A studentship in the UCL VEIV EngD programme funded by EPSRC and the Royal Free Charity.

Applications are invited for this studentship which will start in September 2012.

For general information on the EngD programme, see engdveiv.cs.ucl.ac.uk/

For more information on this project, contact Anthony Hunter (a.hunter@cs.ucl.ac.uk).

Summary

This project will develop new techniques and tools, based on emerging ideas in argument visualization, for supporting decision making. Decision making often involves dealing with incomplete and inconsistent information about a problem and potential solutions. Humans often deal with such situations by considering relevant arguments and counterarguments. This has led to the emergence of computational models of argument for representing and reasoning with arguments and counterarguments for supporting decision making. The aim of argument visualization is to provide ways of visual representations of arguments and counterarguments including representations of the sources of evidence used, the uncertainty in the evidence, and the conclusions that can be drawn from the evidence.

For the application focus the project is to develop a medical decision support tool that will help a clinician and patient to visualize the relevant information in a way that helps them to better understand that information, and to make better decisions based on that information. We expect this to help patients with cancer. Patients frequently have to make complex decisions, where it can be challenging to identify the pros and cons of each treatment option, and make a decision that is appropriate for the patient based on their needs and preferences. This particularly applies to older patients, who may also be suffering from other diseases.

The prototype tool will therefore be aimed at improving patient care, and in particular, the experience and understanding of patients in key clinical decisions. To address this need, the project will develop substantial new ways of harnessing argumentation and visualization technologies in medical decision support, building on emerging developments by Anthony Hunter in computational modelling of argumentation for healthcare, and the expertise of Astrid Mayer in the development and evaluation of tools for clinical decision making. The project will also draw substantially on the taught component of the programme in visualization and graphics techniques.

The supervisors for the project are Anthony Hunter (Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the UCL Dept of Computer Science) and Astrid Mayer (Consultant Oncologist in the Royal Free Hospital and Senior Lecturer at the UCL Cancer Institute).