Abstract: Healthcare Information Systems typically fall into the group of systems in which the need of data sharing conflicts with the privacy. A myriad of these systems have to, however, constantly communicate among each other. One of the ways to address the dilemma between data sharing and privacy is to use data obfuscation by lowering data accuracy to guarantee patient’s privacy while retaining its usefulness. Even though many obfuscation methods are able to handle numerical values, the obfuscation of non-numerical values (e.g., textual information) is not as trivial, yet extremely important to preserve data utility along the process. In this paper, we preliminary investigate how to exploit ontologies to create obfuscation mechanism for releasing personal and electronic health records (PHR and EHR) to selected audiences with different degrees of obfuscation. Data minimisation and access control should be supported to enforce different actors, e.g., doctors, nurses and managers, will get access to no more information than needed for their tasks. Besides that, ontology-based obfuscation can also be used for the particular case of data anonymisation. In such case, the obfuscation has to comply with a specific criteria to provide anonymity, so that the data set could be safely released. This research contributes to: state the problems in the area; review related privacy and data protection legal requirements; discuss ontology-based obfuscation and anonymisation methods; and define relevant healthcare use cases. As a result, we present the early concept of our Ontology-based Data Sharing Service (O-DSS) that enforces patient’s privacy by means of obfuscation and anonymisation functions.

Citation: Iwaya, Leonardo H. and Giunchiglia, Fausto and Martucci, Leonardo A. and Hume, Alethia and Fischer-H{\”u}bner, Simone and Chenu-Abente, Ronald, “Ontology-Based Obfuscation and Anonymisation for Privacy”, In “Privacy and Identity Management. Time for a Revolution? 10th IFIP WG 9.2, 9.5, 9.6/11.7, 11.4, 11.6/SIG 9.2.2 International Summer School, Edinburgh, UK, August 16-21, 2015, Revised Selected Papers”, 2016, Springer International Publishing, Cham, pages 343–358, isbn 978-3-319-41763-9, doi 10.1007/978-3-319-41763-9_23, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41763-9_23. New York, USA, July 2016.

Download: http://bit.ly/2iTQvzT

Abstract: In computing science, much attention has been paid to generic methods for sharing data in secure infrastructures. These sorts of methods and infrastructures are, of course, necessary for sharing healthcare data. The authors are, however, a long way away from being able to realise the potential of medical and healthcare data to support the sorts of extensive, data-intensive experiments being demanded by precision and stratified medicine. A key architectural problem remaining to be solved is how to maintain control of patient data within the governance of local data jurisdictions, while also allowing these jurisdictions to engage with experiment designs that (because of the need to scale to large population sizes) may require analyses across several jurisdictions. This study provides a snapshot of architectural work underway to provide a clear, effective structure of data safe havens within jurisdictions. It then describes how formally specified experiment designs can be used to enable jurisdictions to work together on experiments that no single jurisdiction could tackle alone. The authors’ current work relates to two jurisdictions (in Scotland and in Italy), but the architecture and methods are general across similar jurisdictions.

Citation: David Robertson, Fausto Giunchiglia, Stephen Pavis, Ettore Turra, Gabor Bella, Elizabeth Elliot, Andrew Morris, Malcolm Atkinson, Gordon McAllister, Areti Manataki, Petros Papapanagiotou, and Mark Parsons (2016). Healthcare data safe havens: towards a logical architecture and experiment automation. The Journal of Engineering, Institution of Engineering and Technology, October, 2016. This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), http://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/joe.2016.0170.

Download: http://bit.ly/2j3khFT

Abstract: Public institutions, such as universities, maintain data in several information silos, each of them engineered to serve a specific vertical application. Data about key entities—such as people, publications, courses, projects—is scattered across them and difficult to correlate due to the diversity in format, metadata, conventions, and terminology used. In such a scenario, nowadays it is practically impossible to correlate data and support advanced search and analytics facilities, in turn vital to identify institutional priorities and support institutional strategic goals, as well as to offer effective data visualization and navigation services to their users (e.g., researchers, students, alumni, companies).

Citation: Vincenzo Maltese and Fausto Giunchiglia. 2016. Search and Analytics Challenges in Digital Libraries and Archives. J. Data and Information Quality 7, 3, Article 10 (August 2016), 3 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2939377

Download: http://bit.ly/2j3vczf

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a privacy-enhanced Peer Manager, which is a fundamental building block for the implementation of a privacy-preserving collective adaptive systems computing platform. The Peer Manager is a user-centered identity management platform that keeps information owned by a user private and is built upon an attribute based privacy policy. Furthermore, this paper explores the ethical, privacy and social values aspects of collective adaptive systems and their extensive capacity to transform lives. We discuss the privacy, social and ethical issues around profiles and present their legal privacy requirements from the European legislation perspective. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2015.

Citation: Mark Hartswood, Marina Jirotka, Ronald Chenu-Abente, Alethia Hume, Fausto Giunchiglia, Leonardo A. Martucci, Simone Fischer-Hübner. “Privacy for Peer Profiling in Collective Adaptive Systems.” Privacy and Identity Management for the Future Internet in the Age of Globalisation. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 237-252.

Download: http://bit.ly/2jJvi0h

Abstract: In this work, we show how a smart-phone worn unobtrusively in a nurses coat pocket can be used to document the patient care activities performed during a regular morning routine. The main contribution is to show how, taking into account certain domain specific boundary conditions, a single sensor node worn in such an (from the sensing point of view) unfavorable location can still recognize complex, sometimes subtle activities. We evaluate our approach in a large real life dataset from day to day hospital operation. In total, 4 runs of patient care per day were collected for 14 days at a geriatric ward and annotated in high detail by following the performing nurses for the entire duration. This amounts to over 800 hours of sensor data including acceleration, gyroscope, compass, wifi and sound annotated with groundtruth at less than 1min resolution.

Citation: Gernot Bahle, Agnes Gruenerbl, Enrico Bignotti, Mattia Zeni, Fausto Giunchiglia and Paul Lukowicz (2014): “Recognizing Hospital Care Activities with a Pocket Worn Smartphone”, 6th International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services (MobiCASE 2014)

Download: http://bit.ly/2jcB3mo

Abstract: Society is moving towards a socio-technical ecosystem in which physical and virtual dimensions of life are intertwined and where people interactions ever more take place with or are mediated by machines. Hybrid Diversity-aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) is a new generation of sociotechnical systems where humans and machines synergetically complement each other and operate collectively to achieve their goals. HDA-CAS introduce the fundamental properties of hybridity and collectiveness, hiding from the users the complexities associated with managing the collaboration and coordination of machine and human computing elements. In this paper we present an HDA-CAS system called SmartSociety, supporting computations with hybrid human/machine collectives. We describe the platform’s architecture and functionality, validate it on two real-world scenarios involving human and machine elements and present a performance evaluation.

Citation: O. Scekic, D. Miorandi, T. Schiavinotto, D. I. Diochnos, A. Hume, R. Chenu-Abente, H.-L. Truong, M. Rovatsos, I. Carreras, S. Dustdar, F. Giunchiglia, SmartSociety — A Platform for Collaborative People-Machine Computation, The 8th IEEE International Conference on Service Oriented Computing & Applications (SOCA’15), 19-21 October 2015, Rome, Italy.

Download: http://bit.ly/1Wz4eN5

Our paper “Recognizing Hospital Care Activities with a Pocket Worn Smartphone” received the Best Paper Award at the 6th International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services (MobiCASE 2014).

This has been a joint effort of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Trento, and concerns the problem of “semantic gap” between machine and human semantics.

Abstract: In this work, we show how a smart-phone worn unobtrusively in a nurses coat pocket can be used to document the patient care activities performed during a regular morning routine. The main contribution is to show how, taking into account certain domain specific boundary conditions, a single sensor node worn in such an (from the sensing point of view) unfavorable location can still recognize complex, sometimes subtle activities. We evaluate our approach in a large real life dataset from day to day hospital operation. In total, 4 runs of patient care per day were collected for 14 days at a geriatric ward and annotated in high detail by following the performing nurses for the entire duration. This amounts to over 800 hours of sensor data including acceleration, gyroscope, compass, wifi and sound annotated with groundtruth at less than 1min resolution.

Index Terms: Activity Recognition, health care documentation, real-world study

Citation: Gernot Bahle, Agnes Gruenerbl, Enrico Bignotti, Mattia Zeni, Fausto Giunchiglia and Paul Lukowicz (2014): “Recognizing Hospital Care Activities with a Pocket Worn Smartphone”, 6th International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services (MobiCASE 2014, http://mobicase.org/2014/show/home)

You can find the complete list of proceedings here: http://proceedings.dev.icstweb.eu/2014/mobicase2014/file-storage/index.html#submissions

[wpdm_file id=38]

Abstract. We see the local content from peers organized in directories (i.e., on local ordered lists) of local representations of entities from the real world (e.g., persons, locations, events). Different local representations can give different “versions” of the same real world entity and use different names to refer to it. (e.g., George Lombardi, Lombardi G., Prof. Lombardi, Dad). Although the data from these directories are related and could complement each other, there are no links that allow peers to share and search across them. We propose a Distributed Directory System that constructs these connecting links and allows peers to: (i) maintain their data locally and (ii) find the different versions of a real world entity based on any name used in the network. We evaluate the approach in networks of different sizes using PlanetLab and we show that the results are promising in terms of the scalability.

Keywords: Name-Based Entity Search, P2P, Entity Directory

Citation: F. Giunchiglia and A. Hume. A Distributed Directory System. In 9th Int. Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS) @ISWC2013.

