VIII Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care, held in conjuntion with the 14th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2013)
Murcia, June 1th, 2013
Multi-agent systems are one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. In the last ten years there has been agrowing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care, and it has been argued that the properties of agents fit very well with the usual characteristics of the problems found in health care.
The first specialised workshop on this area was held at Autonomous Agents '2000; several other workshops have followed since then, including three ECAI workshops in 2002, 2004 and 2006. Moreover, a growing European community of researchers interested in the application of intelligent agents in health care emerged as a result of the activities within the AgentCities European project and the AgentLink III Technical Forum Group on Healthcare Applications of Intelligent Agents.
The progressive maturity of agent technology methodologies and tools has led to the development of applications in many complex real-world domains, and e-Health is one of the most prominent cases, as identified in the AgentLink roadmap some years ago. The workshop intends to bring together not only specialists in Computer Science, but also in Medicine or Biomedicine, so that all of them can discuss the benefits that agent technology may bring to the effective solution of problems in these areas, as well as the many technological, social, economic and organisational hurdles that must be crossed before having agent-based applications in full operational and daily use.
Intelligent agent-based systems constitute one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. Due to the growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care, a number of applications addressing clinical problems are already based in agent technology. Thus, it may now be a good time for the specialists in the field to meet and report on the results achieved in this area, to discuss the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains, and also to provide a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future.
This workshop will try to incorporate two novel aspects with respect to related workshops held in the last years:
- Interdisciplinary research: special efforts will be devoted to try to attract the attention of health care and biomedical specialists, so that they attend the workshop and realise the potential benefits of agent technology.
- Applied research: the organising committee will also pay special attention to papers describing applications which are not just academic, but that are already deployed and running in a real medical environment.
- New research topics that are aligned with the H2020 topics on eHealth as for example: monitoring their health and wellbeing online or through intelligent devices, etc.
Current topics of research include personalized health systems for remote and autonomous tele-assistance, communication and co-operation between distributed intelligent agents to manage patient care, information agents that retrieve medical information from distributed repositories, intelligent and distributed data mining, and multi-agent systems that assist the doctors in the tasks of monitoring and diagnosis. Several methodological and technical problems have been discovered by the researchers that attempt to deploy agent-based systems in the medical area; just to name a few, the growing number of huge databases that need to be integrated (e.g. genetic data from next generation sequencing), the difficulty to integrate new agent-based systems with legacy software, the need to apply changing national and international laws and regulations concerning the privacy of medical data and the security of the transaction of patient information between agents.
In this occassion, the VIII Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care will be held in conjuntion with the 14th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2013).
Past workshops
First workshop on agents applied in health care - ECAI 2002 in Lyon, France. Organised by Antonio Moreno (Univ. Rovira i Virgili, URV), Ulises Cortés (Technical Univ. of Catalonia, UPC) and John Fox (Cancer Research UK, CRUK). Expanded versions of selected papers were published in a special issue of AI Communications (Ed. A.Moreno, Vol. 16, Issue 3, 2003).
Second workshop on agents applied in health care - ECAI 2004 in Valencia, Spain. Organised by Antonio Moreno (URV), Ulises Cortés (UPC), John Nealon (Oxford Brookes University, OBU) and John Fox (CRUK). Expanded versions of selected papers were published in a special issue of AI Communications (Ed: John Nealon, Vol. 18, Issue 3, 2005).
Third workshop on agents applied in health care - IJCAI 2005 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Organised by Antonio Moreno (URV), Ulises Cortés (UPC) and John Nealon (OBU). Expanded versions of selected papers were published in a special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems (Ed: A.Moreno, Vol. 21, Issue 6, December 2006).
Fourth workshop on agents applied in health care - ECAI 2006 in Riva del Garda, Italy. Organised by Antonio Moreno (URV), Ulises Cortés (UPC), Roberta Annicchiarico (Fondazione Santa Lucia, FSL) and John Nealon (OBU). Expanded versions of selected papers were published in the book Agent technology and e-health (Eds: R.Annicchiarico, U.Cortés, C.Urdiales), Whitestein series in Software Agent Technologies and Autonomic Computing, 2007.
Fifth workshop on agents applied in health care - AAMAS 2008 in Estoril, Portugal. Organised by Antonio Moreno (URV), Ulises Cortes (UPC) and Roberta Annicchiarico (FSL).
Sixth workshop on agents applied in health care - eHealth 2010 in Casablanca, Morocco. Organised by Antonio Moreno (URV), Ulises Cortes (UPC), Roberta Annicchiarico (FSL), Magi Lluch (MicroArt) and David Isern (URV).
Seventh workshop on agents applied in health care - AAMAS 2012 in Valencia, Spain. Organised by Antonio Moreno (URV), Ulises Cortes (UPC), Magi Lluch (Informatics Research Institute) and David Isern (URV). Expanded versions of the workshop papers are being considered for publication in a special issue of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools.
