Saturday, August 31, 2013

Short Paper: Using natural user interfaces for collaborative process modelling in virtual environments

Just had a short paper accepted for Models and their Role in Collaboration (MoRoCo 2013), 22 September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus.  Submitted version of paper available here

Abstract: Modelling business processes for analysis or redesign usually requires the collaboration of many stakeholders. These stakeholders may be spread across locations or even companies, making co-located collaboration costly and difficult to organize. Modern process modelling technologies support remote collaboration but lack support for visual cues used in co-located collaboration. Previously we presented a prototype 3D virtual world process modelling tool that supports a number of visual cues to facilitate remote collaborative process model creation and validation. However, the added complexity of having to navigate a virtual environment and using an avatar for communication made the tool difficult to use for novice users. We now present an evolved version of the technology that addresses these issues by providing natural user interfaces for non-verbal communication, navigation and model manipulation.


Well done Erik!

Ross

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

CFP Update: 10th Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM 2014)

We would like to give you an update on the conference activities:

- Prof. John Mylopoulos (University of Trento, Italy) will give an APCCM keynote at the ACSW 2014 on "Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering"

- the PC list is finalised and can be viewed on http://2014.apccm.org/

- we have again a Best Paper Award (NZD 500.-) sponsored by University of Auckland and University of South Australia.

- Less than three weeks to the paper submission deadline (12 August 2013)!

We would very much appreciate if you could help us promoting the conference by distributing the call for papers enclosed throughout your networks.

A PDF version of the call can be downloaded from http://2014.apccm.org/files/APCCM2014_CallForPapers.pdf

We would also very much appreciate if you could start following the conference at Twitter:


and retweet information that will be posted on Twitter. The hashtag for the conference is #apccm2014

We are looking forward to meeting you in Auckland, New Zealand in January 2014.

Thank you,

Georg Grossmann and Motoshi Saeki

APCCM 2014 PC Co-Chairs

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Video: Direct Collada Importation to Open Sim

Fortune Truong, a Masters student I have been supervising for a minor project last semester, has just completed a nice native Collada uploading module for Open Sim.  The interaction consists of laying out a primitive with the desired dimensions, and then clicking it to bring up the Google Sketchup 3D Warehouse window to select an object.  The Collada mesh is then injected into the database backend of Open Sim directly, without any intermediate file manipulation by the user.

Video of work can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3b4bizEkXc.

Nice work Fortune!

Ross

Link: TAProViz'13 Workshop Programme

Our TAProViz workshop programme for BPM 2013 is now available online at:


Congratulations to those who were successful with their submissions.  

We are also very happy to announce that Prof. Hajo Reiers (TUE) will be delivering our keynote.

Ross

Program

Beijing, China - 26 August 2013 
13:15-13:30Opening
13:30-14:30
Keynote 
Hajo A. Reijers
14:30-15:00
Towards Enhancing Business Process Monitoring with Sonification  
Tobias Hildebrandt
15:00-15:30Coffee Break
15:30-16:00
A Navigation Metaphor to Support Mobile Workflow Systems  
Jorge Cardoso, Stefan Jablonski and Bernhard Volz
16:00-16:30
Evaluating KIPN for modeling KIP  
Joanne Netto, Flavia Santoro and Fernanda Baiao
16:30-17:00Community meeting
18:00-20:00Workshop Dinner

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Black Box Executable Optiportal Rendering with OpenGL

This year I have been supervising Steven Jonkers on a rendering technology honours project, looking at how to hook into OpenGL executables so that binaries will run on the QUT CUBE, sans modification. Steven has created some great technology to automatically hook into the applications so that they are rendered onto large segmented displays. The methods interrupts the GPU pipeline using windows message hooks, and implements a master-slave distributed renderer, allowing very low network overheads, even for large particle systems.  

The following video links show example OpenGL demonstrators running, without modification, on the OptiPortal in the QUT HPC department.  NB, move to end of video to see the OptiPortal renderings.

Shadow Maps - http://youtu.be/kLXQOqifrLM

2D Particle Simulation - http://youtu.be/qdbJNhl7lBI

HDR Demo - http://youtu.be/006wsuWlfFE

This is a great outcome for an honours thesis (nice work Steven!), and will continue as an ongoing project in liason with the QUT Cube team and HPC.

Thanks to Michael Rosemann for the "motivational" IS Honours scholarship for Steven.

