[SIMPDA 2014] Call for Participation

[Apologies if you receives multiple copies of this CFP]

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Fourth International Symposium on Data-driven Process Discovery and Analysis

############################## SIMPDA 2014 #################################

- http://simpda2014.di.unimi.it/ 

- IFIP Working Groups 2.6 and 2.12/12.4 - 

- Milano, Italy, November 19th-21st -

# About SIMPDA #

With the increasing automation of business processes, growing amounts of
process data become available. This opens new research opportunities for
business process data analysis, mining and modeling. The aim of the IFIP 2.6
- 2.12 International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis
is to offer a forum where researchers from different communities and the
industry can share their insight in this hot new field.

The Symposium will feature a number of keynotes illustrating advanced
approaches, shorter presentations on recent research, a competitive PhD
seminar and selected research and industrial demonstrations. This year the
symposium will be held in Milan, the city of Expo 2015.

        

# Call for Papers #

The IFIP International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and
Analysis (SIMPDA 2013) offers a unique opportunity to present new approaches
and research results to researchers and practitioners working in business
process data modeling, representation and privacy-aware analysis. 

The symposium will bring together leading researchers, engineers and
scientists from around the world. Full papers must not exceed 15 pages.
Short papers are limited to at most 4 pages. All papers must be original
contributions, not previously published or under review for publication
elsewhere. All contributions must be written in English and must follow the
LNCS Springer Verlag format. Templates can be downloaded from:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Accepted papers will be published in a pre-proceeding volume with an ISBN.
The authors of the accepted papers will be invited to submit extended
articles to a post-symposium proceedings volume which will be published in
the LNBIP series (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing,
http://www.springer.com/series/7911), scheduled for early 2014 (extended
papers length will be between 7000 and 9000 words). Around 10-15 papers will
be selected for publication after a second round of review.

-- Topics --

Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:

- Business Process modeling languages, notations and methods

- Data-aware and data-centric approaches 

- Variability and configuration of process models

- Process Mining with Big Data 

- Process simulation and static analyses

- Process data query languages

- Process data mining

- Privacy-aware process data mining

- Process metadata and semantic reasoning

- Process patterns and standards

- Foundations of business process models

- Resource management in business process execution

- Process tracing and monitoring

- Process change management and evolution

- Business process lifecycle

- Case studies and experience reports 

- Social process discovery

- Crowdsourced process definition and discovery

-- Workshop Format --

In accordance to our historical tradition of proposing SIMPDA as a
symposium, we propose an innovative format for this workshop:

The number of sessions depend on the number of submissions but, considering
the previous editions, we envisage to have four sessions, with 4-5 related
papers assigned to each session. A special session (with a specific review
process) will be dedicated to discuss research plan from PhD students.

Papers are pre-circulated to the authors that will be expected to read all
papers in advance but to avoid exceptional overhead, two are assigned to be
prepared with particular care,  making ready comments and suggestions. 

The bulk of the time during each session will be dedicated to open
conversations about all of the papers in a given session, along with any
linkages to the papers and discussions within an earlier session. 

The closing session (30 minutes), will include a panel about open challenges
during which every participant will be asked to assemble their
thoughts/project/ideas/goals/etc that they got out of the workshop.

# Call for PhD Research Plans #

The SIMPDA PhD Seminar is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the
world. The goal of the Seminar is to help students with their thesis and
research plans by providing feedback and general advice on how to use their
research results.

Students interested in participating in the Seminar should submit an
extended abstract describing their research. Submissions can relate to any
aspect of Process Data: technical advances, usage and impact studies, policy
analyses, social and institutional implications, theoretical contributions,
interaction and design advances, innovative applications, and social
implications.

Research plans should be at most of 4 page long and should be organized
following the following structure: 

Abstract: summarizes, in 5 line, the research aims and significance.

Research Question: defines what will be accomplished by eliciting the
relevant the research questions.

Background: defines the background knowledge providing the 5 most relevant
references (papers or books).

