LINGUIST List 10.227

Fri Feb 12 1999

Calls: Mind 4, Prognostic Models in Medicine

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Paul Mc Kevitt, LAST CALL: MIND-IV, TWO SCIENCES OF MIND, 16-20/8,99, DUBLIN, IRELAND
2. Peter Lucas, Last CfP: Workshop on prognostic models in medicine

 LAST CALL

 Mind 4
 Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland, August 16-20, 1999

 Theme: "Two Sciences of Mind"


 Confirmed invited speakers include:
 Bernard Baars
 David Galin
 Karl Pribram
 Stuart Hammeroff
 Kathy McGovern
 Steven Nachmanovitch
 Jacob Needleman

 Program Committee:
 Bernard Baars
 Mark Bickhard
 Robert Campbell
 Christian de Quincey
 Stuart Hammeroff
 Paul Mc Kevitt
 Kathy McGovern
 Steven Nachmanovitch
 Jacob Needleman
 Sean O Nuallain
 Yoshi Nakamura
 Max Velmans
 Terry Winegar

Keynote addresses:

Bernard Baars: "The Compassionate Implications of Brain Imaging of
Conscious Pain: New Vistas in Applied Cognitive Science."

Jacob Needleman: "Inner and Outer Empiricism in Consciousness Research"

Stream 1: Outer and Inner empiricism in consciousness research

This stream will feature papers that attempt to show how "inner"
states can be elucidated with reference to external phenomena. "Inner
empiricism" designates experience, or qualia. They are shaped
(somehow) by brain processes or states which sense and interpret the
external phenomena. The physical nature of these processes or states
may tell us much about consciousness. Likewise, the argument that we
are conscious of only one thing at a time because of the gating action
of the nuclei reticularis thalami (Taylor, Baars, etc) is indicative
of the kind of thinking we are trying to encourage. In this vein, pain
experience and its imperfect relationship to neural activity are
similarly relevant. We particularly welcome papers that feature
empirical data, or, lacking these data, show a grasp of the range of
disciplines necessary to do justice to the topic.


Papers are also invited that

- Interpret qualia in terms of a quantum-mechanics based panpsychism
(or, in current terms, pan-protopsychism)

- Establish links with developments like Whitehead's pan-experientialism
and process thought

-Interrelate physiological processes at the neural level with current
thought in QM

- Emphasize "relational empiricism", ie second-person considerations

- Investigate the brain processes or states giving rise to qualia at
whatever level the writer considers appropriate (eg intra-cellular
cytoskeletal activities and/or quantum-level phenomena).

- Involve studies of central pain states as well as other curiosities
like allodynia, spontaneous analgesia, pain asymbolia, and hypnotic
analgesia.


The invited talks include:

David Galin "The Experience of 'Spirit' in Cognitive Terms."

Stuart Hameroff "Quantum Computing and Consciousness"

Steve Nachmanovitch "Creativity and Consiousness"

Each of these talks will be followed by a panel discussion discussing
respectively, consciousness as explored experientially, through
scientific investigation, and in the arts.


Stream 2: Foundations of Cognitive Science

Co-chairs:


Sean O Nuallain

Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland

(sonuallacompapp.dcu.ie)


Robert L. Campbell

Department of Psychology, Clemson University,

Clemson, SC USA

(campberclemson.edu)



WHAT THE STREAM IS ABOUT


Though deep and contentious questions of theory and metatheory have
always been prevalent in Cognitive Science--they arise whenever an
attempt is made to define CS as a discipline--they have frequently
been downrated by researchers, in favor of empirical work that remains
safely within the confines of established theories and methods.