Ross

Friday, April 26, 2013

2nd CFP: TAProViz¹13 Workshop at BPM 2013

TAProViz’13, 2nd International Workshop on Theory and Applications of Process Visualization, Beijing, China - 26 August 2013

In conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM2013)

Web Site: http://www.wst.univie.ac.at/topics/taproviz13

Workshop Goals

The representation of business process models has been a continuing research topic for many years now.  However, many process model representations have not developed beyond minimally interactive 2D icon-based representations of directed graphs and networks, with little or no annotation for information overlays.  In addition, very few of these representations have undergone a thorough analysis or design process with reference to psychological theories on data and process visualization.  This dearth of visualization research, we believe, has led to problems with BPM uptake in some organizations, as the representations can be difficult for stakeholders to understand, and thus remains an open research question for the BPM community.  In addition, business analysts and process modeling experts themselves need visual representations that are able to assist with key BPM life cycle tasks in the process of generating optimal solutions.

With the rise of desktop computers and commodity mobile devices capable of supporting rich interactive 3D environments, we believe that much of the research performed in computer human interaction, virtual reality, games and interactive entertainment have much potential in areas of BPM; to engage, provide insight, and to promote collaboration amongst analysts and stakeholders alike.  We believe this is a timely topic, with research emerging in a number of places around the globe, relevant to this workshop.

This is the second TAProViz workshop being run at BPM.  The intention this year is to consolidate on the results of last year's successful workshop by further developing this important topic, identifying the key research topics of interest to the BPM visualization community. 

Workshop Theme

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 such as: scalability, human-computer interaction, cognitive aspects, applicability of different approaches, collaboration, process evolution, run-time requirements of process instances and applications, 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
• 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
• 3D Process Visualization Approaches

Format of the Workshop

The ½ day workshop will comprise accepted papers and tool presentations. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. 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.
  
In addition, there will be a joint meeting of the participants, to continue the development of a process visualization research community that will continue to work together after the workshop.

Intended Audience

Researchers, practitioners and software vendors in the BPM space performing research into using graphics and interaction techniques to provide process visualizations across many topics will find this workshop to be of interest.

Important Dates

• Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 25 May 2013
• Notification of Acceptance: 25 June 2013
• Camera-ready version: 23 July 2013
• TAProViz Workshop: 26 August 2013

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 

Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages.  
Only papers in English will be accepted and must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere. Papers should be submitted in the « LNBIP» 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 site.  

Registration

Accepted papers imply that at least one of the authors will register for «(BPM2013)»  and present the paper at the TAProViz workshop.

Workshop Co-Chairs

• Ross Brown 
«r.brown@qut.edu.au» 
Information Systems Discipline, Science and Engineering Faculty 
Queensland University of Technology, Australia 
«http://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/brown8/» 

• Simone Kriglstein
«simone.kriglstein@univie.ac.at» 
SBA Research, Vienna, Austria 
«http://cs.univie.ac.at/simone.kriglstein»

• Stefanie Rinderle-Ma
«stefanie.rinderle-ma@univie.ac.at» 
Research Group Workflow Systems and Technology
University of Vienna, Austria 
«http://cs.univie.ac.at/stefanie.rinderle-ma» 

Program Committee

• Ralph Bobrik (Switzerland)
• Michael Burch (Germany) 
• Massimiliano De Leoni (Netherlands) 
• Remco Dijkman (Netherlands)
• Phillip Effinger (Germany)
• Kathrin Figl (Austria) 
• Hans-Georg Fill (Austria) 
• Sonja Kabicher-Fuchs (Austria) 
• Jens Kolb (Germany)
• Wendy Lucas (USA)
• Silvia Miksch (Austria) 
• Margit Pohl (Austria) 
• Rune Rasmussen (Australia) 
• Manfred Reichert (Germany)  
• Irene Vanderfeesten (Netherlands)
• Eric Verbeek (Netherlands) 
• Günter Wallner (Austria)

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Paper: A theoretical basis for using virtual worlds as a personalised process visualisation approach

Have just had a paper written with my PhD student Hanwen Guo, "A theoretical basis for using virtual worlds as a personalised process visualisation approach," accepted for the Human Centred Information Systems (HCIS) workshop at CaISE, 2013.

QUT eprints version is available here.

Abstract: Communication processes are vital in the lifecycle of BPM projects. With this in mind, much research has been performed into facilitating this key component between stakeholders. Amongst the methods used to support this process are personalized process visualisations. In this paper, we review the development of this visualization trend, then, we propose a theoretical analysis framework based upon communication theory. We use this framework to provide theoretical support to the conjecture that 3D virtual worlds are powerful tools for communicating personalised visualisations of processes within a workplace. Meta requirements are then derived and applied, via 3D virtual world functionalities, to generate example visualisations containing personalized aspects, which we believe enhance the process of communcation between analysts and stakeholders in BPM process (re)design activities.

Well done Hanwen!

Ross