Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Paper: Design insights into embedding virtual reality content into life skills training for people with intellectual disability

Just had paper accepted for OzCHI 2016 - "Design insights into embedding virtual reality content into life skills training for people with intellectual disability" with my colleagues Laurianne Sitbon, Lauren Fell, Margot Brereton (QUT), and Stewart Koplick and Chris Beaument (Endeavour Foundation).  Paper can be found here.

Abstract - This paper presents some lessons learnt from the co-creation, within a support organisation, of a virtual world dedicated to practicing life skills for people with intellectual disability. The progression of the project throughout successive stages has indicated what people would want to see and practice in a such a virtual world, which would not have been found after a single development iteration. These desires include the representation of public spaces, social interactions and disruptions. Based on initial trials, we propose some new design insights for further implementation of such virtual worlds in training sessions with the use of immersive headsets. While immersive headsets have been demonstrated to enhance the learning experience, they also visually isolate the person in training from the trainer. To overcome this isolation, a new design concept is presented which allows the teacher to communicate, using gestures, with the immersed student.

Ross


Monday, September 12, 2016

EditedProc: Preface to the 5th International Workshop on Theory and Application of Visualizations and Human-centric Aspects in Processes.

Preface to our workshop at BPM 2016 - TAProViz2016. Collaboration with my Austrian Friends - Stefanie Rinderle-Ma and Simone Kriglestein.  Preface contents can be found here.

Abstract: This is the fifth TAProViz workshop being run at the 14th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM). The intention this year is to consolidate on the results of the previous successful workshops by further developing this important topic, identifying the key research topics of interest to the BPM visualization community. Towards this goal, the workshop topics were extended to human computer interaction and related domains.

Submitted papers were evaluated by at least three program committee members, in a double blind manner, on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality and exposition. Three full papers were accepted for presentation at the workshop from five submissions.

The papers address a number of topics in the area of process model visualization, in particular:

– Visualization of Layout Metrics for Business Process Models

– Eye Tracking and Process of Process Modeling

– Visually Comparing Process Dynamics

Journal: On the (virtual) getting of wisdom: immersive 3D interfaces for eliciting spatial information from experts, J. Spat. Stat.

Have had a journal paper accepted for Spatial Statistics (Elsevier).  Product of my collaboration with Kerrie Mengersen and Peter Bruza.  Paper can be found here

Abstract: Expert information is a valuable resource in developing robust spatial models to improve understanding and prediction of systems in health, environment, business and society. However, getting experts to reliably activate and encode what they know has proven to be an elusive goal. A root cause of this elusiveness is the fact that expert knowledge is largely tacit, i.e., experts struggle to describe what they know. The imperative to address this goal is increasing. There is a constant need for better models of expert knowledge in organizations, much observational data is sparse and inadequate for spatial modelling, and many domains have knowledgeable workers leaving in numbers. Interviews are often used for eliciting expert knowledge, due to their ease of implementation. However, there is evidence that a lack of appropriate stimuli reduces the quality of knowledge elicited. This paper explores the use of immersive 3D virtual worlds for improved knowledge elicitation, due to their priming effects on memory recall. A case study on habitat prediction for a rock wallaby species is presented, in which the new approach is trialed. This paper is one of the first that aims to combine new virtual spatial technology with expert elicitation for improved spatial statistical modelling.


BookChap: A concept for collaborative business process modeling in interactive spaces

Have had a book chapter accepted.  Product of work with my friends Alex Nolte, at Bochum and Craig Ainsworth, at Middlesex University. Book chapter can be found here
Abstract: Analyzing and redesigning business processes is a complex task. It requires the collaboration of multiple actors such as process stakeholders, domain experts and others. Current approaches mainly focus on collaborative modeling workshops where participants verbally contribute their perspective on a process along with ideas on how to potentially improve it. These workshops are supported by modeling experts who facilitate the workshop, and modelers who translate participants’ verbal contributions into representations of a modeling notation and integrate them into a process model. This setting however limits participation to verbal contributions and therefore negatively affects their motivation to contribute during a workshop since they will mostly have to wait until they are allowed to contribute. Unpleasant experiences in the course of participation can cause reluctance when everyday work practice has to be changed in accordance with the results of a workshop. Furthermore, this setting makes workshop outcomes strongly dependent on facilitators and modelers since they handle all the changes that are potentially applied to a process. Interactive technology such as smartphones, tablets, digital tabletops and interactive walls provide the opportunity for participants to directly interact with process models thus potentially increasing their motivation to contribute. Interactive spaces where different interactive technologies are combined also allow for orchestrating collaboration since it is possible to form breakout groups on demand or work on a process model in solitude before coming back together. Consequently, these possibilities support the balance between the impact of facilitators and modelers on the one side and the influence of the participants on the other side. In this paper we will describe an approach that combines different modes of collaboration using different interactive devices in order to not only increase the quality of process models but also increase the involvement of participants and make workshops a more efficient and motivating experience.

