Kyoto University - Hong Kong Baptist University Joint Workshop on Field Informatics

Speakers
Hong Kong Baptist University

 Kyoto University

 Waseda University

Prof. Toru Ishida


Professor, Kyoto University
Biography
Toru Ishida has been a professor of Kyoto University since 1993.

His academic paths include visiting scientist/professor positions at Columbia University, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Le Laboratoired' Informatique de Paris 6, Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Maryland,Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University and Hong Kong Baptist University. He is a fellow of IEEE, IPSJ, and IEICE since 2002, 2005, and 2008.

His research interest lies with autonomous agents and multiagent systems, and he has been working on this theme for more than twenty years. He is a co-founder of MACC/JAWS (Japanese), PRIMA (Asia/Pacific) and ICMAS/AAMAS (International), conferences on autonomous agents and multiagent systems. He served as a program co-chair of the second ICMAS, a chair of the first PRIMA, and a general co-chair of the first AAMAS.

He was also an editor-in-chief of Journal on Web Semantics (Elsevier) and an associate editor of IEEE PAMI, and Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (Springer).

He has also started workshop/conference on Digital Cities and Intercultural Collaboration. In 2006, he began the Language Grid project. Department of Social Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University takes on the role as the Language Grid Operator.
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Prof. Jiming Liu


Chair Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University

Jiming Liu is the Chair Professor of Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), Hong Kong. Prof. Liu received Bachelor of Science from East China Normal University, Shanghai, Master of Arts from Concordia University, and Master of Engineering and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from McGill University, Montreal. Before 1994, he had worked in the IT industry (e.g., Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM), Virtual Prototypes Inc. (VPI), and Knowledge Engineering Technology Inc. (KENTEK) in Canada).

Prof. Liu's present research interests include multi-agent autonomy-oriented computing (AOC) paradigm, self-organizing/decentralized systems, Web intelligence (WI), and real-world complex systems/complex networks related problems (e.g., health and health systems, extreme events, and energy/sustainability management). His previous research focused on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS), robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI). He has contributed to the scientific literature in those areas. His work on AOC and nature-inspired computing (NIC) was highlighted in Science, October 2006, in Editors' Choice, and the work on adaptive user interface was referenced in Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century outlined by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He has given Keynote Talks at ICNC'08-FSKD'08, AWIC'07, RSEISP'07, RSKT 2006, AMT'06, and AWIC'05, and Invited Plenary Talks at KES'05, MMAS 2004, ISMIS'03, and IJCAI'03, among others. Prof. Liu received the President's Award for Outstanding Performance in Scholarly Work at HKBU in 2007. He was named 2011 IEEE Fellow for contributions to web intelligence and multi-agent autonomy-oriented computing.

Prof. Liu has served professional communities in various capacities, e.g., Editor-in-Chief of Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2005-2009), IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (2009-), and Computational Intelligence (2007-) etc., Editorial Board Member of several other journals, General (Co-)Chair or Program (Co-)Chair of international conferences (IHI'12, ISMIS'12, ICDM'06, WI/IAT'05, EEE'04, IDEAL'03, WI/IAT'01, and IAT'99 etc.), Chair of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics (TCII) (2010-), IEEE Computer Society Fellows Committee Member (2011), Co-Director of Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Member of Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) Engineering Panel (2004-2010), and Member of Hong Kong Young Scientist Award Selection Panel (2002-).
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Prof. Reiko Hishiyama


Professor, Waseda University
Abstract
Society is facing complex issues related to sustainability on all levels, including local issues such as accidental pollution of a river or illegal dumping of waste, and national or international issues such as economic crisis or climate change.

In order to stimulate discussions about the mechanisms that drive these complex concerns and to focus on actions to be taken in the present to change the situation for the future, gaming or gaming simulation can be used as one of the effective techniques to overcome lack of communication. As a spontaneous solution to communication problems, gaming provides a hybrid communication system and presents an integrated or holistic perspective as "gestalt communication."

