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ispartof: Engineering Applications Of Artificial Intelligence status: accepted

Data extraction, retrieval and visualization are some of the key points in Digital Humanities, and together they cover most of the challenges of this field of study, requiring multidisciplinary knowledge. The fruition by users is still today compromised by limited user experiences, problems of integrating data from multiple sources and automatic extraction systems that are not free from errors. The proposal in this document is an approach that, using a simplified graph-based graphical interface, allows the exploration of the contents from multiple data sources and offers a basis for correcting and validating these through social collaboration.

Healthcare is one of the largest business segments in the world and is a critical area for future growth. In order to ensure efficient access to medical and patient-related information, hospitals have invested heavily in improving clinical mobile technologies and spread their use among doctors. Notwithstanding the benefits of mobile technologies towards a more efficient and personalized delivery of care procedures, there are also indications that their use may have a negative impact on patient-centeredness and often places many cognitive and physical demands on doctors, making them prone to make medical errors. To tackle this issue, in this paper we present the main outcomes of the project TESTMED, which aimed at realizing a clinical system that provides operational support to doctors using mobile technologies for delivering care to patients, in a bid to minimize medical errors. The system exploits concepts from Business Process Management on how to manage a specific class of care procedures, called clinical guidelines, and how to support their execution and mobile orchestration among doctors. As a viable solution for doctors' interaction with the system, we investigated the use of vocal and touch interfaces. User evaluation results indicate a good usability of the system.

Process mining allows analysts to exploit logs of historical executions of business processes to extract insights regarding the actual performance of these processes. One of the most widely studied process mining operations is automated process discovery. An automated process discovery method takes as input an event log, and produces as output a business process model that captures the control-flow relations between tasks that are observed in or implied by the event log. Various automated process discovery methods have been proposed in the past two decades, striking different tradeoffs between scalability, accuracy and complexity of the resulting models. However, these methods have been evaluated in an ad-hoc manner, employing different datasets, experimental setups, evaluation measures and baselines, often leading to incomparable conclusions and sometimes unreproducible results due to the use of closed datasets. This article provides a systematic review and comparative evaluation of automated process discovery methods, using an open-source benchmark covering twelve publicly-available real-life event logs and eight quality metrics. The results highlight gaps and unexplored tradeoffs in the field, including the lack of scalability of several methods and a strong divergence in their performance with respect to the different quality metrics used.

Proceedings of the 6th International Brain-Computer Interface Conference 2014

Proceedings of the fifth International Brain-Computer Interface Meeting

Nowadays, Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) and, more generally, Process Management Systems (PMPs) are process-aware Information Systems (PAISs), are widely used to support many human organizational activities, ranging from well-understood, relatively stable and structures processes (supply chain management, postal delivery tracking, etc.) to processes that are more complicated, less structured and may exhibit a high degree of variation (health-care, emergency management, etc.). Every aspect of a business process involves a certain amount of knowledge which may be complex depending on the domain of interest. The adequate representation of this knowledge is determined by the modeling language used. Some processes behave in a way that is well understood, predictable and repeatable: the tasks are clearly delineated and the control flow is straightforward. Recent discussions, however, illustrate the increasing demand for solutions for knowledge-intensive processes, where these characteristics are less applicable. The actors involved in the conduct of a knowledge-intensive process have to deal with a high degree of uncertainty. Tasks may be hard to perform and the order in which they need to be performed may be highly variable. Modeling knowledge-intensive processes can be complex as it may be hard to capture at design-time what knowledge is available at run-time. In realistic environments, for example, actors lack important knowledge at execution time or this knowledge can become obsolete as the process progresses. Even if each actor (at some point) has perfect knowledge of the world, it may not be certain of its beliefs at later points in time, since tasks by other actors may change the world without those changes being perceived. Typically, a knowledge-intensive process cannot be adequately modeled by classical, state of the art process/workflow modeling approaches. In some respect there is a lack of maturity when it comes to capturing the semantic aspects involved, both in terms of reasoning about them. The main focus of the 1st International Workshop on Knowledge-intensive Business processes (KiBP 2012) was investigating how techniques from different fields, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Knowledge Representation (KR), Business Process Management (BPM), Service Oriented Computing (SOC), etc., can be combined with the aim of improving the modeling and the enactment phases of a knowledge-intensive process. The 1st International Workshop on Knowledge-intensive Business process (KiBP 2012) was held as part of the program of the 2012 Knowledge Representation & Reasoning International Conference (KR 2012) in Rome, Italy, in June 2012. The workshop was hosted by the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale Antonio Ruberti of Sapienza Universita di Roma, with financial support of the University, through grant 2010-C26A107CN9 TESTMED, and the EU Commission through the projects FP7-25888 Greener Buildings and FP7-257899 Smart Vortex. This volume contains the 5 papers accepted and presented at the workshop. Each paper was reviewed by three members of the internationally renowned Program Committee. In addition, a further paper was invted for inclusion in the workshop proceedings and for presentation at the workshop. There were two keynote talks, one by Marlon Dumas (Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia) on "Integrated Data and Process Management: Finally?" and the other by Yves Lesperance (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, York University, Canada) on "A Logic-Based Approach to Business Processes Customization" completed the scientific program. We would like to thank all the Program Committee members for the valuable work in selecting the papers, Andrea Marrella for his valuable work as publication and publicity chair of the workshop, and Carola Aiello and the consulting agency Consulta Umbria for the organization of this successful event.