Paper: A 3D visualization approach for process training in office environments, COOPIS 2016

Have had a paper accepted for COOPIS 2016, part of a collaboration with my friends Banu Aysolmaz and Hajo Reijers, at VU Amsterdam. Paper can be found here.

Abstract: Process participants need to learn how to perform in the context of their business processes. Process training is challenging due to cognitive difficulties in relating process model elements to real world concepts. In this paper we present a 3D Virtual World (VW) process training approach for office environments. In this VW, process participants can experience a process in an immersive environment. They inter- act with VW representations of process elements in changing locations, based on process activities. By means of embodied 3D representation, deep immersion and engagement in this environment, enhancements in long term memory learning and episodic memory usage for knowledge retrieval are expected. Our illustration of an example process model shows the applicability of the approach. We list a number of future directions to extend the use and the benefits.

Ross

Sunday, July 31, 2016

CFP: 2017 Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW 2017)

========================================================================
CALL FOR PAPER

2017 Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW 2017)
Geelong, Victoria, Australia (only 70 km away from Melbourne City)
January 31 – February 3, 2017

Paper submission : August 8, 2016
Author notification: October 17, 2016
Camera-ready full papers: November 7, 2016.

========================================================================

Main Features:

*** Industry track for research collaborations
*** World class keynote speakers
*** A number of Special Issues
*** A flagship annual conference in Oceania region
*** Student travel grants
*** Close to Australia Open and Great Ocean Road
========================================================================
The Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW) is the premier event for Computer Science researchers in Australasia that is organised by the Computing Research and Education (CORE) Association of Australasia .
ACSW consists of several conferences covering a wide range of topics in Computer Science and related area. This conference is attended by many national and international delegates comprising HDR students and distinguished academics from all over the world in computer science. The conference week has been running in some form continuously since 1978. This makes it one of the longest running conferences in Computer Science.
Authors are invited to submit papers that present original and unpublished research on topics directly to the relevant conference.
As with previous years, registration for ACSW will enable delegates to attend sessions in any conference participating or co-located in the Australasian Computer Science Week.
The proceedings of this event is aimed to be published by the ACM Digital Library


========================================================================
========================================================================
List of ACSW 2017 satellite conferences (more details can be found at the ACSW conference website)

1.     The 39th Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC 2017)
2.     The Twelfth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM 2017)
3.     Eighteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2017)
4.     Australasian Information Security Conference (AISC 2017)
5.     14th Australasian Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (AusPDC 2017)
6.     17th Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC)
7.     Australasian Web Conference (AWC) 2017
8.     Interactive Entertainment 2017
9.     Australasian Computing Doctoral Consortium (ACDC17)
10.  Australasian Early Career Researchers Workshop (AECRW)
11.  Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management

Special Issues

Selected high quality ACSW 2017 submissions will be invited to perform solid extend to submit to the following Special Issues

1.     International Journal of Computers and Applications, Special Issue for ACSW17 (confirmed).
2.     IEEE Transactions on Big Data, Foundations for Big Data Security and Privacy (confirmed)
3.     Future Generation Computer Systems, Social networking Big Data (confirmed)
4.     More Special Issue will be updated at the conference website



Enquires for ACSW 2017, please contact the executive general chair, Dr Shui Yu, email: syu@deakin.edu.au. For details about a specific satellite conference, please contact the TPC chairs, respectively.

Saturday, May 14, 2016

CFP: ReVISE'16 - Requirements for Visualizations in Systems Engineering

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Call for papers: ReVISE'16 - Requirements for Visualizations in Systems
Engineering

Workshop on the Requirements Engineering Conference RE'16 in Beijing,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Submissions until: June 20, 2016
Notification to authors: July 8, 2016
Camera ready version: July 24, 2016
Workshop: Sept 13, 2016

Topics:
Visual knowledge representations and data visualizations form a
particular kind of information systems in their own right, which deserve
a high degree of scientific interest. Information systems for
visualization are, e. g., analytical diagrams embedded into user
interfaces, model editors and domain-specific model visualizations,
dashboards, and interactive info-graphics. These kinds of systems are
characterized by specific functionalities that come with their own class
of requirements.

