Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability—A Systematic Review of Information Systems Literature

The booming adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) likewise poses benefits and challenges. In this paper, we particularly focus on the bright side of AI and its promising potential to face our society’s grand challenges. Given this potential, different studies have already conducted valuable work by conceptualizing specific facets of AI and sustainability, including reviews on AI and Information Systems (IS) research or AI and business values. Nonetheless, there is still little holistic knowledge at the intersection of IS, AI, and sustainability. This is problematic because the IS discipline, with its socio-technical nature, has the ability to integrate perspectives beyond the currently dominant technological one as well as can advance both theory and the development of purposeful artifacts. To bridge this gap, we disclose how IS research currently makes use of AI to boost sustainable development. Based on a systematically collected corpus of 95 articles, we examine sustainability goals, data inputs, technologies and algorithms, and evaluation approaches that coin the current state of the art within the IS discipline. This comprehensive overview enables us to make more informed investments (e.g., policy and practice) as well as to discuss blind spots and possible directions for future research

Getting Around to It: How Design Science Researchers Set Future Work Agendas

Background: There is a long tradition of writing about future work in research papers, and information systems design science research (IS DSR) is no exception. However, there is a lack of studies on (1) how IS DSR authors currently envision the next steps for their work and (2) guidelines to improve the communication of opportunities to accumulate knowledge. Method: This paper contributes to this topic, building on a systematic literature review of 123 IS DSR papers published between 2018 and 2022. Results: Design-oriented research requires the research team to decide which tasks to carry out immediately in building the future and which to postpone as research debt. The paper\u27s contribution is threefold. First, we propose a research debt lifecycle to support (1) project stakeholders, (2) IS DSR community, and (3) societies looking for better futures. Second, we discuss the anatomy of future work in recent IS DSR. Finally, we suggest guidelines to manage and report the next research steps. Conclusion: This paper presents a pioneering assessment of future work suggestions in the IS field, focusing on the design science research paradigm. Future work directions emerge from researchers\u27 choices during the IS DSR process that must be continuously managed

Investigations into the patient voice: a multi-perspective analysis of inflammation

The patient is the expert of their medical journey and their experiences go largely unheard in clinical practice. Understanding the patient is important as bridging gaps in the medical domain enhances clinical knowledge, benefiting patient care in addition to improving quality of life. Valuable solutions to these problems lie at the intersection of Machine learning and sentiment analysis; through ontologies, semantic similarity, and clustering. In this thesis, I present challenges and solutions that explore patient quality of life pertaining to two inflammatory diseases: Uveitis and Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which are immune-mediated inflammatory diseases and often undifferentiated. This thesis explores how a patient’s condition and inflammation influences their voice and quality of life via sentiment analysis, clustering, and semantic characterisations. Methods With guidance from domain experts and a foundation derived from clinical consensus documents, I created an application ontology, Ocular Immune-Mediated Inflammatory Diseases Ontology (OcIMIDo), which was enhanced with patient-preferred terms curated from online forum conversations, using a semi-automated statistical approach - with application of annotating term-frequency and sentiment analysis. Semantic similarity was explored using a preexisting embedding model derived from clinical letters to train other models consisting of patient-generated texts for systematic comparison of the clinician and patient voice. In a final experimental chapter, blood markers were clustered and analysed with their corresponding quantitative quality of life outcomes using patients in the UK Biobank with Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Results OcIMIDo is the first of its kind in ophthalmology and sentiment analysis revealed that first posts were more negative compared to replies. Systematic comparisons of embedding models revealed frequent misspellings from clinicians; use of abbreviations from patients; and patient priorities - models performed better when the clinical domain was extended with equivalent-sized, patient-generated data. Clusters unveiled insight into the presence of inflammatory stress and the relationship with happiness and the presence of a maternal smoking history with a Crohn’s disease diagnosis. Summary Patient-preferred terms prove the patient voice provides meaningful text mining and fruitful sentiment analysis, revealing the role a forum plays on patients; semantic similarity highlighted potential novel disease associations and the patient lexicon; and clustering blood markers featured clusters presenting a relationship with sentiment. In summary, this deeper knowledge of quality of life biomarkers through the patient voice can benefit the clinical domain and patient outcomes as understanding the patient can improve the clinical-patient relationship and communication standards: all benefiting the diagnosis process, developing treatment plans, and shortening these intensive time hauls in clinical practice

2017 EURēCA Abstract Book

Listing of student participant abstracts

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject

A check list to aid patient/carer memory recall within the medical appointment: an action design research journey

The main nexus of communication between the patient/carer and the doctor is the medical appointment. The primary aim of which is arriving at a correct decision/diagnosis via information elicited from the patient/carer by the doctor. This bi-directional conversation regarding the patients’ medical history (termed the elicitation phase), necessitates the retrieval of data from the patients/carers long-term declarative memory. Unfortunately, recollection for medical history, like other modes of autobiographical memory, tends to be defective, incomplete, and erroneous. Additionally, the ability of the patient/carer to recall (at a later date) what has occurred within the elucidation/explanatory phase of a medical appointment is also quite problematic. Such memory recall/information retrieval issues give rise to numerous pernicious effects, more especially, for the patient. Taking an Action Design Research approach, the artefact designed, built, and evaluated to address the problem of poor memory recall is a pretotype (a paper-based prototype) in the form of a check list. The researcher in this study, a 48-year Cystic Fibrosis patient (who has experienced the problem of poor memory recall within his own medical appointments), decided to embark on a quest to ameliorate or remedy the problem. His practice inspired investigation became driven by the following motivation: How might we augment Cystic Fibrosis (CF) patient/carer memory recall/ information retrieval within the elicitation phase and elucidation phase of the medical appointment? Rigorous evaluation by CF patients, carers and respiratory clinicians’ points to the artefact’s validity and shows its contribution to practice, by facilitating the capture of specific CF related data collection before and during a medical appointment, enhancing a CF patients/carers ability to recall key clinical data within and after the medical appointment. Giving rise to reduced stress levels and an increased sense of empowerment for CF patients/carers within the medical appointment. Moreover, the designed check list is a new discursive template that facilitates a new patient-led approach to tackling and understanding the problem of flawed memory recall within the medical appointments. This study contributes to knowledge research by providing a representative set of 10 design principles for the design of a check list for use by patients/carers to aid memory recall. The most novel of which is the unpacking of long-term declarative memory into its components, where the check list design actually maps to “aid” the memory type drawn upon by the patient/carer within the medical appointment. The result being more effective memory recall/information retrieval. In addition, two conceptual models emerged: 1) a model of information retrieval/memory recall within the elicitation phase of the medical appointment, augmenting our comprehension of this phase of the medical encounter for all stakeholders; and 2) a visualisation/model of reflection within the context of the ADR, which depicts the stages of exploration required to genuinely advance our understanding of a problem, dissecting viewpoints further, gaining deeper insights into phenomena, and developing our problem definitions. As part of the ADR journey the check list (artefact) has been professionally produced in the form of a booklet, which has been adopted and distributed by CF Ireland to all CF patients/carers in Ireland. Furthermore, the NHS began distributing the booklet in early 2020, starting with the Royal London Children’s Hospital. Since then, it has gone to several countries across the world for review/evaluation by their relevant CF bodies

ATHENA Research Book

The ATHENA European University is an alliance of nine Higher Education Institutions with the mission of fostering excellence in research and innovation by facilitating international cooperation. The ATHENA acronym stands for Advanced Technologies in Higher Education Alliance. The partner institutions are from France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, and Slovenia: the University of Orléans, the University of Siegen, the Hellenic Mediterranean University, the Niccolò Cusano University, the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, and the University of Maribor. In 2022 institutions from Poland and Spain joined the alliance: the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University and the University of Vigo. This research book presents a selection of the ATHENA university partners' research activities. It incorporates peer-reviewed original articles, reprints and student contributions. The ATHENA Research Book provides a platform that promotes joint and interdisciplinary research projects of both advanced and early-career researchers