Data-provisioning services can provide high value. Since data can be used and misused in unpredictable ways, organizations deal with the dilemma "to expose or not to expose" their data through Web APIs and – depending on the nature of their business – ponder possible opportunities and pitfalls. Rate limiting strategies are widely employed to control access to data and to safeguard back-end computational resources. However, their effectiveness depends on a good choice of the maximum allowed rate at which information can be "safely" released to users. A relevant scenario is represented by public administrations and private companies providing services whose quality is regulated by formal business agreements on the service levels. These organizations may need to choose a rate limit for their Web APIs that prevent unauthorized users to compute service levels with an high confidence while still allowing the creation of useful value-added services. In this paper, we propose a general statistical model for this problem and a technique, based on uniform sampling tools, to select an appropriate rate limit, and we demonstrate its validity through a case study involving a large bus company.

Audio recordings and the corresponding transcripts are often used as prosthetic memory (PM) after meetings and lectures. While current research is mainly developing novel features for prosthetic memory, less is known on how and why audio recordings and transcripts are used. We investigate how users interact with audio and transcripts as prosthetic memory, whether interaction strategies change over time, and analyse potential differences in accuracy and efficiency. In contrast to the subjective user perception, our results show that audio recordings and transcripts are equally efficient, but that transcripts are generally preferred due to their easily accessible contextual information. We further identified that prosthetic memory is not only used as a recall aid but frequently also consulted for verifying information that has been recalled from organic memory (OM). Our findings are summarised in a number of design implications for prosthetic memory solutions.

International audience; Process models are usually depicted as directed graphs, with nodes representing activities and directed edges control flow. While structured processes with pre-defined control flow have been studied in detail, flexible processes including ad-hoc activities need further investigation. This paper presents flexible process graph, a novel approach to model processes in the context of dynamic environment and adaptive process participants’ behavior. The approach allows defining execution constraints, which are more restrictive than traditional ad-hoc processes and less restrictive than traditional control flow, thereby balancing structured control flow with unstructured ad-hoc activities. Flexible process graph focuses on what can be done to perform a process. Process participants’ routing decisions are based on the current process state. As a formal grounding, the approach uses hypergraphs, where each edge can associate any number of nodes. Hypergraphs are used to define execution semantics of processes formally. We provide a process scenario to motivate and illustrate the approach.

Business process models are a suitable means to describe the temporal and logical order of tasks for achieving a given goal. Therefore they become crucial in the coordination of intervention actions to efficiently recover from a disaster or tragic event. Past experience is vital in handling these scenarios, but every new emergency would almost always present peculiar characteristics. So although generic business processes for disaster management would typically be available in a recovery infrastructure, these need to be adapted every time to the specific scenario. In these situations goal achievement is very time-critical, thus the adaptation process should be done in the most efficient way and be error-free. This paper proposes to capture multiple variants of an emergency recovery process in a configurable model, and to control the model adaptation via the use of interactive domain-based questionnaires.

Searching for similar strings is an important and frequent database task both in terms of human interactions and in absolute world-wide CPU utilisation. A wealth of metric functions for string comparison exist. However, with respect to the wide range of classification and other techniques known within vector spaces, such metrics allow only a very restricted range of techniques. To counter this restriction, various strategies have been used for mapping string spaces into vector spaces, approximating the string distances within the mapped space and therefore allowing vector space techniques to be used. In previous work we have developed a novel technique for mapping metric spaces into vector spaces, which can therefore be applied for this purpose. In this paper we evaluate this technique in the context of string spaces, and compare it to other published techniques for mapping strings to vectors. We use a publicly available English lexicon as our experimental data set, and test two different string metrics over it for each vector mapping. We find that our novel technique considerably outperforms previously used technique in preserving the actual distance. Publisher PDF