Possible research directions for submissions to the workshop include,
but are not restricted to:
- How can information demands towards visualizations be expressed as
part of a system engineering procedure?
- How can it be methodically ensured that visualizations are understood
unambiguously by different people?
- How can appropriate visualization types for the support of specific
system engineering tasks be systematically identified?
- How do domain-specific software-development procedures look like in
which visualizations are created as part of a model-driven visualization
(MDV) process?
- In which way do different cultural backgrounds of visualization users
potentially influence the specification of requirements towards
visualizations?

Additionally, if your paper addresses one or more of the following
topics, please consider to submit it:
- Analysis of the quality and efficacy of visualizations
- Notations and symbols in conceptual models
- Design concepts for interactive visualizations
- Evaluation and improvement of existing visualization techniques
- Cognitive aspects of communicating knowledge via visualizations
- Use of models and visual notations in practice
- Innovative interface concepts for user interaction with software
- Software-supported creation and use of information graphics
- Tool support for creating interactive visualizations
- Use of visualization in business process modeling
- Use of visualizations in collaborative settings
- Teaching and training of visualization design and use

Workshop Format:
The 1-day workshop will consist of a keynote, paper presentations for
full and short papers, as well as a demo-oriented session where recent
applications and prototypes displaying novel ideas in visualization
research are showcased. Each demo will be introduced in a short
presentation, and then demonstrated live with the running software.

Submission:
The following types of submissions will be accepted:
- Full papers, up to 10 pages
- Short papers (work in progress, research agendas, industry reports),
up to 6 pages
- Demo papers (demos, prototypes), 2 to 4 pages

Please upload your submission at
formatting style at
to format your work.

Each submission will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 members of the
program committee. Based on the reviews and review scores the organizing
committee will make a selection of papers to be accepted for
publication. The workshop proceedings are planned to be published in the
IEEE digital library.

Submissions for the demo track do not need to fulfill the same degree of
scientific justification as paper submissions, and do not have to
explicitly address individual research questions. In turn, demo
submissions are required to be highly innovative and distinctively
creative compared to the state-of-the-art of existing approaches and
products.

Program Committee:
Craig Anslow, Middlesex University London
Ross Brown, Queensland University of Technology
Sepideh Ghanavati, Carnegie Mellon University; Luxembourg Institute of
Science & Technology
Miguel Goulaõ, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Irit Hadar, University of Haifa
Dimitris Karagiannis, University of Vienna
Sybren de Kinderen, University of Duisburg-Essen
Simone Kriglstein, University of Vienna
Meira Levy, Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Ramat Gan
Alexander Nolte, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Erik Proper, Radboud University; Luxembourg Institute of Science &
Technology
Hajo Reijers, VU University Amsterdam
Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa
Jean-Sébastien Sottet, Luxembourg Institute of Science & Technology
Stefan Strecker, FernUniversität in Hagen
Barbara Weber, University of Innsbruck
William Wong, Middlesex University London

Organizers:
Jens Gulden, University of Duisburg-Essen, Information Systems and
Enterprise Modeling, Universitätsstr. 9, 45141 Essen, Germany, Tel: +49
201 183-2719, jens.gulden@uni-due.de

Dirk van der Linden, University of Haifa, Department of Information
Systems, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel, Tel: +972 4 8288366,

Banu Aysolmaz, VU University of Amsterdam, Business Informatics Group,
De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Tel: +31 20 59


Sunday, May 8, 2016

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Paper: Augmenting process elicitation with visual priming: An empirical exploration of user behaviour and modelling outcomes

We have just recently published a new journal paper in the Information Systems Journal on our virtual worlds elicitation work in BPM - "Augmenting process elicitation with visual priming: An empirical exploration of user behaviour and modelling outcomes."

QUT Eprints is here, with Journal DOI.  The work was performed by my PhD student Joel Harman along with my collaborators at QUT, Metasonic and University of Vienna.

Well done Joel!


Abstract


Business process models have become an effective way of examining business practices to identify areas for improvement. While common information gathering approaches are generally efficacious, they can be quite time consuming and have the risk of developing inaccuracies when information is forgotten or incorrectly interpreted by analysts. In this study, the potential of a role-playing approach to process elicitation and specification has been examined. This method allows stakeholders to enter a virtual world and role-play actions similarly to how they would in reality. As actions are completed, a model is automatically developed, removing the need for stakeholders to learn and understand a modelling grammar. An empirical investigation comparing both the modelling outputs and participant behaviour of this virtual world role-play elicitor with an S-BPM process modelling tool found that while the modelling approaches of the two groups varied greatly, the virtual world elicitor may not only improve both the number of individual process task steps remembered and the correctness of task ordering, but also provide a reduction in the time required for stakeholders to model a process view.


