Talks

Title: Understanding the Clinical Pathways of Intensive Care Patients using AI
Speaker: Zonglin Ji
Abstract:

Clinical pathway analysis is pivotal in ensuring specialised, standardised, normalised and sophisticated therapy procedures. Understanding the patterns behind clinical pathways, especially what factors may cause them to deviate from expected standard procedures, are critical to providing decision support for clinicians and increasing the efficiency of medical care. Although existing pattern mining techniques can tell us about the sequence of medical behaviours in clinical pathways, few studies directly relate pathway patterns to the physiological data of patients. In this PhD project, we will explore how patient health data can affect and inform clinical pathways, especially at the early stage of hospital admission. We aim to predict the potential pathway that a new intensive care patient may take, focusing on possible deviations as they may indicate complications in their conditions and associated treatments. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a novel framework that can dynamically predict patient pathways over time, thus providing continuous decision support for clinicians over ICU patients.

Title: Network models and machine learning for neuroimaging data
Speaker: Paola Galdi
Abstract:

Brain networks or connectomes are commonly used abstractions to model brain imaging data. Network nodes usually represent spatially contiguous regions of the brain, while edges model relationships between brain regions, that might reflect underlying anatomy (e.g., bundles of nerve fibres connecting neurons) or more complex interactions, such as correlated brain activity over time. In this talk, I will present four different brain network models derived from magnetic resonance imaging: functional connectivity networks, tractography-based connectomes, morphometric similarity networks and cortical meshes. I will then discuss a few examples of applications where features derived from brain networks are used to train predictive models and characterise clinical populations.

Title: Managing Sparsity in Formal Mathematics with User Tags and Network Models
Speaker: James Vaughan
Abstract:

Proof assistants are used for interactive development and verification of mathematical proofs with the assistance of automated tools. These proofs are highly modular and are frequently reused, but the quantity that are available makes it difficult to find those that are relevant during interactive proofs. In this presentation, I will discuss how we use network science to understand the structure of the dependency network that emerges between proofs in the Isabelle proof assistant. In particular, we use stochastic block models and side-information in the form of user tags to combat the sparsity of the network and improve the prediction of new dependencies. In so doing we aim to improve the level of automation in Isabelle, thereby enabling the user to tackle more complex proofs.

Title: The Usage and Improvement of Neurosymbolic AI for Biomedical Applications
Speaker: Lauren DeLong
Abstract:

Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI) describes the combination of logic and rule-based approaches with deep learning. Often, the goal of neurosymbolic AI is to achieve comparable performance to current deep learning methods while simultaneously maintaining interpretability; this makes neurosymbolic AI both practically and ethically suitable for biomedical applications. However, few previous studies have attempted to apply neurosymbolic AI within the biomedical domain. Furthermore, many neurosymbolic approaches have unique abilities that neither symbolic nor neural approaches had alone. Many of these characteristics fit the unique challenges imposed by biomedical data. For example, some neurosymbolic approaches have the ability to represent meaningful relationships between data types, which could be used as a novel way to handle multimodal biomedical data fusion. Additionally, other neurosymbolic methods use a neural network to learn domain-specific rules; this opens the possibility to mine patterns from multi-relational biomedical data. The aims of this thesis, therefore, are to produce some of the first studies using neurosymbolic AI for biomedical applications as well as demonstrate ways to utilize the unique abilities of neurosymbolic methods for common challenges surrounding biomedical data.

Title: Formalising Haag-Kastler Nets In Higher-Order Logic
Speaker: Richard Schmoetten
Abstract:

Despite the enormous experimental success of quantum field theory (QFT) and its standard model of particle physics, its logical grounding remains ambiguous. Differing tools and methods are introduced more or less rigorously, and consequently the theory as a whole has no formal axiomatic basis. Algebraic QFT (AQFT) is an attempt to redress this deficiency, and my PhD is about enriching it with interactive and automated reasoning, in the guise of Isabelle/HOL.

Title: Resources and Process Compositions
Speaker: Filip Smola
Abstract:

In this talk I will highlight some of the progress I have made over the past year on my formal theory of resources and process compositions. This progress includes filling gaps in proofs, refining how resources are represented and introducing new concepts to the mechanised theory. With one of these concepts I seek to enrich resources with more information about any non-determinism they contain, while with another I seek to formally talk about the behaviour of processes.

Title: Improving the explainability of machine learning techniques in the healthcare domain
Speaker: Jorge Gaete Villegas
Abstract:

The critical nature of medical tasks makes explainability an essential quality for any support system in healthcare. Despite various techniques to provide explainable ML models, challenges still exist. Issues such as model selection, interpretation of results or user interaction with the models are important areas of research to achieve more understandable models and improve their adoption. In this talk, I will present our approach to tackle some of these issues, our current work and its application to patients in the Intensive Care Unit and plans for the rest of my PhD. Special attention will be paid to the use of community detection as an alternative to traditional clustering, and to the potential of leveraging our current results by using Probabilistic Logic Programming to create explainable predictive models.

Title: Understanding Processes
Speaker: Filip Smola
Abstract:

In this talk I will give a high-level overview of my work on mechanising linear resources and process models. I will focus on what we can express and do with these models rather than how the mechanisation is set up. This includes how we can use specific kinds of resources and basic actions to express different domains, as well as tools for formally relating such domains. The simpler applications I will demonstrate are built around automatically deriving information about complex compositions of processes in domains inspired by two simulation games. For more interesting applications I'll go over how process compositions relate to event sequences. And to conclude I'll highlight two pieces of work currently in progress: expressing distributions in non-deterministic resources and a labelled process transition system.

Title: Challenges in predicting rehabilitation requirements for older patients
Speaker: Konstantin Georgiev
Abstract:
An ageing population is a major success of modern healthcare, but this challenges the NHS to better support increasingly frail hospitalisations. One third of older people acquire a new disability by discharge, leaving hospital with less independence than before getting ill. Rehabilitation attempts to maximise recovery, but this is not well targeted to people at the highest risk of disability, as the true contributing factors are poorly understood. However, electronic health records now routinely hold information about rehabilitation progress. This brings forward a new opportunity to utilise this data and build structured care pathways using Machine Learning, Process Mining and Explainable AI tools.

In this talk, I will give an introduction to the current challenges in rehab, particularly the complexity in deciding the duration, intensity and type of treatment for frail and multimorbid patients. We will also briefly look at one case study involving rehab patterns for patients recovering from COVID-19.

Title: Neurosymbolic AI for Reasoning on Graph Structures
Speaker: Lauren DeLong
Abstract:
In this short talk, I'll present my idea for a survey paper on using neurosymbolic methods for reasoning on graph structures. Neurosymbolic methods are increasing in popularity as they combine the scalability and performance of neural network-based methods with the interpretability of symbolic methods. Subsequently, recent works have attempted to extend and apply the ideas of neurosymbolic methods to reasoning on graph structures, often for the purpose of knowledge graph completion. I will explain the ideas and motivation behind these methods, the categories to which I have classified the respective papers, and the general structure of the paper which I plan to write. I would appreciate any feedback and suggestions you might have. Additionally, if any particular sections stand out as interesting to anyone, I welcome volunteers to help co-author the paper.