CALL FOR PAPERS

Third International Symposium on
Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/FHIES2013/

International Institute for Software Technology
United Nations University, Macau
21st-23rd August, 2013


BACKGROUND

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 is to promote a nascent research
area that aims to develop and apply theories and methods from a
variety of disciplines for the purpose of modeling, building and
certifying software-intensive ICT systems in healthcare. A particular
objective of FHIES is to explicitly include a focus on healthcare ICT
applications in the developing world (in addition to systems used in
the developed countries), since unique engineering challenges arise in
that special setting. Because humans often play a pivotal role in the
process of using such systems, theories from the human factors
engineering community may need 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. Previous FHIES symposia were held in 2011, in Mabalingwe,
South Africa (with post-conference proceedings in Springer LNCS 7151,
and in 2012, in Paris, France (with post-conference proceedings to
appear in Springer LNCS).


SCOPE

FHIES seeks contributions from both the solution domain (engineering
methods) and the problem domain (healthcare and health
informatics). Solution-domain papers should present their methods in
the context of a concrete application in healthcare, while
problem-domain papers should be devised to educate the methods
community about unique challenges and characteristics of the
healthcare domain. 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:

* modelling, analysis, simulation and verification in health informatics;
* design and verification techniques for software-based ICT and
software-intensive medical devices;
* application and integration of foundational methods from different
disciplines in engineering and science to health informatics;
* specific engineering challenges of ICT-based health service delivery
in different settings, especially in the developing world.

For a more detailed list of topics, see the symposium website.


CATEGORIES

We solicit high quality full submissions in the following categories:

* original research contributions (16 pages max)
* application experience, case studies and software prototypes (16 pages max.)
* surveys, comparisons, and state-of-the-art reports (16 pages max.)
* position papers identifying challenges and milestones of a research
project (8 pages max.)

We also invite short submissions for special sessions:

* student papers on work in progress on an MSc or PhD project (4 pages max.)
* tool demonstrations (2 pages max.)
* proposals to organize birds-of-a-feather sessions or panels (2 pages max.)


SUBMISSIONS

Submissions should be in English, prepared in the LNCS format
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html), and all page limits
are measured in this format. Full submissions (those in the first
four categories above) will be judged on the basis of originality,
contribution to the field, technical and presentation quality, and
relevance to the symposium; student papers will be judged on clarity
of description and the promise of interesting results; tool
demonstrations and BOF proposals will be judged on relevance to the
symposium. All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three program
committee members. Papers should be submitted via EasyChair, at

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fhies2013

Submission constitutes a commitment for at least one author to attend
the symposium and present the paper, if it is accepted.


PUBLICATION

All accepted submissions will be distributed in a technical report at
the Symposium. After the event, postproceedings will be published in
Springer LNCS. Authors of all accepted full submissions will be
invited to revise their papers, in order to resolve any larger issues
raised during reviewing. Authors of accepted short submissions will be
invited to submit full papers for review and LNCS publication too. In
addition, a special issue of a suitable journal is planned, focusing
on the overall objectives of FHIES: this will have an open call for
contributions.


IMPORTANT DATES

Intention to submit: April 29th
Submission deadline: May 6th
Notification of acceptance: June 12th
Delivery of preproceedings version: July 17th
Symposium: August 21st-23rd
Submission for postproceedings review: October 4th
Notification of acceptance: October 11th
Camera ready version: October 18th
Publication of proceedings: December 23rd


ORGANIZERS

General chairs:

* Zhiming Liu, United Nations University, MO
* Jens Weber, University of Victoria, CA

Programme chairs:

* Jeremy Gibbons, University of Oxford, UK
* Wendy MacCaull, St. Francis Xavier University, CA

For the Programme Committee, see the website.