Semantic Integration of Cervical Cancer Data Repositories to Facilitate Multicenter Association Studies: The ASSIST Approach

The current work addresses the unification of Electronic Health Records related to cervical cancer into a single medical knowledge source, in the context of the EU-funded ASSIST research project. The project aims to facilitate the research for cervical precancer and cancer through a system that virtually unifies multiple patient record repositories, physically located in different medical centers/hospitals, thus, increasing flexibility by allowing the formation of study groups “on demand” and by recycling patient records in new studies. To this end, ASSIST uses semantic technologies to translate all medical entities (such as patient examination results, history, habits, genetic profile) and represent them in a common form, encoded in the ASSIST Cervical Cancer Ontology. The current paper presents the knowledge elicitation approach followed, towards the definition and representation of the disease’s medical concepts and rules that constitute the basis for the ASSIST Cervical Cancer Ontology. The proposed approach constitutes a paradigm for semantic integration of heterogeneous clinical data that may be applicable to other biomedical application domains

Knowledge-based analysis of multimedia: balancing between complexity and validity

This thesis introduces tools for the semantic analysis of multimedia documents based on prior knowledge and its main goal is to turn the computational complexity into a controllable parameter of such systems. Entities are divided into (i) directly measurable quantities (syntactic entities) and (ii) high-level concepts, closer to human perception (semantic entities) and organized within a hierarchical fuzzy model. Moreover, appropriate metrics for quantifying the semantic search procedure and its results are proposed. The methodology is equipped with Inference mechanisms that fit various scenarios, while appropriate methods for computing the fuzzy weights of the knowledge model are also described. Although the proposed expressivity is limited w.r.t. Description Logics, it is fully adequate and compatible with the way classifiers treat multimedia documents. On these grounds, this thesis combines the results of other measurement methods (e.g. classifiers), by using a knowledge model that does not require complicated computations during inference. This can be achieved because the truth factors of the entities under examination are computed using closed mathematical expressions that stem directly from knowledge, eliminating the need for ABox reasoning. Furthermore, through the proposed methodology, semantic search can be efficiently used under any restrictions posed by computational complexity, by selecting optimal subsets of the available measurements. The subset selection problem is efficiently solved using dynamic programming, minimizing the extra computational burden it may pose. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve very good accuracy while searching for and retrieving new entities, together with improving the scores given by existing classifiers. This method can be adapted to various domains/datasets through a process of fuzzy weight re-computation. An extra application scenario is presented, where the mathematical tools provided here are used for software agent evaluation. Finally, we theoretically prove that, even in the case of a more expressive language, the execution of a fuzzy tableau algorithm on the measurements (i.e. using the instantiated ABox) yields results identical with the ones our method can achieve using closed-form mathematical expressions. Corresponding experiments illustrate the virtues of this language, while also indicate that the performance of our methodology can be estimated using the development set

Experimental Enquiry into Automatically Orchestrated Live Video Communication in Social Settings

’Orchestration’ refers to the ability of a live video communication system to adapt in real-time to the communication context with a view to enhance the quality of mediation and subsequently the quality of interaction between participants. For example, this can be done by reframing the cameras and changing the way in which the video content is mixed on each screen. To be a feasible solution, orchestration has to be an automatic process. This paper reports a study of orchestration carried out in the social setting of a group of friends playing social games from two separate living rooms. The quality of the communication was assessed via two measures: one objective, in the form of task efficiency, and one subjective, in the form of a questionnaire. The objective measure indicated that mediated communication can be improved through orchestration, but the subjective measure was inconclusive. The paper also uncovers some of the complexities of the experimental space associated with orchestrated mediated communication and aims to provide motivation for further research into this new communication paradigm

Experimental Enquiry into Automatically Orchestrated Live Video Communication in Social Settings

’Orchestration’ refers to the ability of a live video communication system to adapt in real-time to the communication context with a view to enhance the quality of mediation and subsequently the quality of interaction between participants. For example, this can be done by reframing the cameras and changing the way in which the video content is mixed on each screen. To be a feasible solution, orchestration has to be an automatic process. This paper reports a study of orchestration carried out in the social setting of a group of friends playing social games from two separate living rooms. The quality of the communication was assessed via two measures: one objective, in the form of task efficiency, and one subjective, in the form of a questionnaire. The objective measure indicated that mediated communication can be improved through orchestration, but the subjective measure was inconclusive. The paper also uncovers some of the complexities of the experimental space associated with orchestrated mediated communication and aims to provide motivation for further research into this new communication paradigm

Improving Video Mediated Communication with Orchestration

Video-mediated communication (VMC) has become a popular communication medium. However, research to date suggests that the inherent constraints of VMC impair effective and efficient communication and task performance. We propose that these negative findings could be attributed to how the technology was used and propose the novel concept of communication orchestration aimed at mitigating some of the signaled limitations. Orchestration is a selection process for displaying information that is deemed relevant for accomplishing an effective and efficient task performance and communicative experience. We report an experiment that confirmed this suggestion. The results indicate that orchestration could be an important novel feature to aid humans when communicating via VMC, but also suggest that there is potential for further improvements in orchestration

A Rule-Based Virtual Director Enhancing Group Communication

Kaiser, R., Weiss, W., Falelakis, M., Michalakopoulos, S., and Ursu, M.F., 2012. “A Rule-Based Virtual Director Enhancing Group Communication”. Workshop on Emerging Multimedia Systems and Applications, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo 2012, pp. 187-19

Automatic Orchestration of Video Streams to Enhance Video Communication

Falelakis, M., Ursu, M.F., Kaiser, R., Groen, M., and Frantzis, M., 2012. “Automatic Orchestration of Video Streams to Enhance Video Communication”, In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Socially Aware Media, in conjunction with the 20th ACM Multimedia Conference, Nara, Japan, pp. 25-31

Video Communication for Networked Communities: Challenges and Opportunities

Stevens, T., Kegel, I., Williams, D., Cesar, P., Kaiser, R., Färber, N., Torres, P., Stenton, P., Ursu, M.F., Falelakis,M., 2012. “Video Communication for Networked Communities: Challenges and Opportunities”. In Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Intelligence in Next Generation Networks, Oct 2012, Berlin, Germany, pp. 148-155