Call for Papers
AAAI Fall
Symposium on
Dialogue Systems for Health Communication
October 22-24 2004, Washington DC
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.
Topics of Interest
The overall focus will be the design, implementation and evaluation
of effective health dialogue systems, and cover topics such as:
- Automatic generation of dialogue to support patient health education,
health behavior change, or chronic disease management, or to provide
assistance with daily activities for individuals with physical or cognitive
impairments.
- Maintenance of, and reference to, dialogue state and user models across
many therapeutic interactions.
- Automatic tailoring of health dialogue to patient characteristics, such
as stage-of-change, sensory or cognitive impairments, etc.
- Approaches to the development and maintenance of trust, working alliance,
liking and other variables that characterize the patient-agent relationship.
- Recognition or display of affect and empathy to support therapeutic goals.
- Uses and comparisons of different conversational modalities, including
text, audio, embodied agents or robots.
- Health communication studies of patient-caregiver interactions intended
to inform the development of automated systems.
- Ethical and privacy issues.
- Approaches to evaluation of these systems and results from studies and
clinical trials.
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.
Types of Submission
Potential participants may submit a technical paper (up 8 pages), or a short
paper (up to 4 pages) in the form of an extended abstract
or a description of a proposed demo or poster. All accepted papers and abstracts
will appear in the working notes, which will be distributed prior to the
symposium. Authors of long and short
papers may indicate a preference for giving a talk or doing a poster.
Potential participants who are unable to submit a paper are encouraged
to submit a one-page statement of interest. These will be invited to attend
the symposium on a space available basis.
PDF-submissions in AAAI format should be sent to bickmore@bu.edu.
For formatting instructions see http://www.aaai.org/Publications/instructions.html and http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/macros-link.html.
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
|
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