Gabriela Lindemann

Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Multi-Agent Systems

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Agents, Norms and Institutions for Regulated Multiagent Systems, ANIREM 2005, and the International Workshop on Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems, OOOP 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands in July 2005 as an associated event of AAMAS 2005. This volume is the first in a series focussing on issues in Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms (COIN) in multi-agent systems. The 17 papers in this volume are extended, revised versions of the best papers presented at the ANIREM and the OOOP workshops at AAMAS 2005 that were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers from the two workshops have been re-grouped around the following themes: modelling, analyzing and programming organizations, modelling and analyzing institutions, modelling normative designs, as well as evaluation and regulation.

Virtual microscopy in medical research: Open European Nephrology Science Center (OpEN.SC)

The amount and heterogeneity of data in biomedical research, notably in transnational research, requires new methods for the collection, presentation and analysis of information. Important data from laboratory experiments as well as patient trials are available as images. Thus, the integration and processing of image data represent a crucial component of information systems in biomedical research. The Charité Medical School in Berlin has established a new information service center for kidney diseases and transplantation (Open European Nephrology Science Centre - OpEN.SC) together with the German Research Agency (DFG). The aims of this project are (i) to improve the availability of raw data, (ii) to establish an infrastructure for clinical trials, (iii) to monitor the occurrence of rare disease patterns and (iv) to establish a quality assurance system. Major diagnostic procedures in medicine are based on the processing and analysis of image data. In diagnostic pathology, the availability of automated slide scanners provide the opportunity to digitize entire microscopic slides. The processing, presentation and analysis of these image data are called virtual microscopy. The integration of this new technology into the OpEN.SC system and the link to other heterogeneous data of individual patients represent a major technological challenge. Thus, new ways in communication between clinical and scientific partners have to be established and will be promoted by the project. The technological basis of the repository are web services for a scalable and adaptable system. HL7 and DICOM are considered the main medical standards of communication.

A Web-Based Electronic Patient Record System as a Means for Collection of Clinical Data

Availability of valid data is a prerequisite for medical data analysis. Traditional data collection (prospective studies, registries, use of administrative data) tends to be either expensive or inaccurate. By transferring the workflow of routine patient care to an electronic patient record(EPR), large amounts of detailed information are stored in a retrievable format, but the maintainance of EPRs in mainframe- or client/server-architecture is expensive. We therefore investigated the feasibility of an EPR based entirely on Web-Technology. The system is now operational since two years and has replaced the former paper-based patient records of the outpatient clinic completely (now 789 patients). With an average duration of access to all values of a specific laboratory day for a given patient taking 0.9s (SD:0.5s) and the automatic composition of a discharge letter taking 6.1s (SD:2.4s) the speed is adequate. We intend to enlarge the data pool by proliferating the system to other institutions.

First Steps towards an Intelligent Catalogue within the Open European Nephrology Science Center OpEN.SC

The amount and heterogeneity of data in biomedical research, notably in interdisciplinary fields, requires new methods for the collection, presentation and analysis of information. Important data from laboratory experiments as well as patient trials are available but come out of distributed resources. The Charite - University Hospital Berlin has established together with the German Research Foundation (DFG) a new information service centre for kidney diseases and transplantation (Open European Nephrology Science Centre - OpEN.SC). Beside a collaborative aspect to create new research groups every single partner or institution of this science information centre making his own data available is allowed to search the whole data pool of the various involved centres. For an efficient retrieval we develop an intelligent catalogue using principles of knowledge management techniques coming from case based reasoning. The complete system is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with main and auxiliary modules arranged in four layers. Here we introduce a first case study with data coming from the Web-based electronic patient record TBasecopy. The paper is organized as follows: After giving an introduction about the situation of available medical data in nephrology and pathology we introduce the environment of the whole system and come then to our first experiments with a case-based reasoning method.In this paper, a novel approach to predict turning points for chaotic financial time series is proposed based on chaotic theory and machine learning. The nonlinear mapping between different data points in primitive time series is derived and proven. Our definition of turning points produces an event characterization function, which can transform the profile of time series to a measure. The RBF neural network is further used as a nonlinear modeler. We discuss the threshold selection and give a procedure for threshold estimation using out-of sample validation. The proposed approach is applied to the prediction problem of two real-world financial time series. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our new approach.