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Head of the Advanced Computation Laboratory at and has been involved
in the development of PROforma, a method and technology for authoring
and enacting clinical guidelines and protocols at the point of
care.
His most recent book, Safe
and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications,
(synopsis) written in collaboration
with Subrata Das of Charles River Analytics (USA), was published
in June 2000 by MIT Press and the American Association of Artificial
Intelligence.
Safe and Sound: Artificial
Intelligence in Hazardous Applications
Fox, J., & Das, S.
Computer science and artificial intelligence are increasingly used
in hazardous and uncertain situations where small faults or errors
can spell human catastrophe. This book describes a technology for
supporting sound medical decision-making and safe patient management
from the perspectives of the practical software developer and theoretical
AI. It champions the achievements of the logic programming community,
and the role of logic and logic programming as uniquely powerful
tools for addressing such important and difficult problems.
The book grew out of a programme of research into AI and 'cognitive'
functions like reasoning, problem solving and decision-making. These
are well-established research topics in cognitive science but the
programme described here is unusual in its focus on the integration
of such functions into a unified, well-founded model for building
'intelligent agents', and in the need to measure success in practical
as well as theoretical terms, with many examples of real-world applications
in medicine.
The approach combines techniques from logic programming with methods
from conventional software engineering in a formal design framework
and systematic engineering toolkit for constructing intelligent
agents which are grounded in classical and non-classical logics.
Building practical software agents may seem to require a purely
engineering solution. By 'engineering' is meant the use of well-established
techniques, or solutions that are specific to the application, without
needing to develop new theoretical principles. In fact, for reasons
of necessity, curiosity and accident, the work described in this
book addresses problems that are better thought of as 'scientific'.
Some of the medical problems turned out to be so hard that they
demanded new concepts and principles, and powerful computational
techniques to capture and support the ideas. Logic and logic programming
provided the necessary theory and tools.
In many respects Fox and Dasí approach instantiates current
ideas in the logic programming community on logical agents e.g.
Alferes and Pereira) and shows how such agents can be put to practical
use. Although the application focus is medicine, the method and
many of the underlying ideas can be applied to many other application
domains.
The authors were attracted to logic programming for a number of
reasons. First, working in a cancer research institute the applications
they were building were to be used in real patient care ñ and
were therefore safety-critical. From the beginning they were interested
in design tools that had a sufficiently strong formal
foundation that they could provide some guarantees of quality and
integrity. It seemed to them that the development of software using
the concepts, formalisms, methods, results and technologies that
have emerged from the study of mathematical logic as a computational
paradigm had to be a good thing.
While logic programming is extensively used for teaching and research
in academia they were surprised, and disappointed (like many readers
no doubt), that LP has not been more widely adopted by industry
neither in medical informatics nor in commercial software generally.
They feel that one reason for this lack of acceptance may be that
in the early years the LP research community focused on technical
elegance and theoretical virtues of the technology rather than addressing
practical engineering needs. Whether this is a correct diagnosis
or not the method that presented in the book sets out to combine
insights and ideas from logic programming with lessons from software
engineering. The result is PROforma, a logic-based specification
language and a powerful and highly intuitive development environment
for designing and testing applications of logical agents.
The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the motivation
and development of the PROforma method, a discussion of safety issues
and the role of logic in addressing them, and formalities. The first
two parts are written in an informal style, beginning with the medical
background and motivations, technical challenges, and solutions,
before turning to a wide-ranging discussion of intelligent and autonomous
agents, with particular reference to safety and hazard management.
The final part provides a detailed discussion of the PROforma language
and knowledge representation and other aspects of the agent model
developed in the book, along with a rigorous formal treatment of
the model.
There are reasons to be optimistic that logic programming is due
for a resurgence of interest in the practical world, not least
because
complex software is increasingly reaching into technical realms
that are mission and safety-critical. If this is so then Fox and
Dasí contribution provides considerable evidence of its
practical power in a field that directly affects all of us, and
proposes a
set of engineering techniques that could bring logic programming
to a much wider audience.
Jointly published by AAAI and MIT Press
326 pp., references, index, illus., $40.00 hardcover
ISBN 0-262-06211-9 |
