ABSTRACT. According to some research, comorbidity is reported in 35 to 80% of all ill people. Multiple guidelines are needed for patients with comorbid diseases. However, it is still a challenging problem to automate the application of multiple guidelines to patients because of redundancy, contraindicated, potentially discordant recommendations. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model for the problem. It formalizes and generalizes a recent approach proposed by Wilks and colleagues. We also demonstrate that our model can be encoded, in a straightforward and simple manner, in Answer Set Programming (ASP) -- one class of Knowledge Representation languages. Our preliminary experiment also shows our ASP based implementation is efficient enough to process the examples used in the literature.

ABSTRACT. Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIGs) are representations of Clinical Guidelines (CGs) in computer interpretable languages. CIGs have been pointed as an alternative to deal with the various limitations of paper based CGs to support healthcare activities. Although the improvements offered by existing CIG languages, the complexity of the medical domain requires advanced features in order to reuse, share, update, combine or personalize their contents. To this end, we propose a conceptual model for representing the content of CGs as a result from an iterative approach that take into account the content of real CGs, existent CIGs languages and foundational ontologies in order to enhance the reasoning capabilities required to address CG use-cases. In particular, we apply our approach to the comorbidity use-case and illustrate it with a realistic case study.

ABSTRACT. Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) were originally designed to help with evidence-based management of a single disease and such single disease focus has impacted research on CPG computerization. This computerization is mostly concerned with supporting different representation formats and identifying potential inconsistencies in the definitions of CPGs. However, one of the biggest challenges facing physicians is the application of multiple CPGs to comorbid patients. Various research initiatives propose ways of mitigating adverse interactions in concurrently applied CPGs, however, there are no attempts to develop a generalized framework for mitigation that captures generic characteristics of the problem while handling nuances such as precedence relationships. In this paper we present our research towards developing a mitigation framework that relies on a first-order logic-based representation and related theorem proving and model finding techniques. The application of the proposed framework is illustrated with a simple clinical example.

ABSTRACT. Clinical Guidelines (CGs) are developed for specifying the ``best'' clinical procedures for specific clinical circumstances. However, a CG is executed on a specific patient, with her peculiarities, and in a specific context, with its limitations and constraints. Physicians have to use Basic Medical Knowledge (BMK) in order to adapt the general CG to each specific case, even if the interplay between CGs and the BMK can be very complex, and the BMK should rely on medical terminological knowledge. In this paper, we focus on a posteriori analysis of conformance, intended as the adherence of an observed execution trace to CG and BMK knowledge. A CG description in the GLARE language is mapped to Answer Set Programming (ASP); the BMK and conformance rules are also represented in ASP. The BMK relies on the SNOMED-CT terminology and additional (post-coordinated) concepts. Conformance analysis is performed in Answer Set Programming and identifies non-adherence situations to the CG and/or BMK, pointing out, in particular, discrepancies from one knowledge source that could be justified by another source, and discrepancies that cannot be justified.

ABSTRACT. Evidence-based Clinical Guidelines (EbCGs) are that the document or recommendation has been created using the best clinical research ndings of the highest value to aid in the delivery of optimum clinical care to patients. In this paper, we propose a lightweight formalism of evidence-based clinical guidelines by introducing the Semantic Web Technology for it. With the help of the tools which have been developed in the Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the generation of the formulations of evidence-based clinical guidelines become much easy. We will discuss several use cases of the semantic representation of EbCGs, and argue that it is potentially useful for the applications of the semantic web technology on the medical domain.

ABSTRACT. The rules associated with Health Information Exchange (HIE) are voluminous and complex. We had previously prototyped an Accountable System - using Linked Data, we demonstrated the ability to fully represent complex law in machine-readable policy language, to employ it to reason over hypothetical data usage events, and to produce a result which explains likely compliance or non-compliance with the law. Also, a small number of others had worked on representing health law in program code. In this project, we prototyped a HIE under the Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), in which a doctor seeks records for a patient without the patient's written consent. Such events can occur when a patient is unconscious or incompetent as well as when records are misplaced and time is of the essence. In this paper we closely modeled real world problems by incorporating many, different data standards associated with the component parts of the problem and anonymized, but real patient data. During this process, we addressed a challenge previously identified by others - how to reason rules that are not obviously operational? We did so in part by including serial rule-traversal and reasoning obscured dependencies between rules. Both of these techniques are critical to proper implementation of HIE and will be applicable in other domains as well.

ABSTRACT. Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) play an important role in medical practice, and computerized support to CPGs is now one of the most central areas of research in Artificial Intelligence in medicine. In recent years, many groups have developed different computer-assisted management systems of Computer Interpretable Guidelines (CIGs). From one side, there are several commonalities between different approaches; from the other side, each approach has its own peculiarities and is geared towards the treatment of specific phenomena. In our work, we propose a form of generalization: instead of defining “yet another CIG system”, we propose a META-GLARE, a “meta”-system (or, in other words, a shell) to define new CIG systems. From one side, we try to capture the commonalities, by providing (i) a general tool for the acquisition, consultation and execution of hierarchical bipartite graphs (representing the control flow of actions in CIGs), parametrized over the types of nodes and of arcs constituting it, and (ii) a library of different elementary components of guidelines nodes (actions) and arcs, in which each type definition involves the specification of how objects of this type can be acquired, consulted and executed. From the other side, we provide generality and flexibility, by allowing free aggregations of such elementary components to define new primitive node and arc types. In this paper, we first propose META-GLARE general architecture and then, for the sake of brevity, we will focus only on the acquisition issue.

ABSTRACT. The formalisation of clinical guidelines is a long and demanding task which usually involves both clinical and IT staff. Because of the features of guideline representation languages, a clear understanding of the final guideline model may prove complicated for clinicians. In this context, an assessment of the understandability of the guideline model becomes crucial. In the field of Business Process Modelling (BPM) there is research on structural metrics and their connection with the quality of process models, concretely with understandability and modifiability. In this paper we adapt the structural metrics that have been proposed in the field of BPM in terms of the features of a specific guideline representation language, which is PROforma. Additionally, we present some experiments consisting in the application of these adapted metrics to the assessment of guideline models described in PROforma. Although it has not been possible to draw meaningful conclusions on the overall quality of the models, our experiments have served to shed light on important aspects to be considered, such as the hierarchical decomposition of processes.

ABSTRACT. In healthcare domain, business process modelling technologies are able to support clinical processes recommended in guidelines. It has been shown that BPMN is intuitively understood by all stakeholders, including domain experts. However, if we want to develop any computer system using clinical guidelines, we need them in an executable format. Thus, we need computer-interpretable guidelines. Although there are several formalisms tailored to capture medical processes, encoding a guideline in any of them is not as intuitive. We propose an automatic transformation from a guideline represented in BPMN to a computer-interpretable formalism, in this case, PROforma. To tackle this problem, we have studied the approaches that transform graph-oriented languages into block-oriented languages. We have adapted the solution to our specic-domain problem and to our target language, PROforma, which has features of both, graph and block-oriented paradigms.

ABSTRACT. Treatment of cancer in the context of a multi-center treatment trial requires follow-ing a complex detailed process involving multidisciplinary patient treatment as well as study-related tasks, described in narrative protocol documents. We pre-sent a process-oriented approach for modelling clinical trial treatment protocols (CTTPs) to be used for enabling applications that support protocol-based care process delivery, monitoring and analysis. This modelling approach provides an understand-able visualized representation of the protocol document catering for change management, intra-center and national adaptations to the master protocol, and multi-level share-ability. The methodology can be re-used in CTTPs of dif-ferent cancer domains due to the similarity of the CTTPs in terms of required content.

ABSTRACT. We have developed multimedia learning modules (LMs) and guideline-driven interactive case simulation tools (ICSTs) as two major categories of resources for the New York State HIV/HCV/STD Clinical Education Initiative. We have adopted the existing standards on health professional training and clinical guideline representation to capture the important information of LMs and ICSTs. We have synthesized a domain ontology of HIV/HCV/STD clinical topics to index the content of LMs and ICSTs. Based on this, we have built system functions for browse/search of specific resources and checking of related resources. We have disseminated LMs and ICSTs through multiple platforms and recorded heavy usage by audiences from around the world. Plans for next stages include cross-linkages of multiple categories of resources, deeper level of resource mapping through internal structures, and full-scale usage analyses.

