Elizabeth Black

Liz is a postdoc at the University of Oxford. She is currently investigating ways to make computerised clinical guidelines such as PROforma more flexible. It is normally the case that the differing resources and constraints of different clinical institutions mean that guidelines cannot always be implemented in exactly the same way at different locations, and it may also be the case that a user (clinician or patient) may have preferences that affect a choice in a guideline; we are looking at ways in which we can integrate such flexible behaviour with the recommended guideline. A particular focus of this work is on the use of goals to help provide the necessary flexibility and so we are working on formalising a clinical goal ontology.

Liz is also continuing her PhD work on argumentation-based dialogues. This has lead to work (in collaboration with Anthony Hunter) on dialogues where only partial arguments (called enthymemes) are used, as is more natural in human communication. Liz hopes to build on this work to develop a natural and interactive mechanism for explaning decisions to human users. She has also developed (in collaboration with Katie Atkinson) a dialogue system that combines persuasion over actions with inquiry over beliefs, which they have demonstrated with a medical example of a multi-agent system comprising of agents that each have a particular value of concern along with a patient agent that represents a specific patient's data.

For further details please see Liz's personal page

Email