Dear colleague

May I draw your attention to our recent book describing the PROforma
technology and method for intelligent decision support and workflow
management in  clinical and other safety-critical applications? Summary
follows.

Apologies if you knew about this already and for multiple postings of
course.

Regards

John Fox

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Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications

By John Fox and Subrata Das

Jointly published by AAAI and MIT Press, July 2000
326 pp., references, index, illus., $40.00 hardcover
ISBN 0-262-06211-9

Computer science and artificial intelligence are increasingly used in
hazardous and uncertain situations like medicine, where small faults or
errors can spell human catastrophe. This book describes a technology for
supporting sound decision-making and safe process management from the
perspectives of the practical software developer and theoretical AI. The
book contains many examples of real clinical applications.

The book grew out of a programme of research into AI and "cognitive"
functions like reasoning, problem solving and decision-making in medicine.
These are well-established research topics in cognitive science but the
programme described here is unusual in its focus on the integration of such
functions into a unified, well-founded model for building "intelligent
agents", and in the need to measure success in practical as well as
theoretical terms.

Building practical software agents may seem to require a purely engineering
solution, but some of the medical challenges demanded new concepts and new
computational techniques to capture and support the ideas. In many respects
Fox and Das’ approach instantiates current ideas on logical agents and shows
how such agents can be put to practical use. Although the application focus
is medicine, the method and the underlying ideas can be applied to many
other application domains.

The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the motivation and
development of the PROforma method, a discussion of safety issues and
formalities. The first two parts are written in an informal style, beginning
with the medical background and motivations, technical challenges, and
solutions, before turning to a wide-ranging discussion of intelligent and
autonomous agents, with particular reference to safety and hazard
management. The final part presents the formal foundations of the PROforma
decision making and process model, including a possible worlds approach to
safety and hazard management.