ABSTRACT. Arterial hypertension (AH) is an abnormal high blood pressure in the arteries with many possible etiologies. Differential diagnosis of the causes of AH is a complex clinical process that requires the simultaneous consideration of many clinical practice guidelines. Training clinicians to manage, assimilate, and correctly apply the knowledge contained in the guidelines of the most frequent causes of AH is a challenge that we have addressed with the combined use of different sorts of decision tables. After extracting the diagnostic knowledge available in eight clinical practice guidelines of the most frequent secondary causes of hypertension, we have represented this knowledge as decision tables, and have used these tables to train 23 residents at the Hospital Clinic de Barcelona. During the training, the decisions of the residents along the differential diagnostic steps were compared with the decisions provided by the decision tables so that we could analyze the progressive adaptation of clinicians' decisions to the guidelines' recommendations. The study shows a progressive improvement of the adherence of the residents to the guidelines as new AH cases are considered, reaching full adherence after a training with 30 clinical cases.

ABSTRACT. The raise of chronic diseases poses a challenge for the health care sector worldwide. In many cases, diseases are aected by an environmental component that, until now, could be hardly controlled. However, with the recent advances in information and communication technologies applied to cities, it becomes possible to collect real-time environmental data and use them to provide chronic patients with recommendations able to adapt to the changing environmental conditions. In this article, we study the use of the sensing capabilities of the socalled smart cities in the context of the recently proposed concept of Smart Health. We propose a way to exploit the relation between environmental factors and diseases, and we show how to obtain a comfort level for patients. Moreover, we study the application of our proposal to outdoor exercises and rehabilitative activities related to the treatment of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

ABSTRACT. The Irish Record Linkage 1864-1913 project aims to create a knowledge base containing historical birth, marriage and death records translated into RDF to reconstitute families and create longitudinal health histories. The goal is to interlink the different persons across these records as well as with supplementary datasets that provide additional context. With the help of knowledge engineers who will create the ontologies and set up the platform and the digital archivist who will curate, ingest and maintain the RDF, the historians will be able to analyse reconstructed "virtual" families of Dublin in the 19th and early 20th centuries, allowing them to address questions about the accuracy of officially reported maternal mortality and infant mortality rates. In the longer term, this platform will allow researchers to investigate how official historical datasets can contribute to modern-day epidemiological planning.

ABSTRACT. In this position paper we propose a logic-based framework for the computation of scores used in standard medical assessment questionnaires. In line with the medical specification, our degree-based logic allows to model the relationships between evaluated syndromes, corresponding items of the questionnaires, and their scores. The frequently used method of computation of final scores in terms of mean values is naturally reproduced within our framework.

ABSTRACT. Doctors, nurses, and health care professionals interact in various hospital processes to achieve the desired outcome: an effective patient treatment. However, seldom all information relevant for diagnosis and treatment is accessible at the point-of-care. Therefore this position paper introduces the concept of process information and guidance systems, the aim of which is twofold: Visualization of treatment history and recommendation of treatment steps based on medical guidelines, patient data, and organizational rules.

ABSTRACT. Our understanding of the notion "dynamic system" is a rather broad one: such a system has states, which can change over time. Ontologies are used to describe the states of the system, possibly in an incomplete way. Monitoring is then concerned with deciding whether some run of the system or all of its runs satisfy a certain property, which can be expressed by a formula of an appropriate temporal logic. We consider different instances of this broad framework, which can roughly be classified into two cases. In one instance, the system is assumed to be a black box, whose inner working is not known, but whose states can be (partially) observed during a run of the system. In the second instance, one has (partial) knowledge about the inner working of the system, which provides information on which runs of the system are possible.

In this talk, we will review some of our recent research that investigates different instances of this general framework of ontology-based monitoring of dynamic systems. We will also sketch possible extensions towards probabilistic reasoning and the integration of mathematical modelling of dynamical systems.

ABSTRACT. The Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism, which was part of the intellectual movement of Central European philosophy of science, is certainly one of the most important currents in the emergence of modern philosophy of science. Apart from this uncontested historical fact there remains the question of the direct and indirect influence, reception and topicality of this scientific community in contemporary philosophy of science in general as well as in the philosophy of the individual sciences, including the formal and social sciences. 

