Cindy Marling

Associate Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Specialty Medicine
Director, the SmartHealth Lab
Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701, USA

Phone: +1 740 593-1246
FAX: +1 740 593-0007
Email: marling@ohio.edu

Research Interests

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Case-Based Reasoning
  • Medical Informatics
  • Biomedical Engineering

    Classes Taught

  • CS 462/562: Database Systems I
  • CS 480/580: Artificial Intelligence
  • CS 642/BME 642: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
  • CS 682: AI: Case-Based Reasoning

    Current Research

    The 4 Diabetes Support System Project

    The 4 Diabetes Support System (4DSS) project is a collaborative effort with the Appalachian Rural Health Institute Diabetes and Endocrine Center. To avoid serious complications of diabetes, patients must maintain good blood glucose control. This involves managing insulin intake, diet, and exercise, as well as accounting for lifestyle changes, such as travel, shift work, or pregnancy. Advanced technologies provide patients and their physicians with ever increasing quantities of data, but interpreting this data and translating it into better care still requires time-consuming, manual effort. The goal of this project is to provide automated intelligent decision support to diabetes patients and their professional care providers.

    You can watch a brief Ohio Update video or read an Ohio University Medicine news article about this project. The paper "Case-Based Decision Support for Patients with Type 1 Diabetes on Insulin Pump Therapy", from the European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR-08), is available online.

    Additional information is available on The Appalachian Rural Health Institute and Diabetes.

    Machine Learning Models for Blood Glucose Prediction in Diabetes Management

    This SmartHealth Lab project enhances and extends the work begun on the 4DSS project. Machine learning models that predict blood glucose levels would enable or facilitate new applications of direct benefit to patients, including: alerts to immediately notify patients of impending problems; real-time recommendations enabling patients to prevent impending problems; and educational simulations showing the effects of different treatment choices or lifestyle options on blood glucose levels.

    Additional information is available here.

    Prior Research

    The Auguste Project

    The Auguste Project was a collaborative effort with the University Memory and Aging Center of Case Western Reserve University. Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) and Multimodal Reasoning (MMR) were explored in the context of planning the ongoing care of Alzheimer's Disease patients. This is a difficult task marked by cases that change over time, the multiple perspectives of professionals from different health care disciplines, and ethical considerations. The goals of the Auguste Project were to better understand the reasoning processes used in this task and to provide practical decision support tools for health care professionals.

    The papers "Case-Based Reasoning in the Care of Alzheimer's Disease Patients", from the International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR-01), and "Can a Computer Be a Caregiver?", from the AAAI-02 Workshop on Automation as Caregiver, are available online.

    Additional information is available on The Auguste Project and Alzheimer's Disease.

    The RoboCats

    RoboCup is an interdisciplinary effort to build a team of humanoid robots capable of beating human soccer teams in the World Cup by the year 2050. Intense international competition between now and then is expected to lead to numerous unforeseen scientific breakthroughs, commercial spinoffs and societal benefits. Ohio University researchers from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Mechanical Engineering collaborated to build the RoboCats. AI approaches, including CBR and MMR, were used to give the robots brains, allowing them to cooperate with teammates while thwarting the game strategies of their opponents. The RoboCats competed in RoboCup 2002, in Japan, RoboCup 2003, in Italy, and RoboCup 2004, in Portugal.

    The paper "Case-Based Reasoning for Planning and World Modeling in the RoboCup Small-Size League", from the IJCAI-03 Workshop on Issues in Designing Physical Agents for Dynamic Real-Time Environments: World Modeling, Planning, Learning, and Communicating, is available online. The paper "RoboCup for the Mechanically, Athletically and Culturally Challenged," from the AAAI-08 Workshop on What Went Wrong and Why, provides another perspective.

    Additional information is available on RoboCup .

    CAMPER

    The Case-Based Menu Planner Enhanced by Rules (CAMPER) combines CBR with rule-based reasoning (RBR) to plan nutritional menus. It was built as part of the dissertation, Integrating Case-Based and Rule-Based Reasoning in Knowledge-Based Systems, which was completed at Case Western Reserve University.

    The paper "Integrating Case-Based and Rule-Based Reasoning to Meet Multiple Design Constraints", by C.R. Marling, G.J. Petot and L.S. Sterling (1999), Computational Intelligence, 15(3):308-332, is available online.