The first ECAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Diabetes (AID) took place on 30 August 2016. It was held in conjunction with the 22nd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2016, http://www.ecai2016.org/) at the Hague. The workshop was organised by Beatriz López, Pau Herrero Viñas and Clare Martin from the PEPPER team and brought together eighteen international researchers. The invited speaker, Prof. Riccardo Bellazzi, from Università degli Studi di Pavia, spoke about lessons learned from previous and current research projects as well as future directions for research in this area. The remaining presentations covered a broad range of topics including the use of ECG and respiration rate to predict glycaemia, social robotics to support self-management in children, and enhancements to an existing artificial pancreas system. Authors of selected presentations will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for a special issue of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence.
The primary goal of the workshop was to facilitate discussion among different researchers actively engaged in finding Artificial Intelligence-based solutions to problems associated with diabetes. To this end, the presentations were followed by a discussion about future plans. It was agreed that the organisers would consider holding a subsequent workshop in 2017 as part of the Sixteenth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (http://aime17.aimedicine.info/). The ECAI conference is a biennial event, and so it was also agreed that a third workshop will be organised at ECAI 2018 in Stockholm. The group will also create an indexed website of resources to support research into Artificial Intelligence in Diabetes. The intention is that this would operate in a similar way to the established repository for Artificial Pancreas research (http://thedoylegroup.org/apdatabase/).
To conclude, this inaugural meeting of the AID research group was an enormous success, and generated much enthusiasm and energy for future projects. Please see the website for more information ( https://sites.google.com/a/brookes.ac.uk/aid1/home).
