Centre for Logic and Information welcomes three Post-Docs

This summer, the StFX Centre for Logic and Information (CLI) continues to grow and expand its research capacity. CLI director Dr. Wendy MacCaull is pleased to announce that three post doctoral fellows, Dr. Hao Wang, Dr. Cristian Cocos and Dr. Ji Ruan, have begun working at the centre.

The centre, at 54B St. Mary’s St. in Antigonish, has been developed out of an ACOA Atlantic Innovation Fund (AIF) grant announced in January 2007.  The grant is funding the project, Building Decision-support through Dynamic Workflow Systems for Health Care, in which a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, industry and healthcare professionals, led by Dr. MacCaull, are researching the conceptual, scientific and technological problems for the design and development of dynamic workflow software systems for applications to healthcare.

From left to right: Dr. Ji Ruan, Dr. Cristian Cocos, Dr. Hao Wang

Dr. Wang, who has a Ph.D. in computer science from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, China, joined the centre in 2008 and is currently funded through the centre and by an ACEnet/Sun Microsystems Research Fellowship for the project titled “Parallel Approaches to Model-Checking Verification and Tableau-based Theorem Proving using Tabled Logic Programming”.

His previous research has been in the field of security and mechanism design in electronic commerce. His research at the centre involves working on timed model checking methods in a high performance computing environment, which is intended to fully employ the computation power of large computing clusters like ACEnet for the formal verification of workflow processes with timing information. The application to health informatics will be carried out within the framework of the project. He has submitted three papers on his recent research in this area.

Dr. Cocos, who arrived in May 2009 holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and has been at the forefront of worldwide efforts to apply ontological knowledge to various scientific areas, with an eye to immediate computational benefits. 

He has worked on a series of international projects involving computer scientists, biologists and medical researchers which included creating a large ontology of the cancer domain that is currently being used in a number of clinical research projects related to cancer genomics. Working under some of the most prominent figures of contemporary ontological research at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS), Saarland University, Germany, Dr. Cocos researched and did first-hand development of a basic formal ontology model. His work focused on perfecting and adjusting this model, based on input from the wide scientific community; building a relation ontology to complement it and; applying both of these studies as a key developer in several international endeavors aimed at building biomedical ontologies for cancer research and clinical trials.

Dr. Ruan, who also arrived in May, holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Liverpool, England, and comes with a rich educational experience that spans four highly recognized universities over three continents. His areas of research lie in formal verification and multi-agent/distributed systems. He has researched a number of logic frameworks on specification and verification of Multi-Agent Systems, which is a paradigm for understanding and building distributed computing systems. He has collaborated with researchers from the University of Liverpool, England, on investigating connections between dynamic epistemic logic and temporal epistemic logic and on the verification of game descriptions in the general game playing competition. Both lines of research look at connecting different areas within the general concern of specification and verification of multi-agent systems.

“I am very pleased to have researchers of such high caliber joining us,” Dr. MacCaull said. “The specific objective of the AIF project is to research and develop a failsafe and easily customizable software platform for dynamic workflow. Prototypes for two workflow software systems for community based case management will be developed through collaboration from, and piloted in, GASHA and ultimately are intended to interface with the emerging Canadian Electronic Health Records.”

Dr. MacCaull says their research applies modeling and verification (model checking) to the development of intelligent and adaptive workflow software for distributed systems, such as regional health care systems. 

“This research will lead to innovations that find errors early in the design stage of workflow management systems, and provide next generation measures for quality assurance and safety. Each of these individuals brings their own expertise in selected fields that add value and augment our ongoing research,” she said. “Each will be valuable to the overall collaborative approach of our centre.”

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