Download: http://bit.ly/268OEeY

Abstract. Despite their success in general applications, social networks also present a series of challenges like attracting user signups, keeping a healthy contribution level, user privacy concerns, etc. This paper introduces the Social Core – a social network engine that adds semantic-based functionalities like semantic annotations, semantic search and semantic-enhanced access control; as a way to enhance and answer to the current challenges of social applications. The Social Core was integrated as part of the SmartCampus mobile platform, which is currently being live tested by around one hundred students.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-41242-4_50

Citation: F. Giunchiglia., I. Zaihrayeu, R. Chenu-Abente (2013). A semantic-enabled engine for mobile social networks. Poster presentation at ESWC 2013 Workshop paper presentation at co-located SWCS 2013. Montpellier (FR).

Download: http://bit.ly/1SeVdDz

Abstract. We see the local content from peers organized in directories (i.e., on local ordered lists) containing local representations of entities from the real world (e.g., persons, locations, events). Different local representations can give different “versions” of the same real world entity and use different names to refer to it (e.g., Fausto Giunchiglia, Giunchiglia F., Prof. Giunchiglia). Although the names used in these directories connect data that could complement each other, there are no links that allow peers to share and search across them. We propose a Distributed Directory of Entities that makes explicit these connecting links and allows peers to: (i) maintain their data locally and (ii) find the different versions of a real world entity based on any name used in the network. The model we present exploits the name as the central (multi-value) attribute of entities and aims to convince readers of the importance of such names in a peer-to-peer scenario.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-41242-4_47

Citation: F. Giunchiglia., A. Hume. (2013). A Distributed-entity Directory. Poster presentation at ESWC 2013 Workshop paper presentation at co-located SWCS 2013. Montpellier (FR).

Download: http://bit.ly/268OEeY

Abstract. The physical and virtual dimensions of life are becoming more and more deeply interwoven. Society is merging with technology, giving rise to a global socio-technical ecosystem. In a society comprising people and machines as actors we often see people-to-people interactions mediated by machine and machine-to-machine interaction mediated by people. The speed and scale of this change and the differences in culture, language and interests make the problem of establishing effective means of communication and coordination increasingly challenging. Our vision, embodied in the SmartSociety project1, is that a new generation of systems, hybrid (i.e., including humans and artificial peers, as well as social groups), distributed, open and large-scale, is needed to tackle these issues. In such systems, multitudes of heterogeneous peers will produce and handle massive amounts of data; peers will join/leave the system following unpredictable patterns with no central coordination and will interoperate at different spatial and temporal scales. Aware of the ethical issues, and by identifying the right incentive schemes and privacy levels, these systems will assist individuals and collectives in their everyday activities, coping with the diversity of the world and working in the presence of incomplete and incorrect information.

http://eprints.biblio.unitn.it/4214/

Citation: F. Giunchiglia, V. Maltese, S. Anderson, D. Miorandi (2013). Towards Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems. First FOCAS Workshop on Fundamentals of Collective Systems @ECAL 2013.

Download: http://bit.ly/1STlQ0l

Download the book here (PDF)

Find the HTML version of the book here (HTML)

HCC, Human-Computer Confluence, is an ambitious research program (funded under FP7-ICT) studying how the emerging symbiotic relation between humans and computing devices can enable radically new forms of sensing, perception, interaction, and understanding. The horizontal character of HCC makes it a fascinating and fertile interdisciplinary field, but it can also compromise its growth, with researchers scattered across disciplines and groups worldwide. A coordination activity promoting discipline connect, identity building and integration while defining future research, education and policy directions is needed at the regional, national, European and international level.

The HCC research agenda book “Human Computer Confluence – The Next Generation Humans and Computers Research Agenda” reflects the state of the research agenda as of October 2013. It is published under the acronym “Th. Sc. Community” (“The Scientific Community”), standing for a representative blend of the top leading scientists worldwide in this field. It presents a collection of 26 research challenge position statements solicited via the Solicitation Portal, and is publicly available to the whole scientific community for commenting, assessment and consensus finding.

SmartSociety members that have contributed to this publication include Fausto Giunchiglia, Stuart Anderson, Mark Hartswood, Schahram Dustdar, Ognjen Šćekić and Hong-Linh Truong.

Version

19.0, last change 16. 01. 2014

Legal notice

Lead editor / coordinator

Univ. Prof. Dr. Alois Ferscha
Institute for Pervasive Computing
Johannes Kepler University Linz
Altenberger Straße 69
A-4040 Linz
Email: ferscha@pervasive.jku.at

Assistant editor

Michael Matscheko

Copyright

© Institute for Pervasive Computing, Johannes Kepler University Linz, 2014

Copyright of each article stays with the stated authors. Reproduction, for personal use or for further non-commercial or commercial dissemination, of any part of this document is subject to authorisation from the respective copyright holder.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported under the FP7 ICT FET (Future Enabling Technologies) programme of the European Commission under grant agreement No 258063 (HC2).

ISBN 978-3-200-03344-3