Computer support for protocol-based treatment of cancer

Cancer treatment is often carried out within protocol-based clinical trials. An oncology clinic may take part in many trials each of which requires data to be collected for monitoring efficacy and toxicity of treatment. Subsequently, this data is analysed statistically to evaluate clinical objectives of the trial. To be scientifically valid, such analysis must be based on data that is both complete and correct. This is one motivating factor for introducing computer support for trial management. Further motivation is provided by concern that treatment is consistent with the protocol and the well-being of the patient. The complexity of many protocols, the life-threatening nature of cancer and the toxicity of treatment side-effects emphasise the safety-critical nature of oncology. The OaSiS system provides decision support for the protocol-based treatment of cancer patients with emphasis on the safety aspects of the advice it gives. It offers a highly graphical interface, employs integrity constraint checking techniques from logic databases to monitor compliance with a protocol and is implemented in PROLOG. The paper describes the main features of OaSiS and indicates work in progress and planned. 1

Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain

With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the flow of that data across various stakeholders.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Published in: 4th International Workshop on Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2017) in conjunction with 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2017) December 14, 2017, Boston, MA, US

Monitoring Multi-Party Contracts for E-Business.

"Monitoring Multi-party Contracts for E-business" investigates the issues involved in the performance of econtract monitoring of business automations in business to business e-commerce environment. A pro-active monitoring contract model and monitoring mechanism have been designed and developed. A new architecture and framework is proposed for pro-active monitorable contracts. This pro-active monitoring contract model is supported by a prototype

An SBVR Framework for RESTful Web Applications

We propose a framework that can be used to produce functioning web applications from SBVR models. To achieve this, we begin by discussing the concept of declarative application generation and examining the commonalities between SBVR and the RESTful architectural style of the web. We then show how a relational database schema and RESTful interface can be generated from an SBVR model. In this context, we discuss how SBVR can be used to semantically describe hypermedia on the Web and enhance its evolvability and loose coupling properties. Finally, we show that this system is capable of exhibiting process-like behaviour without requiring explicitly defined processes

The Philosophical Foundations of PLEN: A Protocol-theoretic Logic of Epistemic Norms

In this dissertation, I defend the protocol-theoretic account of epistemic norms. The protocol-theoretic account amounts to three theses: (i) There are norms of epistemic rationality that are procedural; epistemic rationality is at least partially defined by rules that restrict the possible ways in which epistemic actions and processes can be sequenced, combined, or chosen among under varying conditions. (ii) Epistemic rationality is ineliminably defined by procedural norms; procedural restrictions provide an irreducible unifying structure for even apparently non-procedural prescriptions and normative expressions, and they are practically indispensable in our cognitive lives. (iii) These procedural epistemic norms are best analyzed in terms of the protocol (or program) constructions of dynamic logic. I defend (i) and (ii) at length and in multi-faceted ways, and I argue that they entail a set of criteria of adequacy for models of epistemic dynamics and abstract accounts of epistemic norms. I then define PLEN, the protocol-theoretic logic of epistemic norms. PLEN is a dynamic logic that analyzes epistemic rationality norms with protocol constructions interpreted over multi-graph based models of epistemic dynamics. The kernel of the overall argument of the dissertation is showing that PLEN uniquely satisfies the criteria defended; none of the familiar, rival frameworks for modeling epistemic dynamics or normative concepts are capable of satisfying these criteria to the same degree as PLEN. The overarching argument of the dissertation is thus a theory-preference argument for PLEN