Electronic Newsletter Actions and Change

Electronic Newsletter on
Reasoning about Actions and Change


Issue 97029 Editor: Erik Sandewall 28.11.1997

The ETAI is organized and published under the auspices of the
European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).

Today

Today's contribution by Miller and Kakas is a continuation of their discussion with Costello, although it also ties in with the general questions in the ontology debate. Also, take a look at the CfP quoted below -- it doesn't ask for papers in our area, but anyway it's quite interesting.


ETAI Publications

Discussion about received articles

Additional debate contributions have been received for the following article(s). Please click the title of the article to link to the interaction page, containing both new and old contributions to the discussion.

Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller
Reasoning about Actions, Narratives and Ramification


Application areas

A while ago we had a plea from Austin Tate and from the present editor about the importance of participating in application areas where methods for reasoning about actions and change are important. The following CfP for a journal issue is interesting from this point of view. Notice that it first mentions research topics in our area, and then it proceeds to invite papers that steer in another direction. Therefore, although this particular issue does not focus on actions and change, still our area is put forward as highly relevant. Food for thought! - The editor.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Special Issue of the Journal "Artificial Intelligence in Medicine"
Theme: NET-BASED DECISION SUPPORT IN MEDICINE
Guest-Editor: Lawrence Widman (University of Texas HSC - San Antonio)

BACKGROUND

The rapid growth of networking, both as the universally accessible Internet and as institutional intranets, has changed one of the fundamental premises of research in artificial intelligence in medicine. Until now, data were often not available in electronic format and professional users would rarely use computers in the course of their daily health care activities. Over the past several years, however, much has changed. Hospitals and large physician practices have installed sophisticated information systems that are truely replacing the paper record and therefore resolve the economic and social barriers to data and to professional users, respectively. Also, the universal acceptance of Web software technology and the promise of Java as a hardware-independent delivery platform have gone far toward resolving technical barriers to the delivery of expert computer technology in the clinical setting. It is fit, therefore, to reexamine the topic of decision support for clinical practice in the context of the new network paradigm that promises to empower both users and software developers.

Many fields of medicine are well-suited as domains for development of decision support systems as their clinical aspects become quantitative, causal, and reasonably well computerized. For example, cardiovascular medicine presents a number of challenges to computer scientists: multilevel causal modeling, reasoning at multiple time scales, reasoning simultaneously in space (anatomic localization) and time, and complexity of interpretation of real clinical records. These challenges obtain in many other areas of medical practice as well. As a practical matter, improved decision support and monitoring tools that improve patient outcomes can reduce health care costs while improving the quality of care. For these reasons, this progress in this area is timely and interesting not only to computer scientists and computer-literate health care providers, but also to health care organizations such as hospital and third-party payors.

OBJECTIVE OF SPECIAL ISSUE

The objective behind this special issue on "Net-based Decision Support in Medicine" is to report on both applied and reasonable theoretical developments. Applied reports describe implementation and validation of architectures. Because widespread availability of Net connections is so new, reasonable theoretical reports describe prototype systems that explore novel and useful concepts and are therefore worthy of consideration before they are fully validated.

More specifically, papers are expected to cover pertinent topics in networked decision support in medicine. Some examples are:

Additional topics will be considered: please send them promptly to the editor (see below) for informal review.

SCHEDULE

All the manuscripts submitted will be subject to a rigorous review process. The special issue will include 4-5 papers of 20-25 manuscript page each, plus an editorial. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the journal "submission guidelines" which are available on request.

January 1, 1998         Submission of tentative title and abstract 
                        to declare intention to submit paper.  
                        Email may be send to widman@sones.uthscsa.edu

April 1, 1998           Receipt of full papers. Three copies of a manuscript
                        should be sent to:

                        Lawrence E. Widman, MD, PhD
			Division of Cardiology, Room 5.660U
			University of Texas Health Science Center
			7703 Floyd Curl Drive
			San Antonio, TX  78284-7872
                        widman@sones. uthscsa.edu

May 15, 1998            Notification of acceptance

July  1, 1998           Receipt of final-version of manuscripts

April, 1999             Publication of AIM special issue