ABSTRACT: I will address two distinct themes in process management. Both approaches are connected by an important and often-ignored aspect of process management: the need to understand and leverage process semantics. Both themes primarily address socio-technical processes (such as clinical processes), which are becoming increasingly important, with the growing recognition of the computational limits of full automation, the growth in popularity of crowd sourcing, the complexity and openness of modern organizations etc. The first theme involves dealing with the flexible, and sometimes dynamic, nature of the execution of human-mediated tasks. It is well-recognized that human execution does not always conform to predetermined coordination models, and is often error-prone. I will address the problem of semantically monitoring the execution of socio-technical processes to check for non-conformance, and the problem of recovering from (or compensating for) non-conformance. I will discuss a semantic solution to the problem, by leveraging semantically annotated process models to detect non-conformance, and using the same semantic annotations to identify compensatory human-mediated tasks. The second theme involves the use of semantic annotations in process analytics (with applications in clinical processes).

BIO:

Aditya Ghose is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wollongong. He leads a team conducting research into knowledge representation, agent systems, services, business process management, software engineering and optimization and draws inspiration from the cross-fertilization of ideas from this spread of research areas. He works closely with some of the leading global IT firms. Ghose is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers (Australia), President of the Service Science Society of Australia and served as Vice-President of CORE (and is a current member of its Executive), Australia’s apex body for computing academics, between 2010 and 2014. He holds PhD and MSc degrees in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, Canada (he also spent parts of his PhD candidature at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Tokyo) and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. In his spare time, Ghose explores how computer science can contribute to a better understanding of the history of civilization.