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CALL FOR PAPERS
2nd Intl. Symposium on the
Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems
FHIES 2012
27-28 August 2012 Paris, France
(Co-located with FM 2012)
http://simbioses.ca/FHIES12
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IMPORTANT DATES
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* Abstract submission: May 6, 2012
* Paper submission: May 13, 2012
* Notification of acceptance: June 24, 2012
* Submission of final version for the pre-proceedings: July 30, 2012
* Submission of final version for the post-proceedings: October 1, 2012



BACKGROUND
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Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an increasingly
enabling role in addressing the global challenges of healthcare, in both
the developed and the developing world. The use of software in medical
devices has caused growing concerns in relation to safety and efficacy.
The increasing adoption of health information systems provides great
potential benefits but also poses severe risks, both with respect to
security and privacy and in regard to patient safety. Hospital and other
information systems raise important issues of workflow support and
interoperability. Regulators, manufacturers and clinical users have
pointed out the need to research sound and science-based engineering
methods that facilitate the development and certification of quality ICT
systems in health care. Such methods may draw from or combine techniques
from various disciplines, including but not limited to software
engineering, electronic engineering, computing science, information
science, mathematics, and industrial engineering.

AIMS
-----------
The purpose of the symposium series on Foundations of Health Information
Engineering and Systems (FHIES) is to promote a nascent research area that
aims to develop and apply theories and methods from a variety of
disciplines, including software engineering, computer engineering,
computing science, information science, mathematics, and industrial
engineering for the purpose of modeling, building and certifying
software-intensive ICT systems in healthcare. Moreover, since humans often
play a pivotal rule in the process of using such systems, theories from
the human factors engineering community may have to be integrated with
methods from the technology-oriented domains in order to create effective
engineering methodologies for socio-technical systems in the healthcare
domain.

Research on theories, techniques and tools of software systems modeling,
verification and validation has been an important area of computer science
and software engineering, known as Formal Methods. This research addresses
the challenging problem of design and certification of safety or mission
critical software systems through abstraction and decomposition techniques
based on the use of mathematical modeling theories and sound engineering
methods.

Formal methods have primarily addressed the correctness of systems used in
the industrial, financial, and defense applications. However, they have
recently found application in modeling and analysis of complex systems
that involve interacting behaviour of many kinds of objects and agents,
including software systems, physical objects and humans. The models of
these systems have both discrete and continuous behaviour, and both
qualitative and quantitative (e.g., spatial timing and probabilistic)
properties. It is believed that these methods can be adapted for modelling
problems of health informatics, given that important challenges can be
addressed, e.g., the aspects related to scalability. A major objective of
FHIES is to advance research and application of formal methods in the
context of health care software systems. Another objective of FHIES is to
explicitly include a focus on health care ICT applications in the
developing world (in addition to systems used in the developed countries),
since unique engineering challenges arise in both settings.

SCOPE
-----------
In order to attain these objectives, FHIES seeks contributions from both
the solution domain (methods communities) and the problem domain (health
care and health informatics). Solution-domain papers should present their
methods in the context of a concrete application in health care, while
problem-domain papers should be devised to educate the methods community
about unique challenges and characteristics of the health care domain.
Consequently, the scope of FHIES is not limited to formal methods papers
in the classical sense. However, all submissions should seek to inform and
further the development, adaptation, evaluation and adoption of formally
based and rigorous engineering methods in health care systems. Topics of
interest include but are not limited to:

* Research on how computational models, techniques and tools of analysis
and verification (including modeling notations, semantics, logics,
techniques of model checking, runtime monitoring, and simulation) can be
applied to problems of health informatics, e.g.,
o modelling and monitoring health organisations
o models of workflow and resource management in hospitals
o quality assurance programs for software systems in hospitals
o privacy and security of data in the context of interoperable systems
and multiple jurisdictions
o interoperability of health information systems
o complex policy management and monitoring, and risks and disaster
management

* Modelling, design and verification techniques and innovative practices
of software-based ICT and software-intensive medical devices, including,
but not limited to
o improving regulatory regimes for guaranteeing the safety and efficacy
of medical devices (the problem of certification)
o software development methodologies in the medical device industry
o solving issues raised by the interoperation of medical devices with
each other and with health information systems
o integrated (multi-institutional) health information systems,
healthcare process and workflow modelling and monitoring
o model-driven, service oriented, agent and ontology based approaches,
of health information systems
o component-based technologies for modelling and designing verifiable
integrated health information systems
o monitoring of operational scenarios in a clinical environment
(consisting of medical devices, patients and healthcare professionals),
and monitoring of networked devices
o pervasive and mobile computing platforms for health information
systems
o medical cyber-physical systems and medical sensor networks

* Application and integration of foundational methods from different
disciplines in engineering and science to health informatics.

