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MAS*BIOMED'06
Second International Workshop on
Agents in Medicine, Computational Biology, and
Bioinformatics
(http://www.diee.unica.it/biomed06)
To be held at AAMAS'06
Fifth International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
May 9, 2006
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Call for papers / participation
*Motivation and Description*
There is growing evidence that agent technology can be useful in designing
and implementing solutions
aimed at supporting the automation of medical and biological procedures.
While it is essential for computer scientists and software developers to
understand the specific problems in medicine and biology, it is also
essential for an expert of either domain to understand the capabilities of
agent technology.
The main purpose of this workshop is to bring together and create synergies
between researchers on these fields in order to discuss relevant issues and
approaches aimed at assessing and promoting the adoption of agent
technology. It is intended that the workshop mainly focuses on the benefits
of adopting agent technology in: (i) storing, accessing, and distributing
relevant medical or biological data, (ii) implementing the automation of
information-gathering and information-inference processes in medical and
biological settings, (iii) supporting e-Health, (iv) simulating and
modelling biological systems.
This workshop aims to attract both theoretically and practically oriented
papers in these thriving areas in the intersection of medicine and biology
with computer science. The workshop will also focus on supporting
infrastructures, such as agent-based systems, tools, languages, ontologies,
and networking facilities for medicine, bioinformatics and computational
biology. Papers on the application and evaluation of agent approaches to the
solution of problems in these fields will be particularly sought.
We envision this workshop to be a mixture of presentations and open
discussions of the attendees.
A key open discussion can focus on the strength and limitations of software
agents in medical and biological domains. Possible questions to be addressed
can be: Why can agent technology provide a better solution than existing
ones? What are the limitations of agent technology with respect to medical
and biological problems? Why can software agents succeed where traditional
Artificial Intelligence technology/expert systems have reached their limits?
What are the priorities of actions when introducing this technology in the
medical and biological fields?
_Medicine and Health Care_
There is barely a country that is no t suffering from the ever increasing
impacts and costs for its health care system which is not the least boosted
by the steadily increasing number of drugs, diagnosis tools and methods, and
treatment procedures that appear continuously on the market. On the other
hand, in today's globalized world, a fast and reliable medical prevention,
diagnosis and treatment is of eminent importance as can be seen, for
example, from the recent problems with SARS or the bird flu. Such highly
contagious and lethal diseases can threaten the globe if they were not
fought immediately with the highest level of efficiency and reliability.
This requires, first of all, a fast and reliable pre-detection and
diagnosis, regardless of where the affected person may currently stay in the
world. The situations mentioned above are some of the many that prove that
the medical domain is marked by requirements for high dynamicity,
distribution, flexibility, scalability, extensibility, efficiency,
cooperative work and collaboration, proactivity and autonomy.
Most of these features are especially strongholds of multi-agent
systems/autonomous agent technology. Thus, it is proper to say that agent
technology will play an increasingly important role in medicine and health
care in now and the future, and will significantly enhance the ability to
model, design, and build complex, inherently distributed, software systems
in medical and health care domains.
_Computational Biology and Bioinformatics_
With the exponential growth of data being produced and made available to
genetics researchers via the Internet, there are several challenges for
using this information effectively to further genetics and biomedical
research. For instance, sequence and structural information exists in
databases along with various tools distributed throughout the world in
various formats and platforms. Also, while the GO (genome ontology) project
is addressing the problem, new and sometimes conflicting terminology and
vocabulary are emerging for phenotyping and annotating sequences. There is a
need for autonomous and semi-autonomous methods for learning and discovering
relational and conceptual knowledge, as well as by intelligently combining
these distributed data and information
sources. In order to harness the benefits of this continuously growing
amount of information, new information and communication technologies and
approaches should be adopted.
