Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Paper: Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education : remembering the past, understanding the present and imagining the future

Have had a conference paper accepted along with (ahem) a few other authors who perform virtual worlds research in Australia. The paper will be presented at ascilite 2013, the paper is available here.


Abstract - 3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area.

Ross

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Video: Virtual World as a Process Modelling Cultural Probe

This is a video of a virtual world we have developed for eliciting expert information from stakeholders. The intention is that the virtual world prompts the user to remember more about their work processes. Our example shows a sparse visualisation of the University of Vienna Department of Computer Science.  This part of a collaboration with Simone Kriglstein, Sonja Kabicher-Fuchs and Stefanie Rinderle-Ma at the University of Vienna.


The video can be found here.

Ross

Paper: Storyboard augmentation of process model grammars for stakeholder communication

Just had a paper accepted for IVAPP 2014, "Storyboard augmentation of process model grammars for stakeholder communication," coauthored with my colleague Simone Kriglstein from the University of Vienna.  Paper was the product of an Honours (First Class) project by Kathleen Nardella at QUT.  Paper can be found here.

Abstract - Process models are often used to visualize and communicate workflows to involved stakeholders. Unfortunately, process modeling notations can be complex and need specific knowledge to be understood. Storyboards, as a visual language to illustrate workflows as sequences of images, provide natural visualization features that allow for better communication, to provide insight to people from non-process modelling expert domains. This paper proposes a visualization approach using a 3D virtual world environment to visualize storyboards for business process models. A prototype was built to present its applicability via generating output with examples of five major process model patterns and two non-trivial use cases. Illustrative results for the approach show the promise of using a 3D virtual world to visualize complex process models in an unambiguous and intuitive manner.

Ross

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Invite: QUT Games Student Showcase!


QUT’s Science and Engineering Faculty is pleased to invite you to the QUT Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment (BGIE) End of Year Showcase.

Date: Friday 1st November 2013

Time: 5:00pm – 9pm (5:30pm Proceedings Start)

Venue: The Cube, P Block, Gardens Point Campus, QUT, 4001, Map - GP Location Map

RSVP: Please RSVP to Ross Brown, (Email: r.brown@qut.edu.au)

Come and see demonstrations of the best polished and published games created by BGIE degree students. The show is an opportunity for you and other industry to meet our graduating students and see their outstanding work.

Jason Harwood (Halfbrick Studios) will be guest speaker for the night.
       
Have fun playing these new games and catch up with friends and colleagues from the industry!

Feel free to pass this invite along to other interested parties.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Scholarship: (Honours) Virtual Worlds & S-BPM funded by Metasonic

Honours Scholarship available
An Honours Scholarship specific to a project that looks at the use of virtual worlds and related 3D visualisations with Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) paradigm is now available, to commence from Jan 2014. The scholarship will provide a living allowance of $13,000.00 per annum. You will get the chance to work with local and international experts and will be exposed to advanced R&D training and development, that can support both an academic or commercial research oriented career path.

Requirements to apply:
1. Completed a Bachelor of IT, Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment, or equivalent, with GPA of at least 5 (on a 7 point scale);
2. High grades of 6 and above in relevant QUT games development units, such as, INB381, INB382, INB383, Interaction Design Units or equivalent from another institution.


Selection Criteria:
1. A genuine interest and aptitude for research;
2. Ability to work as a team and independently;
3. Excellent written and oral communication skills;
4. Sound understanding, as indicated by example projects, of the design and implementation of 3D virtual worlds and related game engine development;
5. Detailed understanding and interest in Interaction Design;
6. Time and project management.

If interested, please email your CV and a statement addressing the selection criteria to Ross Brown (r.brown@qut.edu.au). Applications close on Oct 25th 2013.

Scholarship: S-BPM Honours/Masters @ QUT funded by Metasonic

For my Colleague Wasana Bandara, reply to her email in this message

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

Honours Scholarship available
An Honours Scholarship specific to a project that looks at the Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) paradigm is now available, to commence from Jan 2014. The scholarship  will provide a living allowance of $13,000.00 per annum. You will get the chance to work with local and international experts and will be exposed to advanced R&D training and development, that can support both an academic or commercial research oriented career path.

Requirements to apply:
1. Completed a Bachelor of IT or Bachelor of Business with the GPA of at least 5 (in a 7 point scale)
2. Completed INB320 (Business Process Modelling) unit with a final grade of 6 or above OR proven competency of business process modelling
3. Completed INB321 (Business Process Management) unit with a final grade of 6 or above OR proven competency of the fundamentals of Business Process Management


Selection Criteria:
1. A genuine interest and aptitude for research
2. Ability to work as a team and independently
3. Excellent written and oral communication skills
4. Sound understanding of Business process management
5. Detailed understanding and interest in Business process modeling
6. Time and project management.