* Foundational research on characterizing and formalizing specific
engineering challenges of ICT-based health service delivery in different
settings, including developed countries as well as the developing world.


We solicit high quality submissions reporting on

A. original research contributions (16 pages maximum)

B. application experience, case studies and software prototypes (16 pages
max.)

C. surveys, comparisons, and state-of-the-art reports (16 pages max.)

D. position papers that define research projects with identified
challenges and milestones (8 pages max.)

In all cases, page limits are measured in LNCS format. Submissions will be
judged on the basis of originality, contribution to the field, technical
and presentation quality, and relevance to the conference. Submissions
should be in English, prepared in the LNCS format (see here for details).
Papers should be submitted at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fhies2012.

Submission constitutes a commitment to publish the paper in the conference
proceedings with Springer LNCS and to attend the symposium and present the
paper, if accepted.

All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three program committee
members. Accepted are planned to be published by Springer Verlag (LNCS).
Like in the previous year, we plan to publish a pre-proceeding prior to
the symposium and the LNCS post-proceeding after the symposium. This gives
authors the opportunity to incorporate the feedback received at our
interactive symposium. Please note: all authors accepted for the
pre-proceedings will also be published in the post-proceedings. Moreover,
authors of the best papers will be invited to submit an extended version
of their papers for journal publication within a special issue on FHIES.


ORGANIZATION
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General Chairs

* Zhiming Liu, United Nations University, Macao
* Alan Wassyng, McMaster University, Canada

Program Chairs

* Isabelle Perseil, Inserm, France
* Jens Weber, University of Victoria, Canada

Programme Committee (provisional)

* Syed Mohamed Aljunid, UNU-IIGH, Malaysia
* Borzoo Bonakdarpour, University of Waterloo, Canada
* Fran�ois Fages, INRIA, France
* Sebastian Fischmeister, University of Waterloo, Canada
* Jean-Louis Giavitto, IRCAM, France
* Jeremy Gibbons, Oxford University, UK
* Peter Haddawy, UNU-IIST, Macao
* Jozef Hooman, Radboud University Nijmegen, NL
* Michaela Huhn, TU Clausthal, Germany
* Mark Lawford, McMaster University, Canada
* Insup Lee, University of Pennsylvania, USA
* Martin Leucker, University of L�beck, Germany
* Zhiming Liu, United Nations University, Macao
* Orlando Loques, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
* Wendy MacCaull, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada
* Tom Maibaum, McMaster University, Canada
* Dominique Mery, LORIA and Universite Henri Poincare Nancy 1, France
* Deshendran Moodley, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
* Jun Pang, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
* Anders Ravn, Aalborg University, Denmark
* Ita Richardson, LERO, University of Limerick, Ireland
* David Robertson, University of Edinburgh, UK
* Lutz Schr�der, DFKI Bremen and University of Bremen, Germany
* Neeraj-Kumar Singh, LORIA, France
* Oleg Sokolsky, University of Pennsylvania, USA
* Alexandre Sztajnberg, UERJ, Brazil
* Umit Topaloglu, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, USA
* Alan Wassyng, McMaster University, Canada
* Jim Woodcock, University of York, UK

Local Organization Chair

* Dominique Mery, LORIA and Universite Henri Poincare Nancy 1, France

Steering Committee

* Jeremy Gibbons, Oxford University, UK
* Jozef Hooman, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
* Zhiming Liu, United Nations University, Macau
* Dominique Mery, France
* Deshendran Moodley, University of KwaZulu-Natal, SA
* Alan Wassyng, McMaster University, CA
* Jens Weber, University of Victoria, CA