August 2000, Vol. 17, No. 8 IAAI Conference LifeCode solution dubbed one of "Best" by AAAI A-Life Medical Inc. (San Diego; www.alifemedical.com) received the "Best in Practical Innovations of Intelligent Systems Applications" award for its LifeCode application from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (Menlo Park, Calif.; www.aaai.org). A-Life Medical and the other five application winners were honored at the Innovative Application of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) conference in early August. The honor is presented to companies "whose solutions have demonstrated measurable real-life benefits while implemented successfully in industrial, government, scientific and educational settings," AAAI sources said. Criteria for this award included the innovative nature of the technology, the usefulness of the application and the level of success in deployment. "This award represents a milestone in A-Life's mission to use artificial intelligence to automate the medical coding and data mining industry in order to streamline their processes and ensure HCFA compliance," said Mark Morsch, director of Natural Language Technology at A-Life Medical and co-author for the LifeCode entry. LifeCode's system uses natural language processing to teach a computer to read narrative text, extract medical facts and automatically assign procedure codes and diagnosis codes. It also has a "self-awareness" feature that recognizes its own limits of competence and will request help from human experts as necessary. Daniel Heinze, A-Life's co-founder and CTO, said that "LifeCode's ability to formalize and store every fact that was considered in the coding process also makes it a powerful data-mining tool. For human coders, there just isn't the time or money [to] do [it]." Other AAAI winners were SciComp Inc. of Austin, Texas; Smart Media Institute of Dublin, Ireland; SRA International Inc., located in Fairfax, Va.; the city of Hong Kong and Advanced Object Technologies Ltd., also of Hong Kong; and AI Lab, located at the University of California, Los Angeles. The AAAI is a non-profit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and facilitate the embodiment of such understanding in machines. Table of Contents Web Site © Copyright 2000 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 2555 Cumberland Parkway, Suite 299, Atlanta, GA 30339 USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com Web: www.lionheartpub.com