Today an immense volume of electronic health records (EHRs) is being produced. These health records contain abundant information, in the form of both structured and unstructured data. It is estimated that EHRs contain on average around 60 percent structured information, and 40 percent unstructured information that is mostly free text (Dalianis et al., 2009). A modern health record is very complex and contains a large and diverse amount of data, such as the patient’s chief complaints, diagnoses and treatment, and very often an epicrisis, or discharge letter, together with ICD-10 codes, (ICD-10, 2009). Moreover, the health record also contains information about the patient’s gender, age, times of health care visits, medication, measure values, general condition as well as social situation, drinking and eating habits. Much of this information is written in natural language. All this information in a health record is currently almost never re-used, in particular the parts that are written in free text. We believe that the information contained in EHR data sets is an invaluable source for the development and evaluation of a number of applications, useful both for research purposes as well as health practitioners. For instance, text mining tools for finding new or hidden relations between diagnoses/treatments and social situation, age and gender could be very useful for epidemiological or medical researchers. Moreover, information concerning the health process over time, per patient, clinic or hospital, can be extracted and used for further research. Another application is the use of this data as input for simulation of the health process and for future health needs. Also, such huge health record databases can be used as corpora for the generation of generalized synonyms from specialized medical terminology constitutes another exciting application. We can also foresee a text summarization system applied to an individual patient’s health record, but using knowledge from all text records and conveying the information in the health record at the right level to the specific patient. The data can also be used for developing methods where clinicians in their daily work get automatic assistance and proposals of ICD-10 codes for assigning symptoms or diagnoses, or for validating the already manually assigned ICD-10 codes.

This extended abstract outlines my invited keynote presentation of the recent work on neuromorphic networks ("CrossNets") based on hybrid CMOS/nanoelectronic ("CMOL") circuits, in the space-saving Q/A format.

Such applications In general, there is a many-to-many relationship between provide an intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface signs and symptoms, so attempting to accurately correlate through which the patient selects a symptom or set signs with symptoms can be computationally expensive. of symptoms and through which detailed information is displayed However, clustering in the (topological) product of sign and about the probable causes. Valuable advice can be symptom space should enhance performance.

Conceptual Blending through the process of Double Scope Blending provides an account for human creativity. We show how computational creativity can be modeled after Double Scope Blending for machine generation of scenarios, stories, hypotheses, etc. This paper describes an application of this process to the generation of novel and creative scenarios in the maritime security domain.

This paper claims for a shift towards "the formal sciences" in the cognitive sciences. In order to explain the phenomenon of cognition, including aspects such as learning and intelligence, it is necessary to explore the concepts and methodologies offered by the formal sciences. In particular, category theory is proposed as the most fitting tool for the building of an unified theory of cognition. This paper proposes a radically new view based in category theory is provided. A cognitive model is informally defined as a mapping between two different structures, while a structure is the set of components of a system and their relationships. Put formally in categorical terms, a model is a functor between categories that reflects the structural invariance between them. In the paper, the theory of categories is presented as the best possible framework to deal with complex system modeling -ie: biologically inspired systems that transcend and offer a much more powerful tool kit to deal with the phenomenon of cognition that other purely verbal tools like the psychological categories that Rosch or Harnad refer.

The phenomenon of episodic memory has been studied for over thirty years, but it is only recently that its constructive nature has been shown to be closely linked to the processes underpinning imagination. This paper builds on recent work by the authors in developing architectures for a form of imagination suitable for use in artifacts, and considers how these architectures might be extended to provide a form of episodic memory.

Early studies of public budgeting emphasized uncertainty Two of us (BJ and FB) have published a set of papers, in the decision-making environment. Budgeting in the books focusing on annual budget changes (Jones and absence of information about the impacts of decisions led Baumgartner 2005b). Leptokurtic distribution of percentual to an adjustment process rooted in simple decision rules budget changes were observed in a broad range of settings: and bargaining among interests. This led to marginal or small increases and small decreases of budgets and budget incremental adjustments from the budgetary status quo, components are the most frequent, but time to time large with all major actors wary of big changes to the budgetary increases and cutoffs are observed as well.

This paper advocates the use of a portfolio of representations for problem solving in complex domains. It describes an approach that decouples efficient storage mechanisms called descriptives from the decision-making procedures that employ them. An architecture that takes this approach can learn which representations are appropriate for a given problem class. Examples of search with a portfolio of representations are drawn from a broad set of domains.

The purpose of this study was to develop and test a platform that would assist the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the scientific community at large, in the generation of a human activity and energy expenditure database of sufficient detail to accurately predict human exposures and dose to various pollutants. The monitoring system developed is easily extendable to the collection of other health-related data. Our protocol tested the use of a digital voice recorder to collect activity/location diary data assuming it to be a less burdensome and a more reliable method than using paper and pencil diaries or hand-held computers. We expected the data to be more complete and reliable than retrospective reports (diaries filled out at the end of day) because the recorders are easy to use, the diary entries are made as the events occur, and we expected that participants would be more likely to complete the study because of the reduced burden. The data collection plan was also expected to show that the cost of the transcription of the diary can be reduced substantially by using speech and language processing to translate the digital diaries into the EPA’s Comprehensive Human Activity Database (CHAD).

Simulation techniques used to generate complex biological models are becoming promising research tools in oncology. Using a general Complex Adaptive Systems model that can be tailored to map various phenomena, here, we describe how this model applies to tumor growth. The multi-agent modeling environment is generated using Netlogo. The stochastic model consists of active objects including normal immune and cancer cells. The simulations conducted mimicked the tumor progression success and failure and the status of the tumor mass despite constant variations remained stable for an extended time. Furthermore, increasing the efficiency of the immune cells led to decreases in tumor cell numbers variable in both occurrence time and duration.