IHI

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the inaugural meeting of ACM International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI). We envision IHI as ACMs premier community forum concerned with the application of computer and information science principles as well as information and communication technology to problems in healthcare, public health, the delivery of healthcare services and consumer health informatics aspects, and finally, the related social and ethical issues on the use of computing technology in the health informatics domain. We designed IHI to run as an annual showcase for exciting and innovative research on techniques and technologies developed in universities, hospitals, research labs, and companies all over the world. And here we are, in the very first meeting with a very strong program comprising oral and poster presentations, demos, a very distinguished keynote presentation, and a panel. I am humbled to have a chance to chair such a strong first meeting.

When I was offered the General Chair position for this conference, I accepted with great anxiety, and the anxiety turned to horror when I realized what it really means to organize the very first meeting of a new conference series. One of my first challenges was to draft a budget for the conference. There were many questions that needed to be answered, and we did not have any basis for answering many of them, just our guesses and wish list. How many papers would we receive and include in the conference? How many people would attend our conference? How long the conference should be? Where it should be held? and so on. I am delighted to see that the communitys interest exceeded our estimates and we have received more than 240 submissions, from more than 30 countries, which enabled us to put together an excellent program.

Putting together a conference is a team effort. I am extremely honored to work with such a group of talented and devoted individuals. You will find the complete list of organizers in the proceedings; here I will only name a few of them. I will start with the driving force behind this conference, our honorary general chair, Gang Luo, without his energy, commitment and persistence, we may not have had the IHI conference this year. I must also thank the program committee co-chairs Henrique Andrade and Neil R. Smalheiser for their invaluable contributions not only during the paper review process, but also for their help and comments regarding every aspect of the conference, including Henriques help to create the first version of our conference web site. Later on, Mehmet Deveci and Daby M. Sow took over that task, constantly improving the content with additional information and kept it up to date. Buğra Gedik diligently handled the registrations, while Alper Yilmaz made sure that we were always on track with our budget and assisted with all of the final logistics transactions. Organizing a conference in a different location from where I am based meant that I needed a devoted local arrangement chair, and I was lucky to know Barış E. Süzek he was on top of every single detail regarding the local arrangements. Xue-Wen Chen, Albert M. Lai, and Deepak Turaga have done tremendous job in publicizing our conference, at times with many one-to-one emails. Our proceedings chair Tiffany Veinot not only worked with Sheridan for proceedings, but also helped putting together the program booklet. Special thanks go to Donna Cappo and April Mosqus from ACM for their patience and help in answering our endless questions, to Adrienne Griscti for initiating the ACM-Sheridan Proceedings Service, assisted by Lisa Tolles, for taking care of processing the papers in a timely manner. Jinbo Bi was our contact person for sponsorship and she helped us secure generous support from IBM, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Indiana University, Google Research, Hidola, and Siemens. We are of course also grateful for our sponsors for their financial support. Last but not least, I would like to thank the authors for providing the content of the program and the program committee and external reviewers for their hard work in carefully reviewing all of the submissions and providing feedback to the authors.

On behalf of the conference organizing committee, we hope you find many topics of interest in our program, and hope that you enjoy your stay in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.

Ümit V. Çatalyürek—IHI 2010 General Chair—The Ohio State University, USA