AAAI Fall Symposium on

Dialogue Systems for Health Communication

October 22-24 2004, Crystal City Hyatt, Washington DC

Endorsed by SIGDIAL

 

Motivation

Since Eliza was developed in 1966, computer scientists and health researchers have attempted to build conversational systems that emulate interactions between health providers and patients. Although Eliza was developed only as a proof-of-concept, more recent systems have been built with the intent to provide low-cost and widely accessible health care in limited treatment domains, and many of these systems have been proven effective in large-scale clinical trials. In addition to the unique challenges of developing health dialogue systems that are safe, scale to thousands of users, and can accommodate the complexity of multiple diseases or health behaviors, dozens of studies in the field of health communication indicate that psychosocial aspects of the provider-patient interaction—such as empathy, trust and liking—are crucial for maximizing outcomes and patient satisfaction, indicating that these should be addressed in automated systems as well.

The goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers in AI—including computational linguistics, planning, user modeling and social agents—with researchers in health communication, public health and the medical sciences.

Keynote Talks

Keynote talks will be given by Robert Friedman, head of the Medical Information Systems Unit at Boston University School of Medicine, and by Geoffrey Clapp, Chief Technology Officer of HealthHero Network. Dr. Friedman has led the development of over a dozen automated telephony-based health behavior change and chronic disease self management interventions, successfully evaluated in clinical trials involving thousands of patients. Mr. Clapp is the lead developer of the HealthBuddy text-based “in-home messaging” telemedicine system, which is currently being evaluated in several large-scale clinical trials. Dr. Friedman and Mr. Clapp will discuss the challenges they’ve faced in fielding health communication dialogue systems and problem areas they feel could be addressed through additional dialogue systems research.

Debra Roter, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and the world's leading authority on physician-patient communication, will also give a keynote overview of research on physician-patient communication.

AAAI Fall Symposium Series

The AAAI 2004 Fall Symposium Series will be held Friday through Sunday, October 22-24. The Symposia will be preceded on Thursday, October 21 by a one-day AI funding seminar, which will be open to all registered attendees of the fall symposium series. Information on the Series and the other concurrent Symposia are available on the AAAI website.

Important Dates

Deadline for all submissions

(note: accepting late submissions until 8/15)

 May 3, 2004
Notification of acceptance
 May 24, 2004
Deadline for final versions of abstracts and papers
 August 31, 2004
AI Funding Workshop
 October 21, 2004
Symposium
 October 22-24, 2004

Contact Information

Send your submission or any questions to bickmore@bu.edu.

Organizing Committee

Timothy Bickmore (chair), Boston University School of Medicine
Neal Lesh, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory
Stacy Marsella, USC Information Sciences Institute
Rosalind Picard, MIT Media Laboratory
Martha Pollack, University of Michigan, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory