Special Sessions

Neural networks and pattern recognition in medicine

 Organizers: Giansalvo Cirrincione, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France (exin@u-picardie.fr) and Vitoantonio Bevilacqua, Dip. Ing. Elettrica dell’Informazione, Politecnico di Bari, Italy (vitoantonio.bevilacqua@poliba.it)

Since the very beginning, artificial intelligence has been influenced by medicine, and in the same time has impacted on it very strongly. For instance, in the automatic diagnosis, as a help for doctors’ decisions, or as a tool for improving patients’ health or for biomedical signal processing and brain modelling. Neural networks and neural or statistical pattern recognition are ever increasingly important methods in this field. Also, modeling and pattern recognition help in understanding the mechanisms of diseases, like cancer. At this aim, algorithms in data mining and big data are of utmost importance.

This special session aims to illustrate the state of the art and the perspectives of the most recent techniques, both neural, as deep learning, and not, with a special stress on biomedical image and signal processing, medical classification and diagnosis, and analysis of gene expression data. Papers in pattern recognition, especially as a support to medical diagnosis, are also welcome.

Dynamics of Signal Exchanges

 OrganizersAnna Esposito, Department of Psychology and the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS), Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy (iiass.annaesp@tin.it); Antonietta M. Esposito, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Napoli Osservatorio Vesuviano, Napoli, Italy (antonietta.esposito@ingv.it); Gennaro Cordasco, Department of Psychology and the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS), Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy (gennaro.cordasco@unicampania.it); Nelson Mauro Maldonato, Dipartimento di Neuroscienze and Reproductive Odontostomatological Sciences, Università di  Napoli “Federico II”, Napoli, Italy (nelsonmauro.maldonato@unina.it); Francesco Carlo Morabito, Università degli Studi “Mediterranea” di Reggio Calabria, Italy (morabito@unirc.it); Vincenzo Paolo Senese, Department of Psychology and the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS), Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy (vincenzopaolo.sensese@unicampania.it); Carl Vogel, Department of computer Science, Trinity Centre for Computing and Language Studies of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (vogel@cs.tcd.ie).

The themes of this special session are multidisciplinary in nature, and closely connected in their final aims to identify features from realistic dynamic of signal exchanges. Such dynamics characterize, formal and informal social signals,  communication modes, hearing and vision processes, and brain functionalities.  Of particular interest are analyses  of visual, written and audio information and corresponding computational efforts to automatically detect and interpret their semantic and pragmatic contents. Related applications of these interdisciplinary facets are ICT interfaces able to detect health and affective states of their users,  interpret  their psychological and behavioral patterns and support them through positively designed interventions to improve their quality of life.

Topics include but are not limited to:

  • Signals for detecting affective wellbeing and emotional states
  • Detection of health and psychological states from multimodal signals
  • Social networks for information spread and share
  • Empathic ICT interfaces
  • Computational Architectures for Affective Systems
  • Supervised and Unsupervised Learning Algorithms in Affective Systems
  • Human and/or machine encoding and decoding of behavioral patterns
  • Human daily cognitive activities
  • More