Kay Schröter

TBase2 — a Web-Based Electronic Patient Record

Fast and easy access to all relevant data is of most importance in medical diagnostics and therapy. Electronic patient records can fulfil these requirements much better than common paper-based records. This article describes the TBase2 system, an example of such an electronic patient record. It was developed in close cooperation with the Department of Nephrology at the university hospital Charite in Berlin. Due to its flexibility TBase2 can easily be adapted to the demands of other departments. Beside supporting the daily care for patients, TBase2 also gathers detailed data of high validity ideally suited for medical research.

Agents enacting social roles. balancing formal structure and practical rationality in MAS design

We introduce an integrated approach to the conceptualisation, implementation and evaluation of a MAS (multi-agent system) which is based on sociological concepts of practical roles and organisational coordination via negotiations. We propose a middle level of scale, located between interaction and the overall organisational structure, as the starting point for MAS design, with formal and practical modes of coordination to be distinguished over all relevant levels of scale. In our contribution, we present the modelling principles of our MAS, the agent architecture and the implementation. In the next step the approach is extended to a methodology for the investigation of processes of hybridisation, which means the re-entering of artificial sociality in a real-world domain. The integrated approach is intended to contribute to a generalised understanding of the Socionics program, which in our view should be seen as the enrolment of independent, but subsequent steps in an overall interdisciplinary approach.

C-IPS Approach to Negotiating Agents: Specifying Dynamic Interdependencies between Issue, Partner, and Step

Our C-IPS approach to negotiating agents considers the choice of negotiation issues, partners and steps as separate restricted decision processes. Here we focus on specification of dynamic interdependencies between these decisions and illustrate this by modeling sequential dependencies for an idealized scenario. The explicit modeling of all involved decisions and dependencies eases the understanding, evaluation, and comparison of different approaches to negotiating agents.

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.

AT Humboldt 2000 (Team Description)

Our agent team AT Humboldt 2000 is partly an extension of our former team AT Humboldt 99[2,3]. Again we used a BDI architecture. Especially the world model and some skills where revised. A new timing concept and a completely different architecture for the deliberation component were developed. The actual development was subject of an undergraduate course. Because of problems with the integration of components developed by different work groups, we were forced to start in RoboCup 2000 with a mixed team, consisting mainly of an extended version of the players used in EuRoboCup 2000. Only the goalie used all our new concepts.

The C-IPS Agent Architecture for Modeling Negotiating Social Agents

The basic concepts in agent negotiation are negotiation object, negotiation protocol and reasoning process. While aiming to transfer sociological concepts into multi-agent systems, where agents coordinate themselves by negotiation, we recognized the need for a more detailed structure. Therefore we developed C-IPS, which is presented in this article. It distinguishes between external constraints and internal reasoning processes. The reasoning process covers decisions regarding the negotiation issue, the partner, and a particular step. Its modularization supports the development of agents with different degrees of autonomy. The components of the C-IPS architecture are modeled according to the BDI approach. As an example for the application of C-IPS we consider agents that are required for the INKA project.

A Case-Based Approach for the Classification of Medical Time Series

An early and reliable detection of rejections is most important for the successful treatment of renal transplantation patients. A good indicator for the renal function of transplanted patients is the course over time of the parameter creatinine. Existing systems for the analysis of time series usually require frequent and equidistant measurements or a well defined medical theory. These requirements are not fulfilled in our application domain. In this paper we present a case-based approach to classify a creatinine course as critical or non-critical. The distance measure used to find similar cases is based on linear regression. Our results show that while having a good specificity, our sensitivity is significantly higher than that of physicians.

C-IPS: Specifying Decision Interdependencies in Negotiations

Negotiation is an important mechanism of coordination in multiagent systems. Contrary to early conceptualizations of negotiating agents, we believe that decisions regarding the negotiation issue and the negotiation partner are equally important as the selection of negotiation steps. Our C-IPS approach considers these three aspects as separate decision processes. It requires an explicit specification of interdependencies between them. In this article we address the task of specifying the dynamic interdependencies by means of IPS dynamics. Thereby we introduce a new level of modeling negotiating agents that is above negotiation mechanism and protocol design. IPS dynamics are presented using state charts. We define some generally required states, predicates and actions. We illustrate the dynamics by a simple example. The example is first specified for an idealized scenario and is then extended to a more realistic model that captures some features of open multiagent systems. The well-structured reasoning process for negotiating agents enables more comprehensive and hence more flexible architectures. The explicit modeling of all involved decisions and dependencies eases the understanding, evaluation, and comparison of different approaches to negotiating agents.

Negotiating agents: from full autonomy to dynamic degrees of delegation

The modularization of negotiating agents as proposed by the C-IPS approach provides a sound base for a concept that we call dynamic degrees of delegation. Agents following this concept enable their users at runtime to delegate particular subsets of decisions to their artificial agents. We extend our specification and implementation of fully autonomous agents to capture this concept. We have successfully implemented such a system for application in a sociological experiment.