Computer Science Colloquium Series
==================================
Speaker: George Samaras (University of Cyprus)

SENSQ 5317
Free pizza will be provided to attendees
starting at 11:45 a.m.

Abstract:

E-health, in particular Mobile e-health, is an environment seeing
dramatic progress over the last few years. A principal aim of DITIS
(ΔΙΤΗΣ, in Greek, stands for: Network for Medical Collaboration) is a
system that supports dynamic Virtual Collaborative HealthCare Teams
dealing with the home-healthcare. It supports the dynamic creation,
management and co-ordination of virtual healthcare teams, for the
continuous treatment of the patient. Contrary to today’s health
processing structure, which is in all practical terms facility based
care, this project aims to shift the focus onto home-based care, where
everything is moving around the patient. The virtual healthcare team
will be able to provide dedicated, personalized and private service to
the home residing patient on a need based and in timely fashion, under
the direction of the treating specialist. Thus, it is expected that
chronic and severe patients, such as cancer patients, can enjoy
‘optimum’ health service in the comfort of their home (i.e., a focus on
wellness), feeling safe and secure that in case of a change in their
condition the health care team will be (virtually) present to support them.

Currently, DITIS is deployed as an Internet (web) based Group
Collaboration system with secure fixed and mobile (GPRS/GSM/WAP)
connectivity and supports the Cyprus Association of Cancer Patients and
Friends who offer home-care services for cancer patients in Cyprus. It
employs Mobile Agents, Web Databases with Java Database Connectivity for
storage and processing of information, including Electronic Medical
Record (EMR) and international coding of diagnosis and health care
protocols pertinent to cancer patients. Twenty health-care professionals
are being trained to use the system, caring for over 500 patients.

Bio:

George Samaras (Ph.D.) is a Professor in the Department of Computer
Science of the University of Cyprus. He received a Ph.D. in computer
science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, in 1989. He served
as the lead architect of IBM's distributed commit architecture (1990-94)
and co-authored the final publication of the architecture (IBM Book,
SC31-8134-00, September 1994). He was member of IBM's wireless division
at RTP. His work on utilizing mobile agents for Web database access has
received the best paper award of the 1999 IEEE International Conference
on Data Engineering (ICDE´99). He has been invited as a program
committee member in most conferences and workshops on mobile databases,
mobile commerce and mobile computing. He has a number of patents
relating to transaction processing technology and numerous book
chapters, technical conference and journal publications. He has served
as proposal evaluator at a national and international level and he is
regularly invited by the European Commission to serve as an external
project evaluator and auditor for the ESPRIT and IST Programs (FP5, FP6,
FP7). In addition he served as a technology advisor and consultant at an
international and local level in numerous occasions His research
interest includes mobile and wireless computing (models and interfaces),
context based services, personalization for the wireless environment,
web computing, transaction processing, eServices (eHealth, eGovernment,
eLearning). He also served on IBM's internal international standards
committees for issues related to distributed transaction processing
(OSI/TP, XOPEN, OMG).

Host: Panos Chrysanthis, panos@cs.pitt.edu