Invited Speakers

• Frank van Harmelen
• Paul Lukowicz

Dealing with large amounts of heterogeneous data is one of the crucial challenges in modern Computer Science, and Medical Informatics is no exception: handling patient data from different sources, searching through large volumes of research literature, and integrating information systems all require that we are able to integrate data from very different sources using very different vocabularies.

In recent years, ontologies have been touted as a new and promising solution to this old problem: hierarchically organised, shared vocabularies that formalise the semantics of terms. The promise is that mapping between such ontologies provides a solution to dealing with heterogeneous data-sources.

In this talk I will survey different approaches to ontology-mapping, covering linguistic, statistical and logical methods. The state of the art will be illustrated through a number of recent applications that employ ontology mappings, specifically in the medical domain. At the end of the talk, we should hopefully have an answer if, and to what extent ontology mapping is our way out of the terminological tower of Babel.

Bio: Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was awarded a PhD from the Department of AI in Edinburgh for his research on meta-level reasoning, after having studied Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. His research is in the modelling and representation of different forms of knowledge and reasoning, as found in a large variety of AI systems, with an interest in both applications and theory. He has made key contributions to the CommonKADS methodology for developing knowledge-based system by providing a formal basis for the conceptual models. In recent years, he has been very active in developments around the Semantic Web. One of his five books is the first text book on Semantic Web technology. He is involved in numerous European Semantic Web projects, and he was one of the designers of the W3C standard ontology language OWL. He was the Program Chair of the ECAI 2002, the General Chair of the 2004 International Semantic Web Conference, and will chair the Semantic Web track of the 2005 World Wide Web conference.

Paul Lukowicz
Institute for Computer Systems and Networks
University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology
UMIT Hall in. Tirol

Human Computer Interaction in Context-Aware Wearable Systems

Today in nearly any situation there is guaranteed to be a piece of useful information somewhere on the network. It includes such trivial everyday things like restaurant menus and transportation delays, building plans (relevant for rescue personnel), patient records (needed for example by emergency medics) and multimedia manuals (for maintenance and assembly work). However today most people use their connected devices predominantly for conventional telephony, email access, scheduling and an occasional photograph. Despite a strong push by service providers accessing online information in a mobile environment is still the exception.

To a large degree the limited use of mobile connected devices can be attributed to the inadequacies of the current interaction paradigm. The talk will describe a new approach to solving this problem: so called context-aware wearable systems. Such systems attempt to automatically recognize the needs of the user and deliver the correct information at the correct time and place in a discrete, non-disturbing way. In the simplest case the context used to model the user’s needs system might be just time and location. In more advanced applications it would include user activity (walking, standing, going to work, performing a particular maintenance task), environment state (e.g examination of a specific patient) and background information such as the users schedule or habits. In the talk our work on context recognizing using simple sensors (accelerometers, unltrasonic location, microphones etc.) mounted in the user’s outfit and the environment will be presented. Specific applications from health care related areas will be discussed.

Bio: Paul Lukowicz holds a MSc in Computer Science, and MSc in Physics and an Ph.D in Computer Science all from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. From 1999 till 2003 he was a senior researcher at the ETH Zürich in charge of the wearable Computing Laboratory. Since 2003 he has been Professor of Computer Engineering the University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology in Hall (Insbruck) in Austria. His research interest include ubiquitous system architectures, context awareness and novel applications enabled by the two, with an emphasis on healthcare related areas. He has also worked on parallel computing systems and optical interconnects. Paul Lukowicz is active in a number of European Union sponsored research projects.