An Overview of IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics 2013
By Christopher C. Yang
The 2013 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2013), held in Philadelphia, PA (USA) from September 8-11, brought together researchers and scientists from academia and industry as well as practitioners to discuss their research and practices. ICHI is concerned with the application of computer science principles, engineering principles, information science principles, information technology, and communication technology to address problems in healthcare, public health, everyday wellness as well as the related social and ethical issues.
The IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI) is the premier international forum concerned with the application of computer science principles, engineering principles, information science principles, information technology, and communication technology to address problems in healthcare, public health, everyday wellness as well as the related social and ethical issues. The First ICHI 2013 was organized in Philadelphia from September 8 to 11 in 2013. The conference was sponsored by the Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics of the IEEE Computer Society. It brought together researchers and scientists from academia and industry as well as practitioners to discuss their research and practices. The three-day conference program featured 3 keynote speeches, 55 regular papers and short papers for both oral and poster presentations, 14 extended abstracts, 1 tutorial, 1 panel, and a doctoral consortium. In addition, there were three affiliated workshops, including the International Workshop on Data Mining for Healthcare (DMH 2013), the First Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing in Healthcare (WMCCH 2013), and the Workshop on Hospital Readmission Prediction and Clinical Risk Management (HRPCRM 2013).
ICHI was organized in three major tracks: (1) Systems Track focuses on building health informatics systems (e.g., architecture, framework, design, engineering, and application), (2) Analytics Track focuses on data analytics; and (3) Human Factors Track focuses on understanding users or context, interface design, and user studies of health informatics applications. Papers were submitted to one of the three tracks. Each paper was reviewed by three or more reviewers in the program committee of over 160 members. The senior program committee members coordinated the discussion of each paper with other program committee members and made recommendations to the program committee co-chairs. The three program committee co-chairs, Drs. Carlo Combi, Zhiyong Lu, and Yin-Leng Theng, finalized the ICHI 2013 scientific program with 31 oral presentations and 24 poster presentations. There were 11 parallel oral presentation sessions covering topics: (1) Drug Management; (2) Human Factors: Applications; (3) Health Text Analytics; (4) Interactivity and Modality; (5) Health Organization and Epidemiology; (6) Health Risk Prediction; (7) Home-Assistance and Individual Care; (8) Human Factors: Effects and Outcomes; (9) Web-based Architectures and User Interactions. The contributing authors came from 21 countries and regions, including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sri-Lanka, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States. Over 150 participants attended the conference and shared their valuable comments with the authors and the organizing committee. More details about the conference program can be found at http://cci.drexel.edu/ichi2013/.
Two best paper awards were presented in the banquet on the second day of the conference. These two papers were “A Publish/Subscribe Middleware for Body and Ambient Sensor Networks that Mediates between Sensors and Applications” by Christian Seeger, Kristof Van Laerhoven, Jens Sauer and Alejandro Buchmann and “Empirical Evaluation of Traditional vs. Hybrid Interaction Metaphors in a Multitask Healthcare Simulation” by Lauren Cairco Dukes, Jeffrey Bertrand, Manan Gupta, Rowan Armstrong, Tracy Fasolino, Sabarish Babu and Larry F. Hodges
There were three outstanding keynote speeches on the first and second days of the conference. Prof. Harold Thimbleby from Swansea University, UK, offered his insights on improving safety in medical devices and systems. He talked about the impact of the errors made by the medical devices and how sophisticated design could improve safety in a hospital environment. Dr. Martin Kohn, IBM Chief Medical Scientist for Care Delivery Systems, talked about the Watson technologies in cognitive computing and healthcare. He discussed how the current Watson healthcare technologies could read a large volume of medical documents, extract knowledge, and assist health professionals to answer many complicated questions. Professor Larry Smarr, Founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), talked about how to reveal the dynamics of our superorganism body digitally. He discussed how he tracked over 100 blood and stool biomarkers and used advanced interactive visualization techniques to visually explore his organs.
