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