*Topics of interest include but are not limited to:*
* Multi-Agent Interaction in Medical or Biological Settings
- Coordination of tasks and data
- Collaboration in peer-to-peer networks
- Multi-strategy and meta- learning for cooperative information agents
* Analysis and Modelling of Data and Tasks
- Multi-agent systems for medical pre-detection, diagnosis, and treatment
- Multi-agent systems for patient scheduling, transplant management,
community care,
information access, training, internal hospital and clinic tasks,
etc.
- Integrated genotyping and gene linkage analysis
- Multi-agent approaches to gene expression analysis
- Modelling of biological processes
* Architectures, Languages, Tools, and Applications
- Agent-based architectures and frameworks tailored for medical or
biological domains
- Customization of agent-based tools, languages, and libraries fo r
medical or biological domains
* Knowledge management
- Agent-based integration of biological knowledge
- Agent-based data mining and knowledge discovery in medical or biological
domains
- Multi-agent information gathering in medical or biological settings
- Integration of heterogeneous data sources and/or services
* Ontologies for Medical or Biological Domains
- Collaborative ontology construction
- Distributed ontology management
Those wishing to participate in the workshop are requested to submit an
original research paper, not published or submitted elsewhere. Papers will
be peer reviewed by at least two referees from the workshop's program
committee based on the technical relevance, quality, clarity of
presentation, objective analysis of the reported experiences, and novelty.
High-profile survey papers could be also considered for publication. The
length of a paper must not exceed 15 single-spaced A4 pages including
figures, tables, and references. Papers should be formatted using the
Springer LNCS style.
Templates are available at Springer. The language of the workshop is
English. At least one of the authors per each accepted paper should be able
to register with and attend the workshop and present the paper.
All the accepted papers will be printed in the workshop proceedings of the
workshop. A selection of the best papers presented at this workshop will be
considered for a special issue on the same theme at "Multiagent and Grid
Systems - an International Journal" by IOS press.
*Submission Procedure*
Those wishing to participate in the workshop are requested to submit an
original research paper, not published or submitted elsewhere. Papers will
be peer reviewed by at least two referees from the workshop's program
committee based on the technical relevance, quality, clarity of
presentation, objective analysis of the reported experiences, and novelty.
High-profile survey papers could be also considered for publication.
The length of a paper must not exceed 15 single-spaced A4 pages including
figures, tables, and references. Papers should be formatted using the
Springer LNCS style. Templates are available at Springer.
The language of the workshop is English. At least one of the authors per
each accepted paper should be able to register with and attend the workshop
and present the paper.
All submissions should be sent by email, either in PDF or in PostScript
format, to biomed06 AT diee.unica.it. The subject of the email should
contain "medicine" or "biology" within square brackets to facilitate the
organizing committee in the task of associating papers to referees.
All the accepted papers will be printed in the workshop proceedings of the
workshop. A selection of the best papers presented at this workshop will be
considered for a special issue on the same theme at "Multiagent and Grid
Systems - an International Journal" by IOS press.
*Important Dates*
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2006
Notification of Acceptance: February 19, 2006
Camera ready: March 5, 2006
Workshop: May 9,, 2006
*Organizing Committee*
Giuliano Armano ([log in to unmask])
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Univ. of Cagliari (Italy)
Piazza D'Armi - 09123 Cagliari (Italy)
Andrew Martin ([log in to unmask])
Dept. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology - Univ. College London (UK)
Darwin Building - Gower Street London WC1E 6BT - England
Huaglory Tianfield ([log in to unmask])
Glasgow Caledonian University, School of Computing and Mathematical
Sciences, SRIF/SHEFC
Centre for Virtual Organization Technology Enabling Research (VOTER) -
Director
70 Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA, UK
Rainer Unland ([log in to unmask])
Inst. for Computer Science and Business Information Systems (ICB),
University of Duisburg-Essen
Schuetzenbahn 70, 45117 Essen, Germany
*Publishing Chair*
Eloisa Vargiu ([log in to unmask])
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Univ. of Cagliari (Italy)
Piazza D'Armi - 09123 Cagliari (Italy)