Our goal is to redress the balance. We encourage participants in this
stream to raise and discuss such questions as:


* the adequacy of computationalist accounts of mind

* the adequacy of conceptions of mental representation as structures
that encode structures out in the environment

* the consequences of excluding emotions, consciousness, and the social
realm from the purview of cognitive studies

* the consequences of Newell and Simon's "scientific bet" that
developmental constraints do not have to be studied until detailed
models of adult cognition have been constructed and tested

* the relationship between cognitive science and formal logic

A wide range of theoretical perspectives is welcome, so long as the
presenters are willing to engage in serious discussion with the
proponents of perspectives that are different from their own:


* Vygotskian approaches to culture and cognition

* Dynamic Systems theories

* Piagetian constructivism

* interactivism

* neuroscience accounts such as those of Edelman and Grossberg

* accounts of emergence in general, and emergent knowledge in particular

* perception and action robotics

* functional linguistics

* genetic algorithms

* Information Procesing

* connectionism

* evolutionary epistemology

********************

Contributors will be asked to submit short papers (3000 word limit) in
the form of ASCII text files (HTML files are also welcome, but are
optional) to Robert Campbell (for stream 2) and Sean O Nuallain
(stream 1).

(e-mails campberCLEMSON.EDU,seancompapp.dcu.ie)

The deadline is March 1, 1999. We will email notification of
acceptance or rejection by April 1.

The standard presentations during the streams will be 20-minute talks
and poster sessions.

***********

The "MIND" conferences have normally had their proceedings published
by John Benjamins. We have already been approached by prospective
publishers for Mind 4. All accepted papers and posters will be
included in a preprint.

Robert L. Campbell
Professor, Psychology
Brackett Hall 410A
Clemson University
Clemson, SC 29634-1511 USA
phone (864) 656-4986
fax (864) 656-0358
http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/index.html
Editor, Dialogues in Psychology
http://hubcap.clemson.edu/psych/Dialogues/dialogues.html

- --------------------------- Last CFP -------------------------------------

 AIMDM'99 -- Call for Papers for the workshop

 ** Prognostic Models in Medicine **
 Artificial Intelligence and Decision Analytic Approaches

 during the
 Joint European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
 in Medicine and Medical Decision Making (AIMDM'99)
 in Aalborg, Denmark, 20th - 24th June 1999

 (WWW version of this CFP: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~lucas/ipm-aimdm99.html)
 (WWW version of of AIMDM http://www.miba.auc.dk/AIMDM99/)
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Important dates

 * Submission deadline of structured abstracts: 1 March 1999
 * Notification of acceptance: 15 April 1999
 * Conference: 20th - 24th June 1999
 * Workshop: Sunday, 20th June 1999
 * Invitation for authors of best papers to submit an
 extended version to the special issue of the international
 journal METHODS OF INFORMATION IN MEDICINE: May 1999

Prognostic models are increasingly used in medicine to predict the
natural course of disease, or the expected outcome after
treatment. Prognosis forms an integral part of systems for treatment
selection and treatment planning. In evaluating quality of care,
prognostic models are used for predicting outcome, such as mortality,
which is compared with the actual measured outcome. Furthermore,
prognostic models may play an important role in guiding diagnostic
problem solving, e.g. by only requesting information concerning tests,
of which the outcome affects knowledge of the prognosis.

In recent years several methods and techniques from the fields of
artificial intelligence, decision theory and statistics have been
introduced into models of the medical management of patients
(diagnosis, treatment, follow-up); in some of these models, assessment
of the expected prognosis constitutes an integral part. Typically,
recent prognostic methods rely on explicit (patho)physiological
models, which may be combined with traditional models of life
expectancy. Examples of such domain models are causal disease models,
and physiological models of regulatory mechanisms in the human body.
Such model-based approaches have the potential to facilitate the 
development of actual systems, because the medical domain models can
be (partially) obtained from the medical literature.

Various methods have been suggested for the representations of such
domain models ranging from quantitative and probabilistic approaches
to symbolic and qualitative ones. Semantic concepts such as time,
e.g. for modelling the progressive changes of regulatory mechanisms,
have formed an important and challenging modelling issue. Moreover,
automatic learning techniques of such models have been proposed. When
model construction is hard, less explicit domain models have been
studied such as the use of case-based and neural network
representations and their combination with more explicit domain
models. In medical decision analysis, where the theories of
probability and utility are combined, various representations and
techniques are suggested such as decision trees, regression models,
and representations in which advantage is taken from the Markov
assumption (such as in Markov decision problems).

