International Joint Workshop of Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare andHYbrid Models for Coupling Deductive and Inductive ReAsoning – HC@AIxIA+HYDRA 2025 

Bologna (Italy), October 25-28, 2025 : https://sites.google.com/unical.it/hcaixia-hydra-2025/

CO-LOCATED with the 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2025) : https://ecai2025.org/

NEWS: SPECIAL TRACK + STUDENT AWARD 

=== Special Section for Summer‑School Alumni ===

Within the single main track, a dedicated section is reserved for papers authored by participants of the 1st AIxIA Summer School on Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare (Trento, Italy, July 2025). To highlight the impact of the School, we strongly encourage alumni to act as first (main) authors. Submissions will follow the same review process as standard papers but will be grouped together in the programme and proceedings.

=== Student Contributions and Best Student Paper Award ===

The workshop actively encourages submissions with students as authors, especially when a student is the first (main) contributor. To recognise outstanding work, the PC Chairs will confer a Best Student Paper Award, which includes a monetary prize sponsored by AIxIA and the HC@AIxIA Working Group.

== INITIAL NOTICE == 

This workshop is a joint event stemmed from the communities of the HC@AIxIA and HYDRA workshops, which have been held in separately up to 2024. Please refer to the respective websites for more information on the previous editions.

== INFORMATION ==

In a rapidly evolving world where AI is increasingly embedded in critical sectors, integrating advanced reasoning methods into practical applications not only enhances technological capabilities but also addresses pressing societal challenges, making this integration both useful and profoundly interesting. The joint HYDRA and HC@AIxIAworkshop provides a unique platform for exploring the intersection of foundational AI research and practical applications across multiple domains; it also brings together the research themes of hybrid deductive-inductive reasoning in artificial intelligence (HYDRA) and the application of AI in healthcare (HC@AIxIA). By exploring the synergies between advanced reasoning methods and their application across diverse domains, including but not limited to healthcare, the workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.

== CALL FOR PAPERS ==

The workshop welcomes original research contributions, summaries of recent work, and work-in-progress studies on frameworks, applications, and methodologies for combining deductive and inductive approaches. It invites a wide multidisciplinary spectrum of researchers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, and healthcare practitioners: submissions are welcome from a range of stakeholders, including Computer scientists, health informaticians, and emergency medicine experts; Public health experts, epidemiologists, clinicians, etc.; National and international public health agencies; Epidemic intelligence systems providers; NGOs and Agencies; Industry and startups. Collaborations across disciplines will bridge the gap between theory and practice and foster actionable AI-driven solutions across diverse domains.

Possible topics of interest are, but are NOT limited to:* Hybrid inductive-deductive approaches to AI* Integration of logic programming paradigms (e.g., ASP, CSP) in inductive scenarios* New methods for combining deductive and inductive systems* Knowledge representation and reasoning to enhance inductive processes* Evaluation of Hybrid Reasoning Methods* Ethical and social implications of hybrid AI systems* Machine learning and statistical methods for clinical decision support* Knowledge representation and formal reasoning in healthcare* Probabilistic graphical models and causal networks for clinical decision-making* Personalized medicine and computer-interpretable clinical guidelines* Ethical and legal considerations in medical AI* Machine learning methods, data mining, and statistical methods for clinical decision support* Probabilistic graphical models for clinical decision-making and causal networks* Learning, representation, and reasoning with time* Methods for diagnosis, treatment selection, treatment planning, and prognosis* Monitoring patients in healthcare* Ontologies and medical vocabularies* Support for natural language generation/understanding in connection with electronic patient records* Deductive and Inductive systems in eHealth scenarios* Tools for supporting authoring, execution, and maintenance of clinical protocols and guidelines* Tools for building and deployment of clinical decision-support systems.

