******************************************************************** ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER ON REASONING ABOUT ACTIONS AND CHANGE Issue 97029 Editor: Erik Sandewall 28.11.1997 Back issues available at http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/njl/ ******************************************************************** ********* 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 --- The following debate contributions (questions, answers, or comments) have been received for articles that have been received by the ETAI and which are presently subject of discussion. To see the full context, for example, to see the question that a given answer refers to, or to see the article itself or its summary, please use the web-page version of this Newsletter. ======================================================== | AUTHOR: Antonis Kakas and Rob Miller | TITLE: Reasoning about Actions, Narratives and Ramification ======================================================== -------------------------------------------------------- | FROM: The Authors | TO: Tom Costello -------------------------------------------------------- Tom, In ENAI 21.11, in the context of the general discussion on action description languages, you asked: > Similarly, does > > Always F,G > > or Kakas and Miller's > > F Whenever -G > > mean that every actual state satisfies F,G, or every possible > state. In the light of this remark, it now occurs to us that a possible partial explanation of your difficulty in gaining an intuition about the meaning of E's c- and r-propositions is that you're thinking in terms of states and state-transitions (natural enough if one is used to working with the Situation Calculus and related formalisms). But E's vocabulary and underlying ontology doesn't include (global) states - just fluents, actions and time-points. So it's difficult for us to see what you might be refering to by a "possible state" in the context of E. To understand our intentions, it's better to think just in terms of local cause and effect, i.e. to think of the r-proposition "L whenever C" as meaning "C is a minimally sufficient cause for F", and the c-proposition "A initiates F when C" as meaning "C is a minimally sufficient set of conditions for an occurrence of A to have an initiating effect on F". We include "minimally" here to express our feeling that it's not intuitive to include completely irrelevant fluents in the set C. Hence, as we indicated before, if we were to extend the semantics and entailment relation to include h-, c- and r-propositions, we really would want such propositions to be entailed if and only if they were in the domain description, at least for the simple classes of domain descriptions we've defined so far. (Hence, strictly speaking, we might want to forbid pairs of statements within a single domain description such as "L whenever C1" and "L whenever C2" where C1 was a proper subset of C2, because the second proposition is redundant). However, we retain sympathy for your general arguments about the need, ultimately, for theories in classical logic or similar, and for defining entailment in terms of truth functions (as we've effectively done for t-propositions). It is of course debatable whether such theories need to be centered around the notions of global states and state transitions. One's intuitions and preferences about this are probably coloured by one's experience. Rob and Tony ********* 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: - Client-server architectures for existing validated expert systems in which one or more design or optimization tradeoffs arose from limitations such as in network bandwidth, computing power in the client computer (e.g., wireless handheld units), interfaces with legacy and/or massive databases. - Networking issues such as security and/or confidentiality that could not be resolved by straightforward application of asymmetric key cryptography or other standard means. - Graphical user interface issues relating to the emerging standards of Web browsers, HTML and its extensions, and Java and its variants. - System design issues arising from interconnection of groups of servers such as, for example, a database server, a UMLS vocabulary server, a computation server, and the client software. 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 ******************************************************************** This Newsletter is issued whenever there is new news, and is sent by automatic E-mail and without charge to a list of subscribers. To obtain or change a subscription, please send mail to the editor, erisa@ida.liu.se. Contributions are welcomed to the same address. Instructions for contributors and other additional information is found at: http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/njl/ ********************************************************************