Prof. Francesco M. Donini
Università della Tuscia
Dept. of Humanities, Communication and Tourism
Italy
Among enterprise business processes, Human Resources (HR) management is characterized by two conflicting issues: on one hand, the peculiarities of intellectual capital ask for expressive representation languages to convey as many of its facets as possible; on the other hand, the huge amount of resources managed by HR processes asks for very efficient Data Storage & Retrieval systems.
In this talk, I will show how the representation power of a logical language can be combined with the information processing efficiency of a DBMS for handling HR management tasks. The ideas have been implemented in a fully functioning platform: I.M.P.A.K.T., and I'll show how I.M.P.A.K.T. can help in solving three relevant tasks related to HR: 1) skill matching, 2) task/team composition and 3) company core competence identification.
Francesco M. Donini started working on Computer Science research in 1988, and since 2005 is a full professor at Tuscia University, Viterbo (Italy). His research interests started from theoretical aspects of Knowledge Representation (KR), but since 2000 he turned to practical applications of KR to Image Retrieval, e-Commerce, Automated Negotiation, and Skill Management in support systems for HR management.
Assoc. Professor Adrian Rutle
Department of Computing, Mathematics and Physics
Bergen University College
Norway
The increasing complexity of software systems demands abstractions and usage of abstract models in software engineering. Such an emergent methodology is the Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) in which high level models are considered first class entities of the development process. In the recent years, a lot of advances have been performed in the field regarding the specification of software structures in terms of formalisation, analysis, user-friendly tools and case-studies. This is mainly a consequence of the popularity and good tool availability of the UML and EMF. Despite the importance of models which specify the behavioural aspects of software, tools and formalisations used for definition, analysis and simulation of these models are not yet wide-spread. One reason could be that these tools are not designed with software engineers and domain-experts in mind. The focus of this talk is on an ongoing work in investigating and designing a conceptual framework for the definition and analysis of behavioural models, especially, distributed, concurrent models with time constraints, actors, resource consumption and error-handling. We will emphasise on the formal background (making various analysis, verification, simulation procedures possible) as well as user-friendliness (making the techniques accessible for software engineers and business managers.)
Adrian Rutle holds PhD and MSc degrees in Computer Science from the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway. Rutle is associate professor at the Department of Computing, Physics and Mathematics at the Bergen University College (HiB), Norway. Rutle’s main interest is applying theoretical results from the field of Model-driven Software Engineering to practical domains. He also conducts research in the fields of modelling and simulation of various physical environments using Multi-Agent Systems. His main expertise is the development of formal modelling frameworks as well as domain-specific modelling languages, based on multi-level metamodelling and formal, diagrammatic constraint definitions. He has also experience in using graph-based logic for reasoning about static and dynamic properties of models; as well as in using model transformations for the definition of semantics of modelling languages.
Professor Eleni Karatza
Department of Informatics
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Greece
Computational and data clouds are large-scale distributed systems used for serving demanding applications. Cloud computing is a concept that has emerged from grid computing; it provides users the ability to acquire computational resources on demand from its virtually infinite pool on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The cloud computing paradigm can offer various types of services, such as computational resources for high-performance computing (HPC) applications, web services, social networking, etc.
For many years now, the use of HPC has become important in the enterprise. Companies need to process large amounts of data and realise that they need HPC for success of their business. While large enterprises have budget for a HPC system, smaller companies usually do not have enough funds to deploy such solutions. However, they can extend their computing provision by consuming Cloud services.
