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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>[We apologize if you receive multiple copies of
this message]</FONT></DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial
size=2>*******************************************************************************************************<BR>
MAS*BIOMED'06</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial
size=2>
Second International Workshop on
<BR>
Agents in Medicine, Computational Biology, and
Bioinformatics<BR>
(<A
href="http://www.diee.unica.it/biomed06">http://www.diee.unica.it/biomed06</A>)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial
size=2>
To be held at
AAMAS'06<BR>
Fifth International Joint Conference
on <BR>
Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial
size=2>
May 9,
2006<BR>*******************************************************************************************************<BR>
Call for papers / participation</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>*Motivation and Description*<BR>There is growing
evidence that agent technology can be useful in designing and implementing
solutions <BR>aimed at supporting the automation of medical and biological
procedures. While it is essential for computer scientists and software
developers to understand the specific problems in medicine and biology, it is
also essential for an expert of either domain to understand the capabilities of
agent technology.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The main purpose of this workshop is to bring
together and create synergies between researchers on these fields in order to
discuss relevant issues and approaches aimed at assessing and promoting the
adoption of agent technology. It is intended that the workshop mainly focuses on
the benefits of adopting agent technology in: (i) storing, accessing, and
distributing relevant medical or biological data, (ii) implementing the
automation of information-gathering and information-inference processes in
medical and biological settings, (iii) supporting e-Health, (iv) simulating and
modelling biological systems.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>This workshop aims to attract both theoretically
and practically oriented papers in these thriving areas in the intersection of
medicine and biology with computer science. The workshop will also focus on
supporting infrastructures, such as agent-based systems, tools, languages,
ontologies, and networking facilities for medicine, bioinformatics and
computational biology. Papers on the application and evaluation of agent
approaches to the solution of problems in these fields will be particularly
sought.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>We envision this workshop to be a mixture of
presentations and open discussions of the attendees.<BR>A key open discussion
can focus on the strength and limitations of software agents in medical and
biological domains. Possible questions to be addressed can be: Why can agent
technology provide a better solution than existing ones? What are the
limitations of agent technology with respect to medical and biological problems?
Why can software agents succeed where traditional Artificial Intelligence
technology/expert systems have reached their limits? What are the priorities of
actions when introducing this technology in the medical and biological
fields?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>_Medicine and Health Care_</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>There is barely a country that is no t suffering
from the ever increasing impacts and costs for its health care system which is
not the least boosted by the steadily increasing number of drugs, diagnosis
tools and methods, and treatment procedures that appear continuously on the
market. On the other hand, in today’s globalized world, a fast and reliable
medical prevention, diagnosis and treatment is of eminent importance as can be
seen, for example, from the recent problems with SARS or the bird flu. Such
highly contagious and lethal diseases can threaten the globe if they were not
fought immediately with the highest level of efficiency and reliability. This
requires, first of all, a fast and reliable pre-detection and diagnosis,
regardless of where the affected person may currently stay in the world. The
situations mentioned above are some of the many that prove that the medical
domain is marked by requirements for high dynamicity, distribution, flexibility,
scalability, extensibility, efficiency, cooperative work and collaboration,
proactivity and autonomy.<BR>Most of these features are especially strongholds
of multi-agent systems/autonomous agent technology. Thus, it is proper to say
that agent technology will play an increasingly important role in medicine and
health care in now and the future, and will significantly enhance the ability to
model, design, and build complex, inherently distributed, software systems in
medical and health care domains.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV><BR>_Computational Biology and Bioinformatics_</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>With the exponential growth of data being produced and made available to
genetics researchers via the Internet, there are several challenges for using
this information effectively to further genetics and biomedical research. For
instance, sequence and structural information exists in databases along with
various tools distributed throughout the world in various formats and platforms.
