OBJECTIVES Factors acting before children are born or reach school-going age may explain why some do not complete primary education. Many relevant factors relate to maternal phenotype, but few studies have tested for independent associations of maternal factors relative to those characterizing the family in general. METHODS Using data from a longitudinal study of 838 children in Dhanusha, Nep...

We present Scilog, an experimental knowledge base to facilitate scientific discovery and reasoning. Scilog extends Prolog by supporting (1) dedicated predicates for specifying and querying knowledge about scientific processes, (2) the different scales at which processes may be manifested, and (3) the domains to which values belong. Scilog is meant to invoke more specialized algorithms and to be...

Image mining systems that can automatically extract semantically meaningful information (knowledge) from image data are increasingly in demand. The fundamental challenge in image mining is to determine how low-level, pixel representation contained in a raw image or image sequence can be processed to identify high-level spatial objects and relationships. To meet this challenge, we propose an eff...

This paper presents a new approach for building semantic image indexing and retrieval systems. Our approach is composed of four phases : (1) knowledge acquisition, (2) weakly-supervised learning, (3) indexing and (4) retrieval. Phase 1 is driven by a visual concept ontology which helps the expert to define low-level features useful to characterize object classes. Phase 2 uses acquired knowledge...

Top healthcare and medicine depends on the implementation of best practice methods, which include surveillance of and benchmarking with defined quality indicators. Using healthcare-associated infection (HAI) surveillance as an example, we put forward arguments in favour of automated intelligent information and communication technologies. Assessment studies with our fully automated detection and...

This paper presents a machine configuration system which stores all configuration parameters in a central ‘‘database’’. The system is dynamic in the sense that machines reconfigure themselves to reflect any changes in the database whenever they are rebooted. The use of a central database allows configurations to be validated, and correct configurations to be automatically generated from policy ...

This paper addresses the question of selecting an algorithm from a predefined set that will have the best performance on a scheduling problem instance. Our goal is to reduce the expertise needed to apply constraint technology. Therefore, we investigate simple rules that make predictions based on limited problem instance knowledge. Our results indicate that it is possible to achieve superior per...

Nowadays, the increasing power of hardware components has made available a huge amount of digital models, more and more complex and detailed, as needed in many innovative research fields such as medical imaging, entertainment, product modelling and design. In this scenario, both industry and academy feel an urgent need of tools to efficiently describe, recognise and retrieve shapes, which usual...

Using empirical methods, this paper examines household schooling and child labor decisions in rural Bangladesh. The results suggest the following: poverty and low parental education are associated with lower schooling and greater child labor; asset-owning households are more likely to have children combine child labor with schooling; households choose the same activity for all children within t...