SGES Evening Lectures

Birkbeck College University of London

The Evening Lectures are free to both members and non-members of SGES.
Further information is available on the SGES website:
http://www.bcs-sges.org or from Dr. Hui Liu, Department of Computer
Science, Birkbeck College [log in to unmask]
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Wednesday October 20th 1999 (6 p.m.)

Derek Sleeman (University of Aberdeen)
A Workbench to help clinicians predict outcome for patients given
real-time monitoring data and background medical knowledge

ABSTRACT

The acquisition of Knowledge Bases (KBs) for use with Expert
Systems/Decision Support Systems has long been recognised as a
difficult and time-consuming task. More recently it has been
appreciated that if a KB is complex it is likely to be both incomplete
(& so more Knowledge needs to be acquired) & inconsistent (when the KB
needs to be refined). Additionally, for complex domains it is unlikely
that a complete domain theory will be available, hence the need to
involve the domain expert as an oracle & the need for Co-operative
Knowledge Acquisition & Refinement Systems. Several examples of such
systems which use a variety of knowledge representational schema &
which have been cited in a number of domains (e.g. selection of wines,
diagnosis of turbines, stock control & botanical taxonomies etc) will
be reviewed.

The focus of the talk is a current project to build a (Co-operative)
Workbench so that clinicians can predict outcome for patients given
real-time monitoring data & (incomplete & inconsistent) background
Medical Knowledge. Specifically we are working with data-sets for
serious head injury patients which have been collected in the
Intensive Care Unit at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. The
overall project has been conceived as 3 phases:

 - an initial review of the data to note sub-groups of patients & to
 check for some types of inconsistencies;

- acquisition of causal knowledge from senior clinician (this will be
used as background domain knowledge for the next phase);

- the design & implementation of the Workbench

Finally, this work will be related to current research themes in
Knowledge Technology - such as the design & refinement of Problem
Solving Methods, Reuse of Knowledge Bases, and the semi-automatic
acquisition of KBs from texts.

DEREK SLEEMAN trained as a Physical Scientist at King's College
London, and moved to Leeds where he was a Lecturer in Computing &
co-founded the Computer-Based Learning Unit in 1969. This led to his
interest in Intelligent Tutoring Systems & an edited volume on that
subject with John Seely Brown in 1981. He moved to Stanford in 1982
where he was a Senior Research Associate at the Heuristic Programming
project & Associate Professor of AI & Education.

He returned to Aberdeen in 1986 where he was appointed the
University's first Professor of Computing Science. His Research
activities have remained at the intersection of AI & Cognitive
Science, but the focus has moved from ITSs to Co-operative Knowledge
Acquisition & Knowledge Refinement Systems. For 3 years he was the
Academic Co-ordinator of the EU's Network of Excellence in Machine
Learning & Knowledge Acquisition; additionally he has been a Program
Committee member for the International/European/National Conferences
in Machine Learning & Knowledge Acquisition. He has also served on
various Editorial boards including the Machine Learning Journal & the
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.
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Max Bramer
Chairman, SGES
http://www.bcs-sges.org


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