We have been designing and developing various versions of the original serious games to transmit the complex entirety of the issues to others. Our goal is to improve the efficiency of communication that bridges specialists and non-specialists by using information and communication technology. We conducted human- and agent-based participatory gaming simulations on the Internet and supported the practices of the social communities.
Biography
Reiko Hishiyama is a professor in the Graduate School of Creative Science and Engineering at Waseda University in Tokyo, where she directs the Intelligent Information System laboratory. She received her Doctor of Informatics in 2005 from Kyoto University in Japan. She taught at Kyoto Women's University, before joining the faculty of Waseda University. Her current research interests include artificial intelligence, autonomous multi-agent systems, knowledge representation, autonomy oriented computing and related areas. The topic is viewed as an interdisciplinary field where computer science intersects with organization science, sociology, psychology, and other fields. In 2007, she has joined GCOE (Global Centers of Excellence) "field informatics" program in Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University.
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Dr. Bo Sophia Xiao


Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University

Abstract
The social media revolution has created a dynamic shift in the digital marketing landscape. The voice of influence is moving from traditional marketers towards consumers through online social interactions. In this study, we focus on two types of online social interactions, namely, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) and observational learning (OL), and explore how they influence consumer purchase decisions. We also examine how receiver characteristics, consumer expertise and consumer involvement, moderate consumer purchase decision process. Analyzing panel data collected from a popular online beauty forum, we found that consumer purchase decisions are influenced by their online social interactions with others and that action-based OL information is more influential than opinion-based eWOM. Further, our results show that both consumer expertise and consumer involvement play an important moderating role, albeit in opposite direction: Whereas consumer expertise exerts a negative moderating effect, consumer involvement is found to have a positive moderating effect. The study makes important contributions to research and practice.
Biography
Dr. Bo Sophia Xiao is an assistant professor of Computing and Information Systems in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include human-computer interaction; virtual communities and social networking; online trust, risk, and deception; and online consumer decision support. Her research has been published in top journals in the field of Information Systems, including Management Information Systems Quarterly and Information Systems Research.
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Dr. Hiromitsu Hattori


Assistant Professor, Kyoto University
Abstract
Multiagent-based Simulations (MASim) are increasingly seen as the most attractive approach to reproducing and analyzing diverse social systems. The essential for realizing practical MASim, which is useful to analyze/understand real-life fields, is human behavior modeling. To construct behavior models, we need realistic human behavior data. However, in the real world, it is often difficult to conduct controlled experiments for obtaining data due to drastic changes in the environment. For example, in urban traffic, the traffic status is ever changing so that it is quite hard to obtain useful driving behavior data. In addition, there are cases in which it is impossible to conduct experiments, such as a huge disaster. Participatory multiagent simulations are useful in obtaining human behavior data in unknown environments. I talk about challenges to conduct simulations based on participatory technologies.
Biography
Hiromitsu HATTORI is currently an assistant professor at Kyoto University, JAPAN. From 2004 to 2007, he was a reearch fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). During that period, he worked with Dr. Peter McBurney at University of Liverpool as an honorary research assistant, and with Dr. Mark Klein at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a visiting researcher. He has worked on multiagent systems, with particular focus on negotiation, agent-based electronic commerce support. His current interests include multi-agent simulation, and human behavior modeling.
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Dr. Hai Liu


Research Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University

Abstract
Location information is widely adopted for facilitating communications and data management in mobile fields, including ad hoc networks, sensor and actuator networks, mobile and cellular networks. In the first part of this talk, we introduce the use of location information for communications in various wireless networks, and focus on a location-based movement control algorithm for building robust network topologies in robotic sensor networks. In the second part of this talk, we discuss the protection of users' location privacy in location-based services. Location cloaking has been proposed to blur users' accurate locations with cloaked regions. We show two location cloaking algorithms that achieve different objectives: one for reducing the bandwidth usage of subsequent location-based services and the other for minimizing the location information disclosure during cloaking.
Biography
Hai Liu received the BSc and MSc degrees in applied mathematics from South China University of Technology, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He received the PhD degree in computer science from City University of Hong Kong in 2006. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include wireless networking, mobile computing, and algorithm design and analysis. He is a member of the IEEE.
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Dr. Haibo Hu


