The Informed Consent Ontology (ICO)

Conferences ethics ontology philosophy science

There are many representations of informed consent in EHR systems. Such representations aid in clarifying which protocols are relevant to a research study, and what may be done with a particular biological sample taken from a patient. In this way, they aid in ensuring research can move forward while protecting patient rights.

I am presently aiding in a revision of the OBO Foundry Informed Consent Ontology (ICO), whose goal is to unite a series of ontological representations in order to track consent across the life cycle, from the moment consent is provided, through the transfer of that consent power to various other institutions, where it may be used to permit a particular research study.

The original version of the file developed by Oliver He and colleagues is available here and a development fork of its github repo containing this ontology is presently under development here. The development team and I are grateful to Oliver and his colleagues at the University of Michigan for the opportunity to work with them, and we look forward to presenting at ICBO2018. Comments and criticisms welcome. See our poster here.

 

Buffalo Annual X-Phi Conference 2016

Conferences philosophy science

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This last weekend Buffalo hosted its annual x-Phi Conference. Helen De Cruz served as keynote, delivering a great talk on cognitive science/xPhi in philosophy of religion. Major take-aways: 1) phil of religion, more than other fields of philosophy, presently seems like an empty performance of group identity, where philosophers go to argue positions they, but not others, find forceful, 2) phil of religion, as many people understand it, is a fairly dull affair that could be more interesting, 3) phil of religion is a rich place for philosophers generally to find inspiration, and 4) phil of religion is dominated by Christian theists and their detractors (and is even more white and male than philosophy generally).

One of the interesting things I noticed at this conference vs. previous conferences is the incorporation in a number of talks of qualitative methods (e.g. semi-structured interviews) in presentations, in addition to survey methodologies. This led to some interesting conversations about these methods may (or may not) be helpful.

 

 

International Conference on Biological Ontology & BioCreative 2016

Conferences ontology

osu-memorial-union

I’m in Corvalis, Oregon (go beavers!) this week attending the International Conference on Biological Ontology & Biocreative (ICBO) 2016. Highlights so far: Chris Daly’s talk on the work of the Prism Climate Group; Amanda Hicks and Bill Hogan’s workshop on social entities; and my workshop (co-chaired with Mathias Brochhausen) on institutional roles, deontic powers, and parthood axioms (paper tk). It has also been good to see the wealth of initiatives in developing evidence ontologies.

Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference 2015

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room a The Annual Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference kicked off yesterday with some great talks and an excellent poster session. I’m struck every year by the workshop-feel of the conference, a feeling that continues to persist despite the conference getting bigger than in previous years. I’m also happy to see many more talks in moral psychology alongside talks on epistemic modals and knowledge attribution. Thanks to all thosexphi poster who provided helpful feedback on my work on folk judgments concerning promises.

 

 

Free Will Conference Poster

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Catherine Nolan put together this fun poster for the Blameless Buffalo? Conference this upcoming Friday and Saturday at SUNY-Buffalo. I think the lying down position should have been reserved for outright fatalists, but I suppose I play that role from time to time.