== Submission Guidelines and Types of Submissions ==

Authors are invited to submit their manuscripts in PDF via the submission system here: https://chairingtool.com/conferences/aixia-hydra25/main-track?role=author.  - The workshop welcomes both full papers, possibly already submitted to other conferences or journals, and short papers, which are suggested for presenting work in progress, extended abstracts, software prototypes, or general overviews of research projects. The workshop also welcomes position and discussion papers. - All submissions must be in PDF format, written in English, and formatted according to the LNCS format (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). Full papers should not exceed 13 pages (including bibliography); short, position, and discussion papers should not exceed 6 pages (including bibliography). To ease the reviewing process, the authors of full papers may add an appendix (although reviewers are not required to consider it in their evaluation). 

=== Special Section for Summer‑School Alumni ===

Within the single main track, a dedicated section is reserved for papers authored by participants of the 1st AIxIA Summer School on Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare (Trento, Italy, July 2025: https://sites.google.com/unical.it/hc-aixia-sc-2025/). To highlight the impact of the School, we strongly encourage alumni to act as first (main) authors. Submissions will follow the same review process as standard papers but will be grouped together in the programme and proceedings.

=== Student Contributions and Best Student Paper Award ===

The workshop actively encourages submissions with students as authors, especially when a student is the first (main) contributor. To recognise outstanding work, the PC Chairs will confer a Best Student Paper Award, which includes a monetary prize sponsored by AIxIA and the HC@AIxIA Working Group.

== Submission Platform and Rolling‑Submission Model ==

We use ChairingTool (beta: https://chairingtool.com/) for the entire workflow. Please note that at the time of submission (i.e., June-September 2025) the software is still under active development. Occasional glitches have occurred, and may re‑appear. The Chairs sincerely apologize for that; they are in close contact with the developers, who are very responsive. With the community’s cooperation we expect a smooth process to the end. In order to facilitate authors' work, we adopt a rolling submission model. While submission management system is open, authors are invited to submit their contributions at any time before the deadlines. The review process will be continuous, and authors will receive feedback as soon as possible, so to spread out the review work for the program committee and give authors feedback more quickly. This flexible submission timeline encourages early submissions. Cut-off dates are set to ensure that all contributions are reviewed and accepted in time for the workshop. Although authors are encouraged to submit their works as early as possible to benefit from this continuous review process, submissions are still welcome until the last cut-off date. 

=== Transparent Reviews & Discussion ===

As soon as a review is filed, it becomes immediately visible to the authors. At any point, authors and reviewers can open a discussion thread inside the system. Both authors and reviewers are supposed to use discussion threads rather than e‑mail whenever possible to keep the process traceable. When the PCs judge that reviews (plus any discussion) are sufficient, one of three decisions is issued: - Accept: paper is accepted as is. - Reject (final): paper is declined with no further appeal.     - Revision: a revised version is requested (occasionally preceded by a short rebuttal). Resubmit through the revision form.The cycle repeats until the paper is accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

=== Forms & Version Tracking ===

Each submission has two forms:Initial Submission Form, with standard mandatory fields.Revision Form: all fields optional; it is (only if and when needed) used to upload new versions of a paper, so to track document changes between versions. The system automatically links versions and keeps a full history.

=== Oversight, Support and Expected Benefits ===

Every paper is monitored by its reviewers and the PC chairs. Chairs may step in at any time to resolve issues or clarify policy. If needed, contact the chairs via the platform (preferred) or by e‑mail. This workflow aims to surface the best work, reduce unjustified rejections and improve paper quality before publication. We rely on everyone’s good faith to prevent misuse of the system. We genuinely believe that the community can handle this process and that it will yield clear benefits for authors, reviewers, and the field at large. Please contact us at hcaixia-hydra@googlegroups.com for any issue.

== Proceedings and post-Proceeding (journal) == 

• - All accepted original contributions (both full and short) will be part of the proceedings of the workshop, and will be published in the CCIS book series by Springer. 
• - Non-original communications will be given visibility on the workshop website including a link to the original publication, if already published. - If a sufficient number of high-quality papers are accepted, Chairs will also consider the publication of a selection on an international journal special issue (TBD).

== Working Group Meeting ==

All authors of accepted papers are invited to participate in the annual meeting of the AI and Healthcare Working Group of AIxIA, which will be held right after the workshop. 

== Venue ==

The workshop will be held in Bologna, Italy; the event is organized by ECAI 2025. 