The conference received the generous support from National Science Foundation (NSF) for organizing the doctoral consortium. Over 25 doctoral students received financial traveling support to attend both of the doctoral consortium and the conference program. The doctoral consortium chairs, Drs. Giuseppe Pozzi and David Buckeridge, selected 13 doctoral students to present their work in oral and poster formats in the three-hour program. Each doctoral student had the opportunity to receive individual mentorship from our mentors. A panel was also organized for the mentors and doctoral students to discuss the latest development of healthcare informatics research and the career preparation of our doctoral students.
Healthcare Informatics with computing focus and interdisciplinary nature has drawn increasing attention in the recent years. We hope that the IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics series will continue to serve as a platform for the researchers and practitioners in healthcare informatics to share their latest work annually. ICHI 2014 will be held in September in Verona, Italy. We hope that you will join us either as a presenter or a participant.
Contributor
Christopher C. Yang is an associate professor in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. He received his PhD in computer engineering from the University of Arizona. His recent research interests include healthcare informatics, social intelligence and technology, Web search and mining, knowledge management, and information visualization. Read more
Aniruddha Datta received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 1991. In August 1991, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University where he is currently the J. W. Runyon, Jr. '35 Professor II. His areas of interest include adaptive control, robust control, PID control and Genomic Signal Processing. 
Christopher C. Yang is an associate professor in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. He received his PhD in computer engineering from the University of Arizona. His recent research interests include healthcare informatics, social intelligence and technology, Web search and mining, knowledge management, and information visualization. 
Rebecca Chiu heads up Business Development for MedHelp, the leading online social media and mobile health platform. She works with strategic partners to help them engage patients and personalize their services, as well as building the partner ecosystem for MedHelp's platform service. Ms. Chiu holds an M.A. and a B.A. in Economics from Yale University and an M.B.A. from The Wharton School. 
Simon Lin is Director of the Biomedical Informatics Research Center at Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation and he holds the Dr. John Melski Endowed Physician Scientist at Marshfield Clinic. Dr Lin received an MD degree in Medical Informatics at the School of Medicine, Peking University, Peking. 
Akhil Kumar is a Professor of Information Systems at the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in healthcare IT, business process management systems, process mining and web services. 
Prasanna Desikan is currently Senior Research Scientist at Division of Applied Research, Office of Clinical Excellence, Allina Health. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. 
Jaideep Srivastava is Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he directs a laboratory focusing on research in Web Mining, Social Media Analytics, and Health Analytics. He has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. 
Robert M. Kaplan, Ph.D. is Associate Director for Behavioral and Social Sciences and Director of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of the Director. He is the author, co-author or editor of more than 18 books and over 500 articles or chapters. 
Joydeep Ghosh is Joydeep Ghosh is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Ghosh's research interests lie primarily in data mining and web mining, predictive modeling / predictive analytics and their applications to a wide variety of complex real-world problems, including extracting value from a variety of healthcare data. He received the Ph.D. at The University of Southern California. 
Longjian Liu, MD, PhD, MSc, FAHA, is an associate professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Drexel University School of Public Health, and associate professor of medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine. Dr. Liu's main research covers cardiovascular disease and diabetes prevention, and the usage of hospital electronic medical records to monitor and predict disease risk and outcomes. 
Vipin Gopal is the Vice President of Clinical Analytics at Humana, a Fortune 100 company. He is an expert in developing differentiating analytic competencies, and has previously led analytic functions in diverse companies ranging from industrial conglomerates to healthcare. Dr. Gopal obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. 
Christian Seeger is currently a Ph.D. student in the Databases and Distributed Systems group led by Prof. Alejandro Buchmann at TU Darmstadt. His research interests are middleware approaches and applications for on-body and ambient sensor networks. 
Kristof Van Laerhoven obtained his Ph.D. at Lancaster University (UK) He heads the Embedded Sensing Systems lab at the TU Darmstadt (Germany), funded by the Emmy Noether Programme of the German research foundation DFG. His research combines sensing systems with pattern recognition and machine learning, to obtain adaptive and power-efficient systems.