Monday, March 21, 2016

1st CFP: TAProViz’16 5th International Workshop on Theory and Application of Visualizations and Human-centric Aspects in Processes

TAProViz’16 5th International Workshop on Theory and Application of Visualizations and Human-centric Aspects in Processes

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 19 September 2016 


In conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM2016

========================
Call for Papers
========================

Visualizations can make the structure and dependencies between elements in processes accessible in order to support users who need to analyze process models and their instances.  
However, effectively visualizing processes in a user-friendly way is often a big challenge, especially for complex process models which can consist of hundreds of process components (e.g., process activities, data flows, and resources) and thousands of running process instances in different execution states. 

Many challenges remain to be addressed within the broad area of process visualization, human interaction and user led design such as: scalability, human-computer interaction, cognitive aspects, applicability of different approaches, collaboration, process evolution, run-time requirements of process instances and applications, user-engagement etc.  

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): 

Visual Metaphors in Processes 
Visual Design and Aesthetics for Processes 
Visualization of Dynamic Data in Processes 
Change Visualization for Processes 
Interface and Interaction Techniques for Process Visualization  
Visualization Techniques for Collaboration and Distributed Processes  
Visualization of Large-scale Processes 
Cognition and Perception in Process Visualization 
Evaluation and User Studies of Process Visualization 
Evaluation Methods for Human Aspects in PAIS 
Visual Modeling Languages 
Analysis Techniques and Visualization for Processes 
Process Visualization of Large Screens 
Mobile Process Visualization 
Visualization Tools and Systems for Processes 
Visualization Techniques for Processes 
Process Visualization and Sonification 
Virtual World Process Visualization 
Immersive Process Modeling Approaches 
Human Computer Interaction Design Applied to Process Systems 
3D Process Visualization Approaches 
Human-centric aspects in business process management 
User-centered design for BPM 
User Interface design for Processes 

Format of the Workshop
The half day workshop will comprise accepted papers and tool evaluations. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee.  

This year will also include a new innovation in the programme. Part of the workshop time (depending on the number of prototype submissions) will be set aside for focus group assessments of tools. We will be requesting tool report authors, successful workshop paper authors and panel members attending BPM, to assist in the assessment of demonstration visualization techniques and software. This evaluation process will be a service to attendees, as these heuristic assessments can be written up later as separate papers, or by the workshop chairs as an aggregated workshop outcome. Such evaluations will be an exciting addition to the workshop, as people experienced in Information Visualization, BPM, HCI and related fields, will provide detailed feedback on your prototypes. The evaluation approach is largely in the hands of the tool report writers, but at a minimum, should involve direct interaction with your software and some form of validation via a questionnaire. 

All accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series. There will be a single LNBIP volume dedicated to the proceedings of all BPM workshops. As this volume will appear after the conference, there will be informal proceedings during the workshop. At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop and present the paper.  

Important Dates
Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 27 May 2016 
Notification of Acceptance: 27 June 2016 
Camera­‐ready version: 18 July 2016 
TAProViz Workshop: 19 September 2016 
Paper Submission
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. 

Three types of submissions are possible:  

(1) full papers (12 pages long) reporting mature research results  
(2) position papers reporting research that may be in preliminary stage that has not yet been evaluated  
(3) tool reports, to be evaluated at the workshop 

Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages. Tool reports should include a brief evaluation plan as an appendix, for the evaluation session at the workshop on the day. 

Only papers in English will be accepted and must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere. Papers should be submitted in the « LNBIP http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-791344-0 » format. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper/position paper/tool report). 

All accepted workshop papers will be published by Springer as a post-workshop proceedings volume in the series Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP). Hard copies of these proceedings will be shipped to all registered participants approximately four months after the workshops, while preliminary proceedings will be distributed during the workshop. 

Submitted papers will be evaluated, in a double blind manner, on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. Papers should clearly establish their research contribution and the relation to the theory and application of process visualization. 

Papers (in PDF format) should be submitted electronically via the «EasyChair https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=taproviz2016»  

Registration
Accepted papers imply that at least one of the authors will register for the «(BPM2016) http://bpm2016.uniriotec.br/ » and present the paper at the TAProViz workshop. 

Further workshop information is available from the website: http://wst.univie.ac.at/topics/taproviz16/

Hope to see you at TAProViz'16!

Thanks and best regards,

Ross Brown
Simone Kriglstein
Stefanie Rinderle-Ma


TAProViz Organising Committee