events and situations found in the game world, not other real-world crimes. This targeted finding is at odds with the broader...

We have devized a methodology that mines sequential navigation patterns from a website's logs to enable us to identify the most signi cant associative links in the networks. Spreading activation can then be applied to the generated network of weighted hyperlinks enabling the content-dependent, semantic retrieval of nodes in the network. This approach to information retrieval avoids many of the ...

Motivated by the properties of spreading activation and conceptual distance, the authors propose a metric, called Distance, on the power set of nodes in a semantic net. Distance is the average minimum path length over all painvise combinations of nodes between two subsets of nodes. Distance can be successfully used to assess the conceptual distance between sets of concepts when used on a semant...

For the update summaries task of the Text Analysis Conference 2008 we have implemented a novel summarization technique based on query expansion with encyclopedic knowledge and activation spreading in a large document graph. We have also experimented with sentence compression for building the summaries. The results are average – ranked 27 out of 58 for responsiveness in manual evaluation – but w...