Significance: explains the relevance of the general topic and of the
specific contribution.

Research design and methods: describes and motivates the method adopted
focusing on: assumptions, solutions, data sources, validation of results,
limitations of the approach.

Research stage: describes what the student has done so far.

- SIMPDA PhD award -

A doctoral award will be given by the SIMPDA PhD Jury to the best research
plan submitted.

# Student Scholarships #

An application for a limited number of scholarships aimed at students coming
from emerging countries has been submitted to IFIP.

In order to apply, please contact paolo.ceravolo@unimi.it

# Keynote Speakers #

Jorge Cardoso

University of Coimbra, Portugal

- Compliance of Business Processes with Reference Models -

Reference models provide best practices to design effective and efficient
business processes. However, a main challenge is to evaluate how these best
practices are  implemented. One limitation of existing approaches is the
assumption that compliance can be determined using the notion of process
equivalence. Nonetheless, the use of equivalence algorithms is not suitable
since two models can have different structures but one process can still be
compliant with the other. This talk presents an approach to measure the
compliance of process models with reference models, which was used by a
German passenger airline using IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) reference
models. The talk also covers various initiatives to evaluate the quality and
understandability of process models.

 

# Industrial Talks #

 

Claudia Sebastiani

Creativi Quadrati, Partner openERP

 

- Business Process Measurement in small enterprises after the installation
of an ERP software -

We report the observation of the first six months of operation after the
installation of an ERP software in a group of small Italian enterprises
(some dealers of various  products and one manufacturer). Before the ERP, no
explicit process descriptions existed within the companies: the operations
were manually performed, using office automation software or legacy programs
that were not process oriented. The new ERP is equipped with a workflow
engine, a number of standard processes that should be followed by the users,
and a tracking system that logs the main steps of the processes. We use
process mining tools to analyze the events logged by the ERP during the
sales, the purchases and the manufacture cycles. Our aim is to 1) compare
the ideal processes suggested by the ERP with the real paths followed by the
users 2) describe the eventual adaptation of these paths, as the users
became acquainted with the ERP 3) highlight critical segments in terms of
time spent, iterations, etc. 4) compare the processes of different companies
that are in similar business areas. The final goal is to get a better
understanding of the processes and a rationalization of the operations. It
must be stressed that both the ERP and the main tools used are open source,
so that the process measurement is affordable even for very small (micro)
enterprises.

 

Gregorio Piccoli

Zucchetti

 

- Hierarchical clustering for managers -

Data Mining and Process Mining over big amount of data are today more and
more requested by companies. However managers do not have the necessary
competences for handling the results of analysis ran using these techniques.
For this reason data visualization is a key element to exploit the full
potential of data analysis. Zucchetti spa has developed an in-house approach
for constructing user-friendly data visualizers.

 

Gabriele Ruffatti

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica

 

- A living story: measuring quality of developments in a large industrial
software factory with Open Source Software -

Open Source has no more intrinsic value per se. Nowadays it is facing new
challenges, such as stimulating creativity and bringing innovation into
market. One of its major challenges consists in delivering valuable
outcomes, which requires a PMAI approach: Plan metrics and dimensions of
analysis, get Measures and global performance value from data, Assess
results and Improve processes by solving issues and removing bottlenecks.
Engineering Group uses Open Source Software to makes this happen.

Spago4Q, the analytic of the business intelligence suite SpagoBI, allows the
company to measure the quality of products, processes and services and to
monitor the continuous improvement of quality practices. The measurement and
enhancement of productivity complies with quality certifications such as ISO
and CMMi standards. QESTnd - an n-dimensional measurement model - allows to
collect performance values on three dimensions of analysis (Economical,
Social and Technical) in order to identify process areas that need
improvements. Drill-down capabilities provide both a unified view of the
global performance of the Labs and detailed views of the single process
dimensions.