Research Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University

Abstract
Location information is widely adopted for facilitating communications and data management in mobile fields, including ad hoc networks, sensor and actuator networks, mobile and cellular networks. In the first part of this talk, we introduce the use of location information for communications in various wireless networks, and focus on a location-based movement control algorithm for building robust network topologies in robotic sensor networks. In the second part of this talk, we discuss the protection of users' location privacy in location-based services. Location cloaking has been proposed to blur users' accurate locations with cloaked regions. We show two location cloaking algorithms that achieve different objectives: one for reducing the bandwidth usage of subsequent location-based services and the other for minimizing the location information disclosure during cloaking.
Biography
Haibo Hu is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University. Prior to this, he held several academic or research posts at HKUST and HKBU. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2005. His research interests include mobile and wireless data management, location-based services, and privacy-aware computing. He has published over 30 research papers in international conferences, journals and book chapters. He is also the recipient of many awards, including ACM-HK Best PhD Paper Award and Microsoft Imagine Cup.
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Dr. Tomohiro Kuroda


Associate Professor, Kyoto University
Abstract
A Hospital Information System (HIS) has turned a hospital into a gigantic computer with huge computational power, huge storage, and wired/wireless local area network. On the other hand, a modern medical device, such as an echograph, is a computer system with several functional units connected by an internal network named a bus. Therefore, we can embed such a medical device into the HIS by simply replacing the bus with the local area network. Introduction of sensor network infrastructure changes medical devices as peripherals of HIS, and enabling position tracking of the devices on the sensor network may lead to the emergence of disruptive innovation in the clinical field.

On the other hand, a HIS is a gigantic clinical repository. It holds any clinical information including three-dimensional medical images of patients and life-logs of clinical staffs. Therefore, introduction of add-on applications for various purposes, such as virtual-reality (VR) based surgery planning and visualization of clinical activities may open up new findings to advance clinical and activities.

This lecture provides ongoing project to introduce sensor network infrastructure and add-on applications to the HIS of Kyoto University Hospital.
Biography
Tomohiro Kuroda is the vice CIO of Kyoto University Hospital and is an associate professor of Graduate School of Medicine and of Graduate School of Informatics at Kyoto University. He received B.S. in information science from Kyoto University in 1994, M.S. and Ph.D. in information science from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in 1996 and 1998. He was an assistant professor of Graduate School of Information Science at NAIST from 1998 to 2001, a lecturer of Department of Medical Informatics of Kyoto University Hospital from 2001 to 2006, and an associate professor of Graduate School of Engineering Science of Osaka University from 2007 to 2009. He was also with Department of Information Processing Science of University of Oulu, Finland in 2001 and 2006, where he holds the rank of visiting professor. His current research interests include Human Interface, Virtual/Augmented Reality, Wearable/Ubiquitous Computing, and Medical/Assistive informatics. He takes a role of a councilor of JAMI and JSMBE, the chief editor of transactions of JSMVR, the bureau chief of JASL, and others. He is a member of IEEE, VRSJ, HISJ, ISCIE, and others.
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Dr. Naoto KUME


Assistant Professor, Kyoto University

Abstract
Clinical Research Database on Plural Medical Facilities

Hospital information system (HIS) in Japan is developed in several ways depending on the hospitals. Though the HIS packages are recently well established, electronic medical records (EMR) are stored and processed according to the customized HIS system. After a few years of the HIS installation, it makes sense that the reuse of the medical records is demanded for clinical researches. If the clinical research uses EMR in the hospital, it is smooth to retrieve the test results and prescriptions from HIS. Although, when the clinical research takes aim at the rare diseases such as the mixed connective tissue disease (MCTD), it is very difficult to find the number of patients, only in the hospital, enough to make the research protocols. Therefore, now we are trying to merge the EMR data of several hospitals for the regional researches and the rare disease researches. We constructed a preliminary distributed database between four university hospitals in Japan. The data mapping of the test results in the facilities forces us to bear a burden. Eventually, we proceeded with five pilot studies to find the number of patients, who get a treatment for the same disease cluster, in the four hospitals. In the presentation, we discuss the problems with the distributed database system and the pilot studies.
Biography
Naoto Kume received the Ph.D degree in informatics from Kyoto University in September 2006. He was employed as a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2006 to 2007. He is currently an assistant professor in the department of medical informatics at Kyoto University Hospital since 2007. Also, he was employed as a visiting researcher at ABB AB, corporate research Sweden in 2010.