First, I will characterize the road from the Schlick-Circle to contemporary philosophy of science. Second, I will refer to "the present situation in the philosophy of science" by identifying relevant impacts, findings, and unfinished projects since the classical Vienna Circle. Third, I will address some specific European features of this globalized philosophical tradition up to the present, and outline future perspectives after the linguistic, historical and pragmatic turns – looking back to the "received view", or standard view of the Vienna Circle.

ABSTRACT. The aim of the FLoC Olympic Games is to start a tradition in the spirit of the ancient Olympic Games, a Panhellenic sport festival held every four years in the sanctuary of Olympia in Greece, this time in the scientific community of computational logic. Every four years, as part of the Federated Logic Conference, the Games will gather together all the challenging disciplines from a variety of computational logic in the form of the solver competitions.

At the Award Ceremonies, the competition organizers will have the opportunity to present their competitions to the public and give away special prizes, the prestigious Kurt Gödel medals, to their successful competitors. This reinforces the main goal of the FLoC Olympic Games, that is, to facilitate the visibility of the competitions associated with the conferences and workshops of the Federated Logic Conference during the Vienna Summer of Logic.

This award ceremony will host the

• Fifth Answer Set Programming Competition (ASPCOMP 2014);
• The 7th IJCAR ATP System Competition (CASC-J7);
• Hardware Model Checking Competition (HWMCC 2014);
• OWL Reasoner Evaluation (ORE 2014);
• Satisfiability Modulo Theories solver competition (SMT-COMP 2014);
• Competition on Software Verification (SV-COMP 2014);
• Syntax-Guided Synthesis Competition (SyGuS-COMP 2014);
• Synthesis Competition (SYNTCOMP 2014); and
• Termination Competition (termCOMP 2014).

ABSTRACT. Werner "Jimmy" DePauli-Schimanovich is being honored for his contributions to Gödel research, for his efforts towards re-establishing Vienna as a center of logic in the second half of the past century, and for extending the outreach of formal logic and logical thinking to other disciplines. The books about Gödel he authored, co-authored, or edited contain precious contributions of historical, philosophical, and mathematical value. His film on Gödel, and related articles and TV testimonials, attracted the general public to Gödel and his work. Moreover, DePauli-Schimanovich has unceasingly and successfully fought to re-establish logic in Vienna. He has inspired and encouraged a large number of students and young researchers, has organised meetings and social gatherings, and has created an intellectual home for scholars of logic. His activities significantly contributed to filling the intellectual vacuum in logic research that had developed in Austria in the years 1938–1945 and well into the post-war period. He was a main initiator and co-founder of the International Kurt Gödel Society. Jimmy’s research in logic involved criticism of current axiomatisations of set theory and development of new systems of naïve set theory. In informatics, DePauli-Schimanovich was co-founder and co-organiser of EuroCAST, a conference series on computer-assisted systems theory meeting alternatively in Vienna and Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. Finally, Jimmy has furthered implementation of logical ideas in disparate fields such as mechanical engineering, automated game playing, urban planning, and by inventing a number of logical games.

ABSTRACT. Zhang Mingyi is a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation in China. He has built up a school of non-monotonic logic in Guiyang and has fostered the exchange between Chinese and Western scientists. He has contributed a large number of results on various forms of non-monotonic reasoning, including default logic, answer set programming, and belief revision. In particular, as early as 1992, he has provided important characterizations of various forms of default logic that paved the way for clarifying their computational properties and for developing algorithms for default reasoning.  Jointly with collaborators, he proposed a characterization of answer sets based on sets of generating rules, and introduced the concept of first-order loop formulas to relate answer set programming to classical logic. Other important results relate to theory revision (for example, the proof of the existence and uniqueness of finest splitting of Horn formulae) and to normal forms for Gödel logics. Many of Zhang Mingyi's former students have become internationally respected researchers.

ABSTRACT. The Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, the Technische Universität Dresden, the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (until 2010), the Technische Universität Wien, and Australia's Information Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence (since 2007) are jointly running the European Master's Program in Computational Logic (EMCL) since 2004. The program is supported by the European Union within Erasmus Mundus and Eramsus+. So far, more than 100 students from 39 different countries have successfully completed the distributed master's program with a double or joint degree.

For the first time, the partner institutions are announcing the EMCL Distinguished Alumni Award for outstanding contributions of EMCL graduates to the field of Computational Logic.

http://www.emcl-study.eu/