 

# Organizers #

CHAIRS 

- Rafael Accorsi, University of Freiburg, Germany

- Paolo Ceravolo, Università  degli Studi di Milano, Italy

- Barbara Russo, Free University of Bozen - Bolzano, Italy

ADVISORY BOARD 

- Karl Aberer, EPFL, Switzerland

- Ernesto Damiani, Università  degli Studi di Milano, Italy

- Tharam Dillon, La Trobe University, Australia

- Dragan Gasevic, Athabasca University, Canada

- Erich Neuhold, University of Vienna, Austria

- Maurice van Keulen, University of Twente, The Netherlands

- Philippe Cudre-Mauroux , University of Fribourg, Switzerland

# Program Committee #

- Irene Vanderfeesten, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

- Maurice van Keulen, University of Twente, The Netherlands

- Manfred Reichert, University of Ulm, Germany

- Schahram Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

- Mohamed Mosbah, University of Bordeaux, France

- Meiko Jensen, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

- Helen Balinsky, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, UK

- Valentina Emilia Balas, University of Arad, Romania

- Karima Boudaoud, Ecole Polytechnique de Nice Sophia Antipolis, France

- George Spanoudakis, City University London, UK

- Richard Chbeir, University of Bourgogne, France

- Gregorio Martinez Perez, University of Murcia, Spain

- Ebrahim Bagheri, Ryerson University, Canada

- Jan Mendling, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria

- Farookh Hussain, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

- Marcello Leida, EBTIC (Etisalat BT Innovation Centre), UAE

- Wil Van der Aalst, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands

- Ronald Maier, University of Innsbruck, Austria

- Chintan Amrit, University of Twente, The Netherlands

- Marco Montali, Free Unviersity of Bozen - Bolzano, Italy

- Elizabeth Chang, University New South Wales, Australia

- Peter Spyns, Flemish Government, Belgium

- Angelo Corallo, University of Salento, Italy

- Antonio Mana Gomez, University of Málaga, Spain

- Mustafa Jarrar, Birzeit University, Palestinian Territory

- Isabella Seeber, University of Innsbruck, Austria

- Chi Hung, Tsinghua University, China

- Alessandra Toninelli, Engineering Group, Italy

- Haris Mouratidis, University of Brighton, UK

- Abder Koukam, University of Technology, UTBM France

- Fabrizio Maria Maggi, University of Tartu, Estonia

- Massimiliano  De Leoni, Eindhoven TU, Netherlands

- Edgar Weippl, TU Vienna, Austria

- Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa, Israel

- Jianmin Wang, Tsinghua University Beijing, China

- Minseok Song, UNIST, South Korea

- Roland Rieke, Fraunhofer SIT, Germany

- Josep Carmona, UPC - Barcelona, Spain

- Mark Strembeck, WU Vienna, Austria

- Matthias Weidlich, Imperial College, UK

- Mohamed Mosbah, University of Bordeaux

- Maria Leitner, University of Vienna, Austria

- Benoit Depaire, University of Hasselt, Belgium

- Barbara Weber, University of Innsbruck, Austria

- Babiga Birregah, University of Technology of Troyes, France

# Historical Information on Previous Editions #

SIMPDA was proposed in 2011 and 2012 by IFIP WG 2.6 and 2.12/12.4 as the
International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis. 

The symposium had around 30 attendees in 2011 and 20 in 2012. It featured a
number of keynotes illustrating new approaches, shorter presentations on
recent research, and a competitive PhD seminar, together with selected
research and industrial demonstrations. The authors of the accepted papers
have been invited to submit extended articles to a post-symposium
proceedings volume published in the Springer LNBIP series.

Several events and activities arose off these symposia, among the most
notables we have two Dagstuhl seminars: 

- Dagstuhl Seminar on Semantic Challenges in Sensor Networks, January 24-29,
2010.

- Dagstuhl Seminar on Unleashing Operational Process Mining, November 24-29,
2010. 

The venue was for both editions Campione d'Italia, the Italian enclave
surrounded by Swiss territory, on the shores of Lake Lugano.