If interested, please email your CV and a statement addressing the selection criteria to Wasana Bandara (w.bandara@qut.edu.au). Applications close on Oct 25th 2013.


Masters Scholarship available
A Masters Scholarship specific to a project that looks at the Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) paradigm is now available. It will fund 1 year of the Masters program (the full time research component) commencing from Jan 2014. The scholarship will provide a living allowance of $26,000.00 (per annum). You will get the chance to work with local and international experts and will be exposed to advanced R&D training and development, that can support both an academic or commercial research oriented career path.

Requirements to apply:
1. Completed a Bachelor of IT or Bachelor of Business with the GPA of at least 5.5 (in a 7 point scale)
2. Completed INB/N 320 (Business Process Modelling) unit with a final grade of 6 or above OR proven competency of business process modelling
3. Completed INB/N 321 (Business Process Management) unit with a final grade of 6 or above OR proven competency of the fundamentals of Business Process Management


Selection Criteria:
1. A genuine interest and aptitude for research
2. Prior experience in research and some degree of research training
3. Ability to work as a team and independently
4. Excellent written and oral communication skills
5. Sound understanding of Business process management
6. Detailed understanding and interest in Business process modelling
7. Time and project management.


If interested, please email your CV and a statement addressing the selection criteria to Wasana Bandara (w.bandara@qut.edu.au). Applications close on Oct 25th 2013.

Monday, September 9, 2013

Photos: TAProViz'13 Photos on the Web

We just recently had our 2nd TAProViz workshop at BPM 2013 in Bejing.  A great afternoon, starting with a very interesting keynote by Hajo Reijers of TUE and Perceptive Software.  Simone, co-chair, has uploaded a set of photos of the day to our workshop site here.

Now, onto the 3rd version in Haifa! :-)

Ross

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

CFP: International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC'13)


CALL FOR PAPERS

9th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC'13)
July 29-31, 2013
Aquila Rithymna Beach Hotel
Rethymnon, Crete Island, Greece


****ISVC'13 SPECIAl TRACKS*****


ST1: Computational Bioimaging

Organizers:
        Tavares João Manuel R. S., University of Porto, Portugal
        Natal Jorge Renato, University of Porto, Portugal
        Cunha Alexandre, Caltech, USA


ST2: 3D Mapping, Modeling and Surface Reconstruction

Organizers:
        Nefian Ara, Carnegie Mellon University/NASA Ames Research Center,
        USA
        Edwards Laurence, NASA Ames Research Center, USA
        Huertas Andres, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, USA
        Visentin Gianfranco, ESA European Space Research and Technology
        Centre, The Netherlands
        Lourakis Manolis, Foundation for Research and Technology . Hellas,
        Greece
        Chliveros Georgios, Foundation for Research and Technology .
        Hellas, Greece,



ST3: Visual Computing in Digital Cultural Heritage

Organizers:
        Doulamis Anastasios D., Technical University of Crete, Greece
        Doulamis Nikolaos D., National Technical University of Athens,
        Greece
        Ioannides Marinos, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
        Georgopoulos Andreas, National Technical University of Athens,
        Greece



ST4: Graphical Model Inference and Learning for Visual Computing

Organizers:
        Komodakis Nikos, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, France
        Kohli Pushmeet, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
        Kumar Pawan, Ecole Centrale de Paris, France
        Blaschko Matthew, Ecole Centrale de Paris, France
        Carsten Rother, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK



ST5: Sparse Methods for Computer Vision, Graphics and Medical Imaging

Organizers:
        Metaxas Dimitris, Rutgers University USA
        Axel Leon, New York University, USA
        Zhang Shaoting, Rutgers University, USA



ST6: Visual Computing Applied to Geosciences

Organizers:
        Brazil Emilio Vital , University of Calgary, Canada
        Patel Daniel, CMR, Norway
        Sousa Mario Costa, University of Calgary, Canada



ST7: Visual Computing with Multimodal Data Streams

Organizers:
        Zhang Hui, Indiana University, USA
        Du Yingzi, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis,
        Indianapolis, USA
        Boyles Mike, Indiana University, USA
        Wernert Eric, Indiana University, USA
        Thakur Sidharth, Renaissance Computing Institute, USA
        Ruan Guangchen, Indiana University, USA



ST8: Intelligent Environments: Algorithms and Applications

Organizers:
        Bebis George, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
        Nicolescu Mircea, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
        Bourbakis Nikolaos, Wright State University, USA
        Tavakkoli Alireza, University of Houston, Victoria, USA


ISVC provides a common forum for researchers, scientists, engineers and
practitioners to present their latest research findings, ideas,
developments and applications in visual computing. We seek papers
contributing to the state of the art and practice in any of the four
central areas of visual computing: (1) computer vision, (2) computer
graphics, (3) virtual reality, and (4) visualization.  Of particular
interest are papers that combine technologies from two or more areas. For
a list of topics, see http://www.isvc.net

ISVC'13 will consist of invited and contributed presentations dealing with
all aspects of visual computing. In addition to the main program, the
symposium will include several keynote presentations, special tracks, and
a poster session. Significantly extended and revised versions of selected
papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the
International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT) (ISI/SCIE
indexed) and the Computers and Graphics journal(ISI/SCIE indexed). Also, a
"best paper" award ($500) is sponsored by Mitsubishi Electric Research
Labs (MERL). The symposium's proceedings will be published by
Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Computer Science.


*****Keynote Speakers

            Thomas Ertl, University of Stuttgart, Germany
            Mel Slater, University College London, UK
            Serge Belongie University of California, San Diego, USA
            Anthony Hoogs, Kitware, USA
            Fei-Fei Li, Stanford University, USA
            Dennis Zorin, New York University, USA



*****Important Dates


Special track proposals:    February 1, 2013
Paper submissions        May 10, 2013
Notification of acceptance    June 10, 2013
Final camera ready paper    June 28, 2013
Advance Registration        June 28, 2013
ISVC'13 Symposium        July 29-31, 2013


Thursday, March 14, 2013

CFP: (CPSM 2013) Communicating Business Process and Software Models Quality, Understandability, and Maintainability

Please consider submitting a paper to the following workshop being chaired by my colleague and collaborator Irene Vanderfeesten.

--------------------------------------------------------------             

1st IEEE International Workshop on Communicating Business Process and Software Models Quality, Understandability, and Maintainability (CPSM 2013)


held in conjunction with the 29th International Conference on Software
Maintenance (ICSM) Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 22-28 September 2013.


About the workshop
--------------------------------------

In recent years, the fact that models are a means for communication gained
more attention in research on process modeling and software modeling. Both
communities discuss issues related to models, modeling languages, and their
use and perception, such as model understandability, complexity of modeling
languages, actual usage of language features, cognitive aspects, human
perception and subjective perspectives on models, and related issues. These
topics are extremely important for the adaption of modeling languages in
practice, yet the attention from the research community is still limited. The
CPSM 2013 workshop shall provide a forum for researchers and practitioners
actively working on quality, usability and maintainability of software and
process models.

The workshop supports the exchange of ideas, challenges, and insights from
two similar domains with the aim of raising awareness of the important "soft
skills" of modeling languages. The workshop will give room to present
research results, position papers, case studies and share experiences and
ideas in panel discussions. Relevant topics are

-              Business process model quality metrics
-              Business process maintainability
-              Business process evolution
-              Business process modeling styles
-              Business process modeling patterns and anti-patterns
-              Business process comprehension
-              Relation between business process models and software / system models
-              Software model maintainability
-              Software model evolution and tracking
-              Software model and implementation alignment
-              Software model comprehension
-              Roles and expertise different modeling activities
-              Empirical studies on understandability of business processes and
    software models
-              Empirical studies on quality of business process and software models
-              Industrial cases on communication and understandability of process
    and software models

We invite full papers that describe consolidated research results or case
studies, as well as short papers outlining researches still in progress or
position papers. Submissions will be assessed based on their novelty,
relevance, empirical evidence, scientific quality, readability, comparison
with existing and related works, and the extent to which the paper allows to
build bridges between the different domains of process modeling and software
engineering. We specifically want to encourage early results.

Format of the Workshop and Proceedings
--------------------------------------
The workshop will comprise presentations of accepted papers and keynotes from
experienced researchers and practitioners. Moreover, we will organize
moderated discussions on hot topics that were raised in the different
communities and emerged from the workshop submissions. All accepted papers
will be published as IEEE Workshop Proceedings. As this volume will appear
after the conference, there will be informal proceedings during the workshop.
At least one author for each accepted paper must register for the workshop
and present the paper.

Paper Submission
--------------------------------------
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of
the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted. Different
paper types are distinguished. Length of full papers (completed research or
case study) must not exceed 10 pages. Short papers (work in progress or
positions paper) should be no longer than 4 pages. Papers should be submitted
in the IEEE style in PDF format, templates are available at

Papers have to present original research contributions not concurrently
submitted elsewhere. 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 (full paper | case study
| work in progress | position paper).

Papers should be submitted via EasyChair:

Important Dates
--------------------------------------
Submission: Monday, June 10th, 2013
Notification: Friday, July 12th, 2013
Camera-ready: Friday, July 26th, 2013
Workshop: September 23rd, 2013

Workshop Website
--------------------------------------


Organization
--------------------------------------
-  Marco Brambilla, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
-  Irene Vanderfeesten, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
-  Dirk Fahland, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands

Program Committee
--------------------------------------
-  Marco Brambilla, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
-  Ross Brown, Queensland Univeristy of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
-  Jordi Cabot, INRIA and Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France
-  Pete Dolog, Aalborg University, Denmark
-  Suzanne Embury, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
-  Dirk Fahland, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
-  Kathrin Figl, Vienna University of Economics, Austria
-  Flavius Frasincar, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Netherlands
-  Simone Kriglstein, Secure Business Austria, Vienna, Austria
-  Ralf Laue, University Leipzig, Germany
-  Jan Mendling, University of Vienna, Austria
-  Geert Poels, Ghent University, Belgium
-  Gianna Reggio, University of Genoa, Italy
-  Manfred Reichert, Ulm University, Germany
-  Hajo Reijers, Perceptive Software & Eindhoven University of Technology,
   the Netherlands
-  Gustavo Rossi, UNLP, Buenos Aires, Argentina
-  Davide Di Ruscio, Università dell'Aquila, Italy
-  Bruce Silver, Silver Associates, USA
-  Antonio Vallecillo, Universidad de Malaga, Spain
-  Irene Vanderfeesten, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
-  Juan M. Vara, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
-  Barbara Weber, University of Innsbruck, Austria
-  Matthias Weidlich, Technion, Haifa, Israel
-  Manuel Wimmer, Technical University of Vienna. Austria
-  Marco Winckler, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France

CPSM 2013 is supported by IEEE Computer Society (http://www.ieee.org/).

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Paper: The BPMVE Wunderkammer

Have just had a BPTrends column, "The BPMVE Wunderkammer,"  published with my colleague, Prof. Jan Recker.  QUT ePrint is available here.  Thanks for the opportunity Jan!

Ross

Friday, February 22, 2013

Video: 3D Process Visualisation Configurations

Have just uploaded to Youtube a video of 3D Process Visualisation Configurations.

Video is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Losma61-U.  

Related paper will be coming soon.

Ross

Video: Collaborative BPMN Process Modeller

Have uploaded to Youtube a video of our new 3D collaborative BPMN modelling environment.

Video is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYMgI6R4iHs.  

Related research paper is here: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/54174/.

Ross

Friday, February 15, 2013

CFP: TAProViz’13 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)

Monday, February 11, 2013

Update: Bug Workaround for Infinite Mario Game Research


Guenter has come back regarding a reported bug in Infinite Mario regarding their game research experiment at: http://bit.ly/Y4UBUk.

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

This is a weird problem. It seems to occur with Windows 7 with Java SE7. I
don't know where the problem really is but I have two workarounds.

a) Starting Firefox in Windows XP Service Pack 3 compatibility mode (right
click on Firefox Icon -> Properties -> Compatibility-> Check the "Run this
program in compatibility mode for" box) fixes the problem

b) Changing the color depth of Windows 7 from 32bit to 16bit also
circumvents the problem.

I will also put a notice on our website.

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

Ross

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Help Needed: Game Research - Infinite Mario


Please consider assisting my colleagues Simone Kriglstein and Guenter Wallner in their games research project.

Guenter and I are currently running a user study on playing behaviour in Infinite Mario and we are searching for people who want to play the game online. 

The game can be accessed at: http://bit.ly/Y4UBUk

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Opportunity: Games Startup at Right Pedal Studios, Brisbane


Posted by my Colleague Matt Ford on Facebook
==================================

Hi all-- let me put in an extra plug for us freaking overwhelming Right Pedal Studios with awesome teams and game proposals before their 20 Jan deadline. I want this promising new fund to realise just how much potential this community has. The more great applications there are, the more benefits we will harvest. To get honest advice about this opportunity, contact me at matthew@fordfam.com, and/or go to the Mana Bar event on the 8th to learn more: https://www.facebook.com/events/468788233158922/ 

I'm not a RPS investor; my stake is with *you* as devs, and I think for many this is a great opportunity. Let's not pass it up.