Keynote Lectures

Abstract

US healthcare, the most expensive in the world, has been diagnosed as an assemblage of uncoordinated component subsystems embedded in a market economy that promotes independent pricing with few points of global control over delivered quality of care and cost.  In this talk, we report on a project to develop a modeling and simulation methodology and tools to capture the existing state of, and re-engineer, such a system of systems to increase quality of care and reduce cost. A useful abstraction comprehends the system as an interaction of individual patients, a variety of care providers, a set of payers, and a billing system that records patient-provider transactions and enables payer-provider fee-for-service transactions.  Stimulated by the Affordable Care Act and other initiatives, efforts are underway to increase the level of information technology (IT) to improve patient record keeping and portability as well as the move to price services based on performance rather than amount provided. Yet such an IT infrastructure  by itself will not provide  significantly greater coordination since it does not provide transparency into the threads of transactions that represent patient treatments, their outcomes, and total costs.
In this talk, we discuss the Pathways Care Coordination model,  a construct that enforces threaded distributed tracking of individual patients experiencing certain pathways of intervention, thereby supporting coordination of care and fee for performance based on end-to-end outcomes.  As an essential byproduct, the Pathway concept also opens up possibilities for system level metrics that enable more coherent visualization of behavior than previously possible, therefore greater process control and improvement re-engineering, We discuss the associated concepts, their implementation in the MS4 Modeling and Simulation Environment, and the application to a successful implementation of Pathways model in a local scale.  We close with comments on how the environment and tools can play a role in the evolution of the Pathways model  as it is scaled up to state and national levels.

Abstract
Modeling is an enterprise that is present in all academic disciplines, and it is a topic native to the simulation field in cases where the model captures the dynamical essence of phenomena. Computing is a large field, where practitioners write programs to process data, and integrate information. We propose an approach to learning computing through, not only the execution of a simulation, but also through the design of simulation models. These models serve as machines which operate to yield results identical to those of written programs. Model constructions arise from an interdisciplinary connection between systems thinking, computing, and design as practiced in the arts. The result of this collaboration is a set of creative models that engage and inspire students to learn computing. I will illustrate this practice with several examples, and cover challenges with this pedagogical approach.

Abstract
There has been a growing interest in recent years in development of computational intelligence methodologies that relate to nature-inspired computational methodologies and approaches to address complex real-world problems to which traditional approaches, are ineffective or infeasible. The essential to development of novel algorithms is modeling the phenomena of the nature in that way that they can be applied to solving technical problems Artificial Immune Systems are one of the recent methodologies in computational intelligence. AIS can be defined as computational systems inspired by theoretical immunology, observed immune functions, principles and mechanisms in order to solve problems. In the talk I will give an overview about the role of Modelling in Artificial Immune Systems and how we are using them for anomaly detection and protecting ad-hoc networks from attacks.