The European Commission has given "HealthAgents" the best IST project website award during its biannual Information Society Technologies event (IST 2006) held in Helsinki, Finland last week. The winners were announced by Mr Fabio Colasanti of the European Commission, accompanied by Mr. Erkki Ormala, Vice President of Technology Policy at Nokia, at the IST 2006 closing ceremony on 23 November 2006.
HealthAgents
IST 2006 was the biggest IST event ever, involving over 4500 people from all over the globe. Over 254 Information Society Technologies projects enrolled their site into the competition via the European Commission website, through which the wider Internet community rated them online. Over 16,000 ratings were received, resulting in a shortlist from which a jury selected the winners.
HealthAgents, a multi-million European project, funded by the European Commission, involves scientists and medics from the Universities of Birmingham, Edinburgh, Southampton, Valencia, Barcelona and Leuven as well as three international companies, Microart, PQE, and ITACA. HealthAgents plans to create a multi-agent distributed Decision Support System, to help in the early diagnosis and prognosis of brain tumours.
Being the HealthAgents community a geographically-dispersed group by nature, the website brings identity to the project team, and arguably fosters the HealthAgents virtual organisation. Furthermore, the website is the main tool for carrying out external dissemination, serving as the main repository of information to the public.
According to Horacio Gonzalez-Velez, research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and scientific dissemination leader in HealthAgents, "the HealthAgents website is crucial to the overall dissemination strategy in HealthAgents. It enables researchers and the public to interact with the latest developments in the project as well as be informed of the latest trends in agent technologies, pattern recognition and clinical methods."
University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics
www.healthagents