IntelliFest is right around the corner and promises to be an exciting one for us.

This year, we will be kicking off the conference with a special one-day workshop for healthcare professionals to address the role of rules, workflow, ontologies and events in healthcare computing. The workshop will feature a full day of high-level talks about the use of applied artificial intelligence and reasoning technologies in clinical support and related systems. Anyone involved or interested in clinical support, process models or even simply the use of open source in healthcare, will find the sessions helpful.

Dr. Robert Greenes, chairman of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University, is scheduled to keynote the event. Dr. Greenes’ research has centered on clinical decision support in terms of models and approaches to decision making, the knowledge representation to support it, and its clinical application and validation. He has also been active in the promulgation of standards and fostering of group collaborative work, particularly in knowledge management.

The healthcare day will be Monday, October 22 at the Bahia Resort Hotel in San Diego. Captain Emory Fry, M.D., chief medical informatics officer at Cognitive Medical Systems, and Dr. Davide Sottara, cognitive engineer, Department of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University will co-chair the event.

Following the healthcare workshop, Red Hat will host a free bootcamp on business rules on Tuesday, October 23. The sessions will highlight Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise BRMS (business rules management system) product, as well as advanced Drools and jBPM programming. Drools and jBPM are open source community projects related to business rules and workflow engine technologies that serve as upstream feeds for JBoss Enterprise BRMS.

The bootcamp is geared for all rules developers, programmers, engineers and architects. The program is designed to introduce attendees to rules engines and complex event processing, including how each is used, as well as cover:

• How Business Process Management (BPM) interoperates with rules and how jBPM works;
• Why serverside knowledge management is important;
• Why ontologies are important to rule development;
• How to do advanced Drools programming in a game context;

The 2012 IntelliFest conference runs through Friday, October 26. For more information, visit http://www.intellifest.org

We hope to see you there!