== Contacts == 

All questions about submissions should be emailed to hcaixia-hydra@googlegroups.com.

== Important dates (TENTATIVE) == 

Please visit https://sites.google.com/unical.it/hcaixia-hydra-2025/call-for-papers

NOTE: notifications will be released continuously, as soon as possible after submissions, and no later than the subsequent cut-off date. The date for the notification of acceptance reported above refers to the 3rd cut-off submissions, and in any case for all submissions. 

== Committees ==

=== Program Chairs ===

• * Pierangela Bruno, University of Calabria
• * Francesco Calimeri, University of Calabria
• * Francesco Cauteruccio, University of Salerno
• * Mauro Dragoni, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
• * Fabio Stella, Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca
• * Giorgio Terracina, University of Calabria

=== Program Committee ===

• Mario Alviano, University of Calabria (Italy)
• Alessia Amelio, University G. d'Annunzio Chieti–Pescara (Italy)
• Luca Anselma, Università di Torino (Italy)
• Gianluca Apriceno, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy)
• Francesco Bellocchio, Fresenius Medical Care (Italy)
• Paola Berchialla, University of Turin (Italy)
• Andreas Brännström, Umeå University (Sweden)
• Andrea Brunello, University of Udine (Italy)
• Davide Chicco, Università di Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
• Stefano Cirillo, University of Salerno (Italy)
• Marco Colussi, University of Milan (Italy)
• Richard Comploi-Taupe, Siemens (Austria)
• Anthony Constantinou, Queen Mary University of London (UK)
• Erica Coppolillo, University of Calabria (Italy)
• Alessandro Dal Palù, University of Parma (Italy)
• Edoardo De Rose, University of Calabria (Italy)
• Luigi Di Biasi, University of Salerno (Italy)
• Carmine Dodaro, University of Calabria (Italy)
• Jonas Ehrhardt, Helmut-Schmidt-University (Germany)
• Esra Erdem, Sabanci University (TR)
• Grazia Ferrara, University of Salerno (Italy)
• Zini Floriano, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy)
• Francesca Gasparini, Università Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
• Daniele Germano, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy)
• René Heesch, Helmut Schmidt University (Germany)
• Antonio Ielo, Università della Calabria (Italy)
• Alberto Lavelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy)
• Fabrizio Lo Scudo, University of Calabria (Italy)
• Peter Lucas, Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands)
• Cinzia Marte, University of Calabria (Italy)
• Giuseppe Mazzotta, University of Calabria (Italy)
• Giovanni Melissari, DLVSystem (Italy)
• Lucia Migliorelli, Università Politecnica Delle Marche (Italy)
• Sara Moccia, Università degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti – Pescara (Italy)
• Stefania Montani, Università del Piemonte Orientale (Italy)
• Brais Muñiz Castro, University of Coruña (Spain)
• Rafael Peñaloza, University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
• Pierpaolo Pierpaolo, University of Glasgow (UK)
• Luigi Portinale, Università del Piemonte Orientale (Italy)
• Alessandro Quarta, University of Calabria (Italy)
• Marta Ranzini, Humanitas Research Hospital (Italy)
• Fabio Rinaldi, IDSIA USI-SUPSI (Switzerland)
• Niccolò Rocchi, University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
• Luca Romeo, University of Macerata (Italy)
• Lucia Sacchi, University of Pavia (Italy)
• Leonardo Sanna, Fondazione Bruno Kessler - FBK (Italy)
• Marco Scutari, IDSIA (Switzerland)
• Alberto Signoroni, University of Brescia (Italy)
• Christel Sirocchi, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
• Germano Stefano, University of Oxford (UK)
• Gioacchino Sterlicchio, Polytechnic University of Bari (Italy)
• Manuel Striani, University of Piemonte Orientale (Italy)
• Kai-Yen Wang, Qualcomm Technologies Inc., CPU Design (USA)
• Paolo Zaffino, Magna Graecia University of Catanzaro (Italy)
• Alessio Zanga, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
• Riccardo Zese, Università degli Studi di Ferrara (Italy)