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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 -------------- 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.