Dear Members of the CAST10 listserv,
I would like to make you aware of a special session on control systems engineering approaches to
behavioral health that will be held during the upcoming American Control Conference in St. Louis.
In addition to presentations on research approaches in this emerging area, the session offers the
opportunity to interact with program officers from NIH (Patty Mabry) and NSF (Fahmida Chowdury)
interested in stimulating interest from control systems engineers in this class of problems.
Feel free to direct any inquiries about the session directly to me (contact information in my
signature below).
Best regards,
Daniel Rivera
------------------
Control Engineering and Related Systems Approaches for Improving Behavioral Health
A Special Session held as part of the 2009 American Control Conference
(http://a2c2.org/conferences/acc2009), Hyatt Regency St. Louis Riverfront Hotel, June 10-12,
2009;
Organizers:
Daniel E. Rivera, Department of Chemical Engineering, Arizona State University; Fahmida
Chowdhury, Cross-Directorate Activities Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, National
Science Foundation
Time: Thursday June 11, 2009; 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Mills Studio 3 (Hyatt Regency St. Louis Riverfront Hotel)
The goal of this special session is to describe emerging approaches and research opportunities for
control engineering in a developing research topic of important societal significance. Specifically,
we explore how control systems and related approaches from systems science can be applied to
the prevention and treatment of chronic behavioral disorders; these include drug and alcohol
abuse, depression, HIV/AIDS, cancer, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular health, and aging. Effective
management of chronic behavioral disorders has major impact on public health, requiring
hierarchical, multi-stage decision-making of prevention and treatment components over time.
Conceptually, such time-varying interventions represent forms of closed-loop control systems
where intervention dosages (i.e., manipulated variables) are determined by decision rules (i.e.,
controllers) based on the values of a participant’s key characteristics (i.e., tailoring variables or
controlled variables). Consequently, drawing from control engineering has the potential to
significantly inform the analysis, design, and implementation of novel behavioral interventions,
leading to improved adherence, better management of limited resources, a reduction of negative
effects, and overall more effective interventions. Advances in this field involve significant
modeling and computational challenges that need to be addressed. Novel decision rules will draw
not only from control engineering, but also from the fields of artificial intelligence, statistics, and
computer science. Practical solutions will involve individuals from diverse disciplines (e.g.,
psychologists, physicians, statisticians, computer scientists, applied mathematicians, and
engineers). The session brings together a control engineer (Rivera), a quantitative psychologist
(Collins), a statistician (Murphy) and a computer scientist (Pineau) with relevant program officers
from NSF (Chowdhury) and NIH (Mabry) to address challenges and opportunities in this field. The
paper titles and authors are summarized below: (* denotes the corresponding author and
presenter)
1. Engineering Control Approaches for the Design and Analysis of Adaptive Behavioral
Interventions, Daniel E. Rivera* (ASU) and Linda M. Collins (Penn State).
2. Using Clinical Trial Data to Construct Behavioral and Medication Policies,
Susan A. Murphy* (Michigan) and Joelle Pineau (McGill)
3. Systems Science and Health at NIH and Beyond: Areas of Interest and Funding Opportunities,
Patty Mabry* (NIH)
4. Discussion session (led by Fahmida Chowdhury, NSF)
Paper Synopses
1. Engineering Control Approaches for the Design and Analysis of Adaptive Behavioral
Interventions
Daniel E. Rivera
Department of Chemical Engineering
Arizona State University
Linda M. Collins
The Methodology Center and Department of Human Development and Family Studies
Penn State University
The talk will discuss how control engineering concepts can be applied to optimize adaptive
interventions for prevention and treatment of chronic, relapsing behavioral disorders such as
substance abuse, mental illness, and obesity. Adaptive interventions are feedback systems that
individualize therapy via decision rules that assign dosages and forms of treatment over time;
consequently drawing from principles in control engineering can significantly inform the analysis,
design, and implementation of adaptive interventions, leading to improved adherence, better
management of limited resources, a reduction of negative effects, and overall more effective
interventions. The application of concepts from Internal Model Control, Model Predictive Control,
and system identification will be discussed. A simulated example based on Fast Track, a real-life
preventive intervention designed to reduce conduct disorder in at-risk children, will be presented
as an illustration.
2. Using Clinical Trial Data to Construct Policies for Guiding Clinical Decision Making
Presenter: Susan Murphy
Departments of Statistics and Psychiatry
University of Michigan
Joelle Pineau
Department of Computer Science
McGill University
Constructing policies for managing behavioral and mental disorders presents a number of
challenges to control engineering. First the clinical trial data sets are quite small, second the
system dynamics are incompletely understood and third clinically acceptable policies should avoid
falsely specifying one action as best when in reality there is little evidence in the data to select one
action over another. These challenges motivate the development of algorithms and methods that
are robust to the incomplete knowledge of the system dynamics, and that provide measures of
confidence for the value of estimated policies. We discuss present approaches to addressing these
challenges.
3. Systems Science and Health at NIH and Beyond: Areas of Interest and Funding Opportunities.
Patricia L. Mabry, Ph.D.
Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR)
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Located in the Office of the Director at NIH, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research
(OBSSR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is well situated to work across the 27 Institutes
and Centers that comprise NIH and with other federal agencies (especially the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention) to stimulate and nurture an under explored field of inquiry: the area at the
intersection of behavioral and social sciences with systems science and health. The presentation
will provide a brief history of how OBSSR came to see the value of systems science, a description
of some of the complex problems that threaten the public's health and examples of how some of
these have been addressed with systems science methodologies. Specific funding opportunities
that feature systems science methodologies will be presented along with a look at the future of
this new and growing area.
-----------------------
Daniel E. Rivera, Ph.D.
Professor and Program Director, Control Systems Engineering Laboratory
Chair, IEEE Technical Committee on System Identification and Adaptive Control
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology
Department of Chemical Engineering
Mail Stop 876006
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona 85287-6006
Phone: (480) 965-9476
FAX: (480) 965-0037
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.fulton.asu.edu/~csel/rivera.html
|
