Keynote Lectures List:
- Azzelarabe Taleb-Bendiab, Liverpool John Moores University, UK - Download Presentation

- Schahram Dustdar, Information Systems Institute, Vienna University of Technology, Austria - Download Presentation

- Ernesto Damiani, University of Milan, Italy - Download Presentation

Brief Bio of Dr. Azzelarabe Taleb-Bendiab

Prof. A. Taleb-Bendiab is Professor of Computer Science and Head of Research at the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, UK. He has over 15 years experience in conducting research and teaching in the areas of distributed software engineering, information systems and web technology. He has published widely in the area of distributed information systems engineering, grid computing and autonomic computing, and has a number of awards including: the Best Innovative Paper at the IEEE International Conference on Self-Organising and Self-Adaptive Systems, 2005, and best paper at the IEEE International Conference of Autonomic Computing (ICAS), 2006.
Prof. Taleb-Bendiab research group focuses on distributed software engineering with the overall aim to investigate the fundamental requirements and the development of generic frameworks and/or associated formal modelling methods for the engineering of self-adaptive and self-organising systems. Central to its objectives, the group aims at narrowing the gap between the theory and practice of high-assurance, dependable and evolving software, and facilitating their introduction and deployment in business environments. This constitutes a key research direction in the School and underpins research effort in middleware for networked appliances, sensor and actuator networks and security. The group has a number of UK research council and private/public sector funded projects. The Group has (01) Professor, (02) Principal lecturers, (07) senior lecturers, (02) research assistants and (14) PhD research students.
Prof. Taleb-Bendiab has a well-developed collaborative track record with UK private and public sector organisations and international companies including; (i) Software evolution (UK Research Council, 1998-2000), (ii) High-assurance decision support systems for breast cancer (UK Research Council, 2002-2005), (iii) E-health middleware and software services for NHS Dental Services (UK NHS funded project 2005-2007), (iv) Taiwan Telecom Ltd (2001–2004) on distributed software engineering training and consultancy related to National Taiwanese E-government platform and software services.
He is a member of the UK research Council Peer Review and reviewed research projects for the Dutch Research Council. He is also a member of conference/workshop Technical and/or Organising Programme Committees including: (i) Self-Organization and Cybernetics for Informatics, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. (ii) IEEE International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (ICAS), 2006-07. (iii) NetObject 2006-7 [advisory Board member]. (iv) IEEE CONSUMER COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING CONFERENCE (CCNC), 2003-7. (v) Ease 2005-7. (vi) SAACS’05-07 [Co-Chair, TCP and Sessions Chair], IEEE International Conference. (vii) IEEE International Conference on Self-Organization and Autonomic Systems (SOAS), 2005-07.

Abstract:

Over the years, ICT has enriched and pervaded every part of our lives yielding numerous socio-technical benefits. Along with such benefits came increased requirements for improved systems’ functionality, interoperability, dependability, accessibility and ease of use to name but a few. This engendered a myriad of technical challenges providing fertile research grounds to explore new computational models such as those inspired by biological concepts. Which aim to imbue future information systems with self-managing capabilities to adapt autonomously to their users’ requirements and environments. For instance, to recover from an encountered/anticipated system failure, protect itself from security vulnerability/attacks, tune its performance to guaranty its service level agreement, or simply reconfigure to accommodate new services.
Since its inception back in 2002, significant progress has been made towards imbuing modern information systems with autonomic capabilities of self-configuring, self-organizing, self-managing and self-repairing. However, the foundations and engineering principles of complex autonomic information systems is far from being completely understood, and are under rapid evolution. Hence, in the spirit of the WEBIST conference, this lecture will provide the audience with an upto date review of the emerging research results in the field of autonomic and service-oriented information systems, and their engineering concerns including relevance to supporting the development of current and future web-based information systems.
The lecture will start with a brief overview of the general design and complexity challenges of modern information systems, which will be followed by a review of the state-of-the-art of autonomic systems designs including; reference models, service-oriented architecture, standards, distributed software engineering and artificial intelligence tools and techniques for autonomic systems design and management. Real-life examples will be used to illustrate the contents of this presentation.
 

Brief Bio of Dr. Schahram Dustdar

Schahram Dustdar is Full Professor of Computer Science with a focus on Internet Technologies at the Distributed Systems Group, Information Systems Institute, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) where he is director of the Vita Lab. He is also Honorary Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Computing Science at the University of Groningen (RuG), The Netherlands.

He received his M.Sc. (1990) and PhD. degrees (1992) in Business Informatics (Wirtschaftsinformatik) from the University of Linz, Austria. In April 2003 he received his Habilitation degree (Venia Docendi in Angewandte Informatik) for his work on Process-aware Collaboration Systems - Architectures and Coordination Models for Virtual Teams. His work experience includes several years as the founding head of the Center for Informatics (ZID) at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz (1991-1999), Austrian project manager of the MICE EU-project (1993 - 97), and director of Coordination Technologies at the Design Transfer Center in Linz (1999 - 2000). While on sabbatical leave he was a post-doctoral research scholar (Erwin-Schrödinger scholarship) at the London School of Economics (Information Systems Department) (1993 and 1994), and a visiting research scientist at NTT Multimedia Communications Labs in Palo Alto, USA during 1998.