Also, while the GO (genome ontology) project is addressing the problem, new and
sometimes conflicting terminology and vocabulary are emerging for phenotyping
and annotating sequences. There is a need for autonomous and semi-autonomous
methods for learning and discovering relational and conceptual knowledge, as
well as by intelligently combining these distributed data and information
<BR>sources. In order to harness the benefits of this continuously growing
amount of information, new information and communication technologies and
approaches should be adopted.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>*Topics of interest include but are not limited to:*</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>* Multi-Agent Interaction in Medical or Biological Settings<BR>
– Coordination of tasks and data<BR> – Collaboration in peer-to-peer
networks<BR> – Multi-strategy and meta- learning for cooperative
information agents</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>* Analysis and Modelling of Data and Tasks<BR> – Multi-agent systems
for medical pre-detection, diagnosis, and treatment<BR> – Multi-agent
systems for patient scheduling, transplant management, community
care, <BR>
information access, training, internal hospital and clinic tasks, etc.<BR>
– Integrated genotyping and gene linkage analysis<BR> – Multi-agent
approaches to gene expression analysis<BR> – Modelling of biological
processes</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>* Architectures, Languages, Tools, and Applications<BR> – Agent-based
architectures and frameworks tailored for medical or biological
domains<BR> – Customization of agent-based tools, languages, and libraries
fo r medical or biological domains</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>* Knowledge management<BR> – Agent-based integration of biological
knowledge<BR> – Agent-based data mining and knowledge discovery in medical
or biological domains<BR> – Multi-agent information gathering in medical
or biological settings<BR> – Integration of heterogeneous data sources
and/or services</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>* Ontologies for Medical or Biological Domains<BR> – Collaborative
ontology construction<BR> – Distributed ontology management</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Those wishing to participate in the workshop are requested to submit an
original research paper, not published or submitted elsewhere. Papers will be
peer reviewed by at least two referees from the workshop’s program committee
based on the technical relevance, quality, clarity of presentation, objective
analysis of the reported experiences, and novelty. High-profile survey papers
could be also considered for publication. The length of a paper must not exceed
15 single-spaced A4 pages including figures, tables, and references. Papers
should be formatted using the Springer LNCS style.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Templates are available at Springer. The language of the workshop is
English. At least one of the authors per each accepted paper should be able to
register with and attend the workshop and present the paper.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>All the accepted papers will be printed in the workshop proceedings of the
workshop. A selection of the best papers presented at this workshop will be
considered for a special issue on the same theme at “Multiagent and Grid Systems
- an International Journal” by IOS press.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>*Submission Procedure*</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Those wishing to participate in the workshop are requested to submit an
original research paper, not published or submitted elsewhere. Papers will be
peer reviewed by at least two referees from the workshop’s program committee
based on the technical relevance, quality, clarity of presentation, objective
analysis of the reported experiences, and novelty. High-profile survey papers
could be also considered for publication.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The length of a paper must not exceed 15 single-spaced A4 pages including
figures, tables, and references. Papers should be formatted using the Springer
LNCS style. Templates are available at Springer. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The language of the workshop is English. At least one of the authors per
each accepted paper should be able to register with and attend the workshop and
present the paper. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>All submissions should be sent by email, either in PDF or in PostScript
format, to biomed06 AT diee.unica.it. The subject of the email should contain
“medicine” or “biology” within square brackets to facilitate the organizing
committee in the task of associating papers to referees. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>All the accepted papers will be printed in the workshop proceedings of the
workshop. A selection of the best papers presented at this workshop will be
considered for a special issue on the same theme at “Multiagent and Grid Systems
- an International Journal” by IOS press. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>*Important Dates*</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Submission Deadline: January 15, 2006 <BR>Notification of Acceptance:
February 19, 2006<BR>Camera ready: March 5, 2006<BR>Workshop: May 9,, 2006</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>*Organizing Committee*</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Giuliano Armano (<A
href="mailto:giuliano.armano@diee.unica.it">giuliano.armano@diee.unica.it</A>)<BR>Dept.
of Electrical and Electronic Engineering – Univ. of Cagliari (Italy)<BR>Piazza
D’Armi – 09123 Cagliari (Italy)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Andrew Martin (<A
href="mailto:martin@biochem.ucl.ac.uk">martin@biochem.ucl.ac.uk</A>)<BR>Dept. of
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology – Univ. College London (UK)<BR>Darwin
Building - Gower Street London WC1E 6BT - England</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Huaglory Tianfield (<A
href="mailto:h.tianfield@gcal.ac.uk">h.tianfield@gcal.ac.uk</A>)<BR>Glasgow
Caledonian University, School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences,
SRIF/SHEFC<BR>Centre for Virtual Organization Technology Enabling Research
(VOTER) – Director<BR>70 Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA, UK</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Rainer Unland (<A
href="mailto:UnlandR@informatik.uni-essen.de">UnlandR@informatik.uni-essen.de</A>)<BR>Inst.
for Computer Science and Business Information Systems (ICB), University of
Duisburg-Essen<BR>Schuetzenbahn 70, 45117 Essen, Germany</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>*Publishing Chair*</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Eloisa Vargiu (<A
href="mailto:vargiu@diee.unica.it">vargiu@diee.unica.it</A>)<BR>Dept. of
Electrical and Electronic Engineering – Univ. of Cagliari (Italy)<BR>Piazza
D’Armi – 09123 Cagliari (Italy)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>
<HR align=left width=280>
<FONT face=arial size=-2>Eloisa Vargiu, PhD<BR>IASC Group - Intelligent Agents
and Soft-Computing<BR>DIEE, Dept. of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering<BR>email: <A
href="mailto:vargiu@diee.unica.it">vargiu@diee.unica.it</A><BR>tel: +39
070-675.5785<BR>fax: +39 070-6755782<BR>mobile: +39 320-4373038<BR>web: <A
href="http://iasc.diee.unica.it ">http://iasc.diee.unica.it </A></FONT>
<HR align=left width=280>
<FONT face=arial size=-2><I>Il problema dell'umanita' e' che gli stupidi sono
strasicuri,<BR>mentre gli intelligenti sono pieni di
dubbi.</I><BR>B.Russel<BR></FONT>
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