Researchers Add Unique Expertise to New Center

Two additional researchers have joined the newly formed Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision-Making (CCIDM) at The University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston (SHIS). The Center boasts recently recruited top researchers from across the U.S. in addition to some of the school’s current faculty.

“Our two newest recruits bring something unique to the Center,” said Jiajie Zhang, PhD, Doris L. Ross Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the UT School of Health Information Sciences, “They will not only be doing research, but will be able to apply their computer and engineering backgrounds to our research and translate it into real world applications through the creation of informatics tools.”

The CCIDM is a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of medical decision-making, cognitive foundations of health behaviors and the effective use of computer-based information technologies. These research efforts are guided by a commitment to improving the performance of individuals and teams in the health care system.

The Center’s two directors, Zhang and Vimla Patel, PhD, DSc, who will join the school as a professor later this year, want the Center to be a place where people come to look for state of the art research in cognition and decision making in healthcare. The recruitment of these leading researchers will aid in its success.

Thomas George Kannampallil

An expert in social networking, Thomas George Kannampallil will join the school as an assistant professor.

“I am excited to be joining the school,” said Kannampallil, “The level of expertise and quality of the researchers in the program is part of what attracted me to SHIS. For a junior faculty member, being able to work with world-renowned researchers like Drs. Patel, Shortliffe and Zhang is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Being part of such an environment where I can grow with the new center and at the same time be mentored by world-renowned faculty played a crucial part in my decision.”

Kannampallil received his bachelor of technology from the College of Engineering in Trivandrum, India and will receive his PhD from Pennsylvania State University in the coming months.  Over the past year, he has been working as a visiting researcher for the Beckham Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His primary research interest is in studying human interactions with technology, to develop an understanding of cognitive behaviors, errors encountered, social influences and strategies that are developed.

This can be used to design and develop better tools and technologies that can help users in different environments. For example, software tools that can provide physicians with a comprehensive awareness of events in an emergency room, where they are trying to balance different tasks in a dynamic environment.  Human interactions will be studied using logs of communication, system use and collaboration.

 “A research project that I have been discussing is to develop a spatial and temporal network representation of interactions between healthcare professionals in a critical care setting,” said Kannampallil.

This could be used for different purposes. For instance, studying the complex nature of work in critical care settings to identify errors, improve patient care processes, and workflows.

“Being a part of the Center provides me with a unique opportunity to work with researchers with different research backgrounds and expertise,” said Kannampallil, “This will help in developing novel approaches to solving challenging medical problems by combining approaches and methods from different fields such as cognitive science, computer science, and psychology.”


Xiaohui Kong, PhD

Cognitive science and artificial intelligence researcher, Xiaohui Kong, PhD, will also join the school as an assistant professor.

“For me joining this new Center not only means an exciting start of my academic career,” said Kong, “But more importantly, we are working on some ‘big’ problems in the medical environment. In the Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making, we have a shot to change the world and make it a much better place, through collaborating with many talented people in different fields.”

Kong received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and his bachelor’s degree form Zhenjiang University in China.  He has a research background in visual cognition, particularly in studying how humans use limited resources in visual cognition to solve complex problems through global perception and global thinking.

“We, as limited by our working memory, can only hold several ‘active’ pieces of information in our cognition at the same time,” said Kong.

For example, it would be hard to mentally calculate multiple digit multiplication. Although there is a huge amount of visual information that reaches the eyes at any moment, only a minor fraction of it is actually encoded.

Therefore, Kong believes how information is presented and visualized is critically important to how people perceive it and make decisions based on it . This is even more important for people when making life-critical decisions in real-time, like in many medical settings. For example, creating better user-interfaces on electronic medical records for clinicians.

“I am very excited to begin my work at the Center. It’s not surprising to me that it has attracted so many top researchers in different fields," said Kong, “Because it has many very rare if not completely unique attractions.”

by Rachel Christianson, School of Health Information Sciences