[agents] CFP: 7th Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care

[Magí Lluch-Ariet]

*7th Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care*
http://deim.urv.cat/~itaka/workshops/aamas2012 
<http://deim.urv.cat/%7Eitaka/workshops/aamas2012>

To be held in conjunction with the Eleventh International Conference on 
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
(AAMAS 2012, 4th-8th June 2012, Valencia, Spain)

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

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 are already deployed and running in a real medical
      environment.

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.

Submitted papers should address at least one of the following issues:

    * Co-operation between intelligent agents to improve patient
      management (e.g. distributed patient scheduling).
    * Agents that provide autonomous and remote care delivery.
    * Agents that provide information about medical services.
    * Multi-agent systems for patient monitoring and diagnosis.
    * Successful applications of agents and multi-agent systems in
      health care.
    * MAS that improve medical training or education (e.g. tutoring
      systems).
    * Medical agent-based decision support systems.
    * Information agents that gather compile and organise medical data
      and knowledge available on Internet.
    * Solutions to the basic methodological and technological problems
      associated to the real deployment of health-care agent-based systems:
          o Security, privacy of medical data.
          o Social acceptance of agent-based systems.
          o Integration and use of medical ontologies.
          o Lack of centralised control.
          o Communication standards.
          o Integration with other types of software.
    * Legal and ethical issues related to the use of agents in health care.
    * Surveys providing an up to date view of the state of the art in
      the area of agents in health care.

*Important dates*
The workshop organisers would appreciate that anyone intending to submit 
a paper to the workshop communicates this intention before February 1st 
to the workshop contact person.

    * February 14th, 2012: Deadline for paper submission
    * March 28th, 2012: Notifications of acceptance/rejection sent
    * April 10th, 2012: Deadline for sending camera-ready papers to
      workshop organisers.
    * June 4th or 5th, 2012: Workshop.
    * Autumn-Winter 2012: Possibility of publishing revised and expanded
      versions of selected papers in a special issue of an appropriate
      scientific journal or book.

The organizers will actively try to publish revised and extended 
versions of the accepted papers in a special issue of a journal or in a 
specific book. Note that most of the previous editions of the workshop 
have had a post-publication of this kind (3 special issues and 2 books).

*Organising committee*

Antonio Moreno (contact person)
University Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain.
e-mail: antonio.moreno at urv.net <mailto:antonio.moreno at urv.net>

Ulises Cortés
Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

Mr. Magí Lluch-Ariet
Informatics Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain

Mr David Isern
University Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain.