AI potential in law and healthcare

RESEARCH by Grigoris Antoniou, the University of Huddersfield’s Professor of Computer Science, is helping to develop the potential of Artificial Intelligence in fields that include the law and healthcare.  He is a participant in a major European project on legal informatics and in the UK he has collaborated with an NHS trust to discover how AI can be used to predict suicide risk among mental health patients, as well as to diagnose ADHD.  The technology could also be of help in the treatment of autism and dementia. 

In keynote addresses that he was invited to deliver at recent international conferences, Professor Antoniou has described his work and discussed the challenges facing semantics and knowledge technologies in the age of Big Data.  He also drew on some of the findings of his research collaborations. 

At the 10^th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA), held at Patras in Western Greece, Professor Antoniou gave a keynote titled Semantics and Reasoning in the Big Data Era. 

“One of the biggest challenges we have at the moment is that we are drowning in data and we are trying to make sense of it,” he said.  “This poses new research challenges, so my keynote was partly about that and was also linked to a European project that has been running in the area of AI and law for three years.” 

This is MIREL, which stands for Mining and Reasoning with Legal Texts.  It describes how legal informatics can be used to search for data and then arrive at an interpretation for clients. 

One of the biggest challenges we have at the moment is that we are drowning in data and we are trying to make sense of it.” 

Professor Antoniou

Professor Antoniou is a globally-acknowledged expert on knowledge representation and semantic technologies and the University of Huddersfield was awarded the leadership of one of MIREL’s work packages.  The four-year research programme draws on expertise at universities in several European countries plus China, Australia, Japan, South Africa and Argentina and was awarded EU funding of more than 1.2 million euros.  It concludes at the close of 2019. 

The second of Professor Antoniou’s recent keynotes was at the 16^th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held at Yanuca Island, Fiji and hosted by The University of the South Pacific and Fiji National University. 

Here, he spoke about how AI can be used for clinical decision making in mental healthcare.  Professor Antoniou provided results from a series of projects – carried out in collaboration with the South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust – in which he applied machine learning to the assessment of suicide risk and the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in adults. 

The project continues, said Professor Antoniou and new funding could enable it to expand into other areas of mental health, such as autism or dementia. 

“Our work is not intended to advance general medical knowledge but to provide clinical decision support.  The clinician is in the driving seat, but we give them meaningful input so they can make the best use of the data.”