This workshop aims at bringing together various theoretical and
practical approaches to computational prognosis that comprise the
state of the art in this field. This workshop is a follow up on the
initiative started with the successful invited session on "Intelligent
Prognostic Methods in Medical Diagnosis and Treatment Planning" in
1998 during the conference "Computational Engineering in Systems
Applications 1998 (cesa'98)
(http://www.cs.ruu.nl/~lucas/ipm-cesa98.html) which has resulted in a
special issue on prognosis of the journal Artificial Intelligence in
Medicine.

Papers are sought that describe medical prognosis applications using
methods and techniques from artificial intelligence, decision theory,
and statistics as well as papers proposing theoretical foundations of
such methods. The workshop will also include one or more invited talks
(details will appear in due time on the corresponding WWW-page of this
workshop and the AIMDM'99 pages).

Topics of interest

Papers are sought on topics including, but not limited to:

 * Modelling and Reasoning:
 o the specification of prognostic models, possibly as part of
 diagnostic or therapy-planning applications
 o representation and reasoning about (multiple) model types such as
 empirical, anatomical and (patho)physiological ones
 o representation of and reasoning with time
 o qualitative representation and reasoning
 o decision modelling and analysis
 o (dynamic) probabilistic networks
 o representation and interpretations of strategies and guidelines
 o health care quality assurance
 o technology assessment and health policy making
 o function-based representation and reasoning
 o case-based representation and reasoning

 * Knowledge Acquisition:
 o acquisition of the medical prognostic models
 o automated learning of domain or task models using machine learning
 and data-mining techniques

 * Formalisation:
 o use of logical, set-theoretical or probabilistic methods to
 formalise various aspects of prognosis and therapy planning

 * Medical Applications:
 o clinical context of actual prognostic models
 o role of prognostic models in diagnosis or treatment planning of a
 specific disease
 o evaluation of prognostic models

Each submission will be refereed by at least two members of the
programme committee. Accepted papers will appear in the working notes
of the workshop "Prognostic Models in Medicine: Artificial
Intelligence and Decision Analytic Approaches". In addition authors
of the best papers are invited to contribute to a special issue on
prognostic models in medicine of the international journal Methods
of Information in Medicine.

Instructions to authors

Structured abstracts (up to 4 pages) are to be addressed to the first
co-chair and should be written in English with a short abstract and a
list of keywords. Electronic submissions by e-mail are encouraged
(either postscript files or plain text). Alternatively, 3 paper copies
may be submitted. The accepted abstracts will appear in the working
notes. Note that authors planning to submit a structured abstract to
the workshop may also submit their contributions (full paper or
structured abstract) to the main conference of AIMDM'99.

Registration fee

Workshop only 750 DKK, for participants of AIMDM'99 500 DKK. The fee
includes light refreshments and lunch.


Workshop organization

Co-Chairs:
Ameen Abu-Hanna, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Peter Lucas, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Programme committee

A. Abu-Hanna, The Netherlands
S. Andreassen, Denmark
P.M.M. Bossuyt, The Netherlands
J. Fox, UK
L.C. van der Gaag, The Netherlands
J.D.F. Habbema, The Netherlands
P. Haddawy, USA
P. Hammond, UK
E. Keravnou, Cyprus
N. Lavrac, Slovenia
J. van der Lei, The Netherlands
P.J.F. Lucas, The Netherlands
L. Ohno-Machado, USA
M. Ramoni, UK
M. Stefanelli, Italy
Th. Wetter, Germany
J. Wyatt, UK

For more information about the workshop please contact one of the
co-chairs.

- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ameen Abu-Hanna Peter Lucas
Dept. of Medical Informatics Dept. of Computer Science
Academic Medical Center Utrecht University
University of Amsterdam Padualaan 14
Meibergdreef 15 3584 CH Utrecht
1105 AZ Amsterdam The Netherlands
The Netherlands
Telephone: +31 20 565959 Telephone: +31 30 2534094
Fax : +31 20 6919840 Fax: +31 30 2513791
A.Abu-Hannaamc.uva.nl lucascs.uu.nl