Since 1999 he works as the co-founder and chief scientist of Caramba Labs Software AG (CarambaLabs.com) in Vienna, a venture capital co-funded software company focused on software for collaborative processes in teams. Caramba Labs was nominated for several (international and national) awards: World Technology Award in the category of Software (2001); Top-Startup companies in Austria (Cap Gemini Ernst & Young) (2002); MERCUR Innovationspreis der Wirtschaftskammer (2002). Currently, Prof. Dustdar is on the advisory board of Smart Information Systems and Sanaga Labs, two Austrian Start-up companies as well as on the management board of the Association of the alumni of the TU Wien.

He has published some 120 scientific papers as conference-, journal-, and book contributions. He has written 3 academic books as well as one professional book. His latest book, co-authored with H. Gall and M. Hauswirth, is on software architectures for distributed systems (2003), Springer-Verlag. In 1997 he co-authored a book on Multimedia Information Systems, Kluwer and co-edited the book Telekooperation in Unternehmen, Gabler Verlag. He has published in various journals including Distributed and Parallel Databases, Data and Knowledge Engineering, Journal of Grid Computing, WWW Journal, IEEE Multimedia, Business Process Management Journal, Journal of Systems Architecture, Journal of Organizational Computing, Kluwer Multimedia Tools and Applications, Wirtschaftsinformatik, and Journal of Computing and Information Technology. He co-organized several scientific workshops and conferences (e.g. BPM 2006, DiSD 2005 colocated with RE; Teamware colocated with SAINT; CSSE colocated with ASE; UMICS 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, colocated with CAiSE; DMC 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 colocated with IEEE WETICE) and has been serving on some 150 international program committees as well as on editorial boards of 10 scientific journals. His research interests include collaborative computing, workflow systems, Internet technologies, software architecture, distributed systems, distributed multimedia systems, and mobile collaboration systems. He is charter member of the Association of Information Systems (AIS), member of the IEEE Computer society, ACM, GI, and Austrian Computer Society. He was an invited expert evaluator for the IST 6th Framework (FP6) of the European Commission as well as an invited expert for the 7th Framework roadmap definitions for some working groups. He has been a scientific reviewer for a number of National Science Foundations (e.g. NWO (Netherlands), EPSRC (UK), SFI (Ireland), NSERC (Canada)).

Abstract:

Knowledge Workers are increasingly involved in new kinds of organizational structures and work interaction patterns that require highly dynamic forms of collaboration, ranging from Nimble (short-lived) to Virtual and Mobile/Nomadic Teams. Teams morph from one kind of organizational structure to another. In most cases, workers engage in many such teams simultaneously and require support from adequate software services. To meet the requirements of dynamic, multiform team working, current Internet-based Collaboration Working Environments must evolve towards large-scale, loosely-coupled, trusted service-oriented systems, with increased emphasis on P2P capabilities.

In this talk we discuss some scientific approaches focused on a new blend of human collaboration and service-oriented systems that explores two basic research strands:

1. efficient and effective support for human interactions and collaboration in various teams through dynamically aggregated software services;
2. use of human-to-human or human-to-service interactions in applying intelligent mining and learning algorithms that can detect interaction patterns for pro-active service aggregation.

In addressing these issues, we present our current findings for mining human activities and providing context-relevant services, at the right time and granularity, to human interaction partners in those various team forms. To this end, relevance-based context representation models and autonomic service adaptation methods for context-coupling and enrichment will be developed.

Brief Bio of Dr. Ernesto Damiani

Ernesto Damiani is a professor at the Dept. of Information Technology, University of Milan, where he leads the Software Architectures Lab. Prof. Damiani holds/has held visiting positions at several international institutions, including George Mason University (Fairfax, VA, US) and LaTrobe University (Melbourne, Australia). Prof. Damiani is an Adjunct Professor at the Sydney University of Technology (Australia). He has written several books and filed international patents; also, he co-authored more than two hundred research papers on advanced secure service-oriented architectures, open source software and business process design, software reuse and Web data semantics. Prof. Damiani is the Vice Chair of IFIP WG 2.12 on Web Data Semantics and the secretary of IFIP WG 2.13 on Open Source Software Development. He coordinates several research projects funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and by private companies including Siemens Mobile, Cisco Systems, ST Microelectronics, BT Exact, Engineering, Telecom Italy and others.

Abstract:

Business Process Modeling is increasingly important for the digitalization of both IT and non-IT business processes underlying business process development, as well as for their deployment on service-oriented architectures. A number of methodologies, languages and software tools have been proposed to support digital business process design; nonetheless, a lot remains to be done for assessing a business process model validity with respect to an existing organizational structure or external constraints like the ones imposed by security compliance regulations. In particular, web-based business coalitions and other inter-organizational transactions pose a number of research problems.
The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) provides a framework for representing processes at different levels of abstraction. In this talk, a MDA-driven notion of business process model is introduced, composed of a static domain model including the domain entities and actors, plus a platform-independent workflow model providing a specification of process activities . The talk describes some semantics-aware representation techniques, introducing logics-based static domain models and their relationship with Description Logics and current Semantic Web metadata formats. Then, the talk discusses some issues emerging from the literature on business processes representation and presents some research directions on the evaluation of the compatibility of business and IT processes with existing organizational environments and practices. The problem of implicit knowledge and? of its capture in a manner which allows it to be included in business process design is also discussed, presenting some open research issues.