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Abstract: General patterns of execution that have been frequently scheduled by a workflow management system provide the administrator with previously unknown, and potentially useful information, e.g., about the existence of unexpected causalities between subprocesses of a given workflow. This paper investigates the problem of mining unconnected patterns on the basis of some execution traces, i.e., of detecting sets of activities exhibiting no explicit dependency relationships that are frequently executed together. The problem is faced in the paper by proposing and analyzing two algorithms. One algorithm takes into account information about the structure of the control-flow graph only, while the other is a smart refinement where the knowledge of the frequencies of edges and activities in the traces at hand is also accounted for, by means of a sophisticated graphical analysis. Both algorithms have been implemented and integrated into a system prototype, which may profitably support the enactment phase of the workflow. The correctness of the two algorithms is formally proven, and several experiments are reported to evidence the ability of the graphical analysis to significantly improve the performances, by dramatically pruning the search space of candidate patterns. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We consider opinion diffusion on social graphs where agents hold opinions and where social pressure leads them to conform to the opinion manifested by the majority of their neighbors. Within this setting, we look for dynamics that allows us to maximize the diffusion of a target opinion given the initial opinions of all agents. In particular, we focus on the setting where more than two opinions are available to the agents, and we show that the properties of this setting are entirely different from those characterizing the setting where agents hold binary opinions only. Indeed, while it is well-known that greedy dynamics are always optimal ones in the binary case, this is no longer true in our more general setting and—rather surprisingly—even if just three opinions are available. Moreover, while it is possible to decide in polynomial time if a dynamics leading to consensus exists when agents have two available opinions, the problem becomes computationally intractable with three opinions, regardless of the fraction of agents that have the target opinion as their initial opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]