His research interests lie in the field of virtual reality in medicine and medical informatics.
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Dr. William K. Cheung


Associate Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University
Abstract
Attaining higher operational efficiency in healthcare processes ensures better patient experience as well as better healthcare resource utilization. In particular, timely diagnosis and treatment, or in other words, a shorter treatment journey, is vital for cancer patients. Bad coordination among stakeholders (healthcare units) is often one of the major causes of process delays. The patient journey factor is hard to be taken into account, and thus resulting in long treatment journeys.

In this talk, we present our work on applying computational techniques to cancer patient journey shortening. The first part of the talk is about the use of a simulation-based approach for performing additional resources allocation with the patient journey factor used in the allocation strategy. Preliminary results obtained based on some real data will be presented. The second part of the talk is about our recent attempt in modeling the stakeholders' interactions as a dynamic network, and in turn casting the bottleneck root cause identification problem as a diffusion network inference problem and temporal motif detection problem.
Biography
William K. Cheung is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University. He received the BSc and MPhil degrees in electronic engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the PhD degree in computer science in 1999 from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has served as the cochair and program committee members of a number of international conferences/workshops, as well as a guest editor of journals in areas including artificial intelligence, Web intelligence, data mining, Web services, and e-commerce technologies.

He has also been on the editorial board of the IEEE Intelligent Informatics Bulletin since 2002. His research interests include artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as their applications to collaborative filtering, Web mining, distributed and privacy-preserving data mining, planning under uncertainty, and network data mining.
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Dr. Shigeo Matsubara


Associate Professor, Kyoto University
Abstract
Which selling format is better among posted-price selling and ascending auctions? This has been discussed for a long time in economics. A data analysis of Internet auctions enables us to answer this question in a different way from the previous studies. Internet auction sites offer a buyout option, e.g., Yahoo! JAPAN auction provides a permanent buyout option to sellers. If a seller chooses to use a buyout option, a buyer can purchase the item at the buyout price even when the merchandise is also listed in the auction. By using a buyout option, a virtual posted-price selling can be realized in the auction markets it the starting price is set to the same value as the buyout price. An interesting point is that identical goods are sold using an auction and a posted-price selling at the same time. To investigate the interaction between the two selling formats, we have analyzed the real auction data provided by Yahoo! JAPAN auction. The results show that both posted-price sellers and auction sellers can increase their revenues by introducing buyout options, if the buyout price is set to an appropriate value. This helps to consider a billing structure suitable for Internet auction sites.
Biography
Shigeo Matsubara is an associate professor of Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University. From 1992 to 2006, he was a research scientist of NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT. He received his Ph.D. degree in Informatics from Kyoto University. During 2002-2003, he was a visiting researcher at University of California, Berkeley. He was also an advisor of NICT Language Grid project from 2006 to 2007. His research focuses on multiagent systems and information economics. He has published in Artificial Intelligence Journal and other academic journals. He has served as a PC member for international conferences including AAMAS, IJCAI, AAAI and an industrial track co-chair of AAMAS2007.
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Dr. Li Chen


Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University
Biography
Dr. Li Chen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University. She obtained her PhD degree in Human Computer Interaction at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and Bachelor and Master Degrees in Computer Science at Peking University, China. Her research interests are mainly in the areas of human-computer interaction, user-centered design and development of intelligent Web technologies, recommender systems and e-commerce decision supports. Her co-authored papers have been published in high-quality journals (e.g. TOCHI, UMUAI, ECRJ, KBS) and top-rated conferences such as ACM EC, AAAI, IUI, UMAP, ACM RecSys. She is the vice chair of ACM HK Chapter. She has also been the program co-chair of ISMIS'12, demo and poster chair of UMAP'12, demo chair of IUI 2011, publicity chair of IUI'10, Asian liaison of ACM RecSys'10//11/12, and workshop co-organizer in IUI'10, CSCW'11 and RecSys'11.
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