Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems (FHIES 2013) - final call for papers

[Jeremy.Gibbons at cs.ox.ac.uk]

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

Programme committee:

* Ime Asangansi, University of Oslo, NO
* Tom Broens, Mobihealth, NL
* Lori Clarke, University of Massachusetts, US
* David Clifton, University of Oxford, UK
* Gerry Douglas, University of Pittsburgh, US
* Johannes Faber, IIST, United Nations University, MO
* Jozef Hooman, Embedded Systems Institute and Radboud University Nijmegen, NL
* Michaela Huhn, Technische Universität Clausthal, DE
* Shinsako Kiyomoto, KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc, JP
* Craig Kuziemsky, University of Ottawa, CA
* Yngve Lamo, Bergen University College, NO
* Insup Lee, University of Pennsylvania, US
* Orlando Loques, Instituto de Computação, Universidade Federal Fluminense, BR
* Gilbert Maiga, Makerere University, UG
* Dominique Mery, Université de Lorraine, LORIA, FR
* Deshendran Moodley, University of KwaZulu-Natal, ZA
* Jun Pang, University of Luxembourg, LU
* Manfred Reichert, University of Ulm, DE
* Ita Richardson, Lero, University of Limerick, IE
* David Robertson, University of Edinburgh, UK
* Christopher Seebregts, Jembi Health Systems / Medical Research Council, ZA
* Bo Song, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, CN
* Alan Wassyng, McMaster University, CA

Keynote speakers:

* Joe Cafazzo, Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, CA
* Jane Liu, Academia Sinica, TW
* Bill Thies, Microsoft Research, IN