Archive for the ‘workshop reports’ category

 

MIXHS11 Challenges & Visions Session a Success

December 16th, 2011

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Cui Tao and Matt-Mouley Bouamrane, the organizing chairs of the First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems, which was held in October 2011 in Scotland (U.K.).

First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems (MIXHS11).We were delighted to host a successful Vision and Challenge Track at the First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems. MIXHS 2011 was a forum focused on recent research and technical results in knowledge management and information systems in bio-medical and electronic health systems. The workshop was designed to provide an opportunity for sharing practical experiences and best practices in e-Health information infrastructure development and management. Of particular interest to the workshop themes were technical solutions to recurring issues in practical systems deployment, including harnessing the complexity of bio-medical domain knowledge and the interoperability of heterogeneous health systems. The workshop gathered experts, researchers, system developers, practitioners, and policymakers for discussing, designing, and implementing solutions for managing clinical data and integrating existing and future eHealth systems infrastructures.

The Vision and Challenge Track invited submissions of short papers in the areas of interest of the main event that: 1) described revolutionary ideas that are likely to guide research in the near future; 2) challenged existing assumptions prevalent in the research community; and 3) identified novel applications and technology trends that create new research challenges.

Eight papers were accepted for presentation in the Vision and Challenge Track. And of these 8, three were chosen for CCC-sponsored Best Paper awards. The prizes took the form of travel reimbursement awards totaling $1,000, $750, and $500 for first, second, and third place, respectively.

Here are the three awardees (after the jump):

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First Person: “Science is Only One Part of Policymaking”

November 14th, 2011

Peter Stone, UT-Austin [image courtesy UT-Austin].Last Monday, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) – together with the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Government Affairs Committee – ran its first-ever Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI). Thirty-five computing researchers from around the country came to Washington to learn about U.S. science policy. Here, one of the participants — Peter Stone, an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin — shares his experiences in the daylong workshop.

Scientists and politicians comprise two very different, usually mutually independent cultures.  The analytical mindset that is central to the scientific process is not as pervasive in politics, where compromise and deal-making rule the day. As a result, scientists are often reluctant to engage in the political realm.  But this reluctance can be very detrimental to the scientific community.

On Monday, November 7th, the Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) was held as an effort to energize mid-career computer science researchers to play a role in influencing science policy. Sponsored by the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC), it was a one-day meeting of 35 computer science professors from universities around the country and a few researchers from industrial research labs.  We met on the 11th floor of the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill.

An esteemed group of speakers was brought in to first motivate us to become involved in science policy, and second to teach us how to do so.

As Fred Schneider, CCC Council member and Chair of CRA’s Government Affairs Committee, told us in the first talk, and as we learned in detail throughout the day, government is complicated. In his words, if what we learned in school about the three branches was Government 101, then this was Government 601. We learned about congressional committees, agencies, budgets, staffers, lobbyists, and all of the other relevant people and organizations, as well as how they relate to one another (more after the jump…).

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First Person: “In Washington the National is Local”

November 10th, 2011

Beki Grinter, Georgia Tech [image courtesy Georgia Tech].On Monday, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) – together with the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Government Affairs Committee – ran its first-ever Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI). Thirty-five computing researchers from around the country came to Washington to learn about U.S. science policy. Here, one of the participants – Beki Grinter, an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech — shares her experiences in the daylong workshop.

This past Monday I participated in the first CCC/CRA Leadership in Science Policy Institute in Washington, DC. The day was broken out into different sessions focused on how the Federal budgeting process works, how to connect to agencies like the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and the more familiar to many National Science Foundation (and how they are all very different from each other!), and so on. We also had time to craft and practice interactions we might have with Congressional staffers and what Congressional testimony looks like. Each of these warrants at least one blog post in its own right (if not more). In the rest of this post I would like to share some of the other things I learned at the workshop (after the jump…).

» Read more: First Person: “In Washington the National is Local”