Thursday, April 30, 2015

2nd CFP: TAProViz 2015 : 4th International Workshop on Theory and Application of Visualizations and Human-centric Aspects in Processes

TAProViz’15 4th International Workshop on Theory and Application of Visualizations and Human-centric Aspects in Processes, Innsbruck, Austria - 31 August 2015


In conjunction with the 12th International Conference on Business Process Management BPM2015 - http://bpm2015.q-e.at/ at Innsbruck, Austria.

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Call for Papers
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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

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Format of the Workshop
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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.

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Important Dates
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* Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 29 May 2015
* Notification of Acceptance: 29 June 2015
* Camera-ready version: 20 July 2015
* TAProViz Workshop: 31 August 2015

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Paper Submission
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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.

Papers must be in English 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.

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Registration
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Accepted papers imply that at least one of the authors will register for BPM2015 and present the paper at the TAProViz workshop.

Further workshop information is available from the website: http://www.wst.univie.ac.at/topics/taproviz15/

Hope to see you at TAProViz'15!

Thanks and best regards,

Ross Brown
Simone Kriglstein
Stefanie Rinderle-Ma

TAProViz Organising Committee

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Paper: Process visualization techniques for multi-perspective process comparisons

Have just had the paper "Process visualization techniques for multi-perspective process comparisons" accepted for AP-BPM, written with Azzurra Pini (Politecnico Milano), and Moe Wynn (QUT).  This is an outcome of Azzurra's work as an intern with us at QUT in 2014.  the paper is stored here, please contact me if you want a copy.

Abstract - Organizations executing similar business processes need to understand the differences and similarities in activities performed across work environments. Presently, research interest is directed towards the potential of visualization for the display of process models, to support users in their analysis tasks. Although recent literature in process mining and comparison provide several methods and algorithms to perform process and log comparison, few contributions explore novel visualization techniques. This paper analyzes process comparison from a design perspective, providing some practical visualization techniques as analysis solutions. In order to support the needs of business analysts the design of the visual comparison has been tackled via three different points of view: the general model, the superimposed model and the side-by-side comparison. A case study is presented showing a preliminary evaluation of the application of process mining and visualization techniques to patient treatment across two Australian hospitals.

Ross

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Paper Review: A Quantum Information Retrieval Approach to Memory

#Title#
A Quantum Information Retrieval Approach to Memory

#Authors#
Kirsty Kitto, Peter Bruza, Liane Gabora

#Venue#
Neural Networks (IJCNN), The 2012 International Joint Conference on

#DOI#
DOI: 10.1109/IJCNN.2012.6252492

#Abstract#
Abstract—As computers approach the physical limits of in- formation storable in memory, new methods will be needed to further improve information storage and retrieval. We propose a quantum inspired vector based approach, which offers a contextually dependent mapping from the subsymbolic to the symbolic representations of information. If implemented computationally, this approach would provide exceptionally high density of information storage, without the traditionally required physical increase in storage capacity. The approach is inspired by the structure of human memory and incorporates elements of Gaerdenfors’ Conceptual Space approach and Humphreys et al.’s matrix model of memory.

#Comments#
This paper detail's Bruza, Kitto and Gabora's matrix model of memory.  Peter Bruza is also a colleague of mine at QUT. :-)

The key components I find interesting are the relationship between symbolic and subsymbolic levels, and its movement towards a distributed overlaid model of memory, that causes excitations in related symbolic entities/terms.  The matrix notation allows for a representation of context as a matrix of features, which via tensor product formalism,  allows for memory to be a distributed process, with activations of related terms.

This is of interest to me, as we can start to utilise visual features in a computational model of subsymbolic components contributing to memory recall via similar inputs of features.

While this is strongly related to an NN associated matrix approach, it makes the relationships between the components explicit, and is thus a candidate as a cognitive model of priming in expert elicitation sessions.  This approach can then be used to modulate user interfaces in virtual world elicitation systems.

#ImportantRefs#