Introduction to the ACM TIST Special Issue on Intelligent Healthcare Informatics

Healthcare Informatics is a research area dealing with the study and application of computer science and information and communication technology to face both theoretical/methodological and practical issues in healthcare, public health, and everyday wellness. Intelligent Healthcare Informatics may be defined as the specific area focusing on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) theories and techniques to offer important services (such as a component of complex systems) to allow integrated systems to perceive, reason, learn, and act intelligently in the healthcare arena. One of the many peculiarities of healthcare is that decision support systems need to be integrated with several heterogeneous systems supporting both collaborative work and process coordination and the management and analysis of a huge amount of clinical and health data, to compose intelligent, process-aware health information systems. After some pioneering work focusing explicitly on specific medical aspects and providing some efficient, even ad hoc, solutions, in recent years, AI in healthcare has been faced by researchers with different backgrounds and interests, taking into consideration the main results obtained in the more general and theoretical/methodological area of intelligent systems. Moreover, from a focus on reasoning strategies and deep knowledge representation, research in healthcare intelligent systems moved to data-intensive clinical tasks, where there is the need for supporting healthcare decision making in the presence of overwhelming amounts of clinical data. Significant solutions have been provided through a multidisciplinary combination of the results from the different research areas and their associated cultures, ranging from algorithms, to information systems and databases, to human-computer interaction, to medical informatics. To this regard, it is interesting to observe that, from one side, medical informaticians benefited by the general solutions coming from the generic computer science area, tailoring them to specific medical domains, while from the other side, computer scientists found several (still open) challenges in the medical and, more generally, health domains. This ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST) special issue contains articles discussing fundamental principles, algorithms, or applications for process-aware health information systems. Such articles are a sound answer to the research challenges for novel techniques, combinations of tools, and so forth to build effective ways to manage and deal in an integrated way with healthcare processes and data

Entity Identification Problem in Big and Open Data

Big and Open Data provide great opportunities to businesses to enhance their competitive advantages if utilized properly. However, during past few years’ research in Big and Open Data process, we have encountered big challenge in entity identification reconciliation, when trying to establish accurate relationships between entities from different data sources. In this paper, we present our innovative Intelligent Reconciliation Platform and Virtual Graphs solution that addresses this issue. With this solution, we are able to efficiently extract Big and Open Data from heterogeneous source, and integrate them into a common analysable format. Further enhanced with the Virtual Graphs technology, entity identification reconciliation is processed dynamically to produce more accurate result at system runtime. Moreover, we believe that our technology can be applied to a wide diversity of entity identification problems in several domains, e.g., e- Health, cultural heritage, and company identities in financial world.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-

Defusing Ideological Defenses in Biology

Ideological language is widespread in theoretical biology. Evolutionary game theory has been defended as a worldview and a leap of faith, and sexual selection theory has been criticized for what it posits as basic to biological nature. Views such as these encourage the impression of ideological rifts in the field. I advocate an alternative interpretation, whereby many disagreements between different camps of biologists merely reflect methodological differences. This interpretation provides a more accurate and more optimistic account of the state of play in the field of biology. It also helps account for biologists' tendency to embrace ideological positions

Afterword: Safety research on the move

Question: What makes connections (often deep ones) between diverse areas, has a network of equally diverse participants, and the potential to significantly impact the life of cities and their inhabitants? Answer: The researchers who combined to produce this special issue, of course. I was privileged to see them, and others, in action at a workshop convened in Stockholm by the Editor of this special issue, and to read the papers published here. I am no specialist in transport crime, but have a broad interest in research and practice in crime prevention and particular concern with the built environment and with design in general. The Editor has already capably summarised the content of the articles in the Introduction, which allows me, in what follows, to reflect on some of the many issues raised, both specific to transport and common to the whole of crime science

From the buzzing in Turing’s head to machine intelligence contests

This paper presents an analysis of three major contests for machine intelligence. We conclude that a new era for Turing’s test requires a fillip in the guise of a committed sponsor, not unlike DARPA, funders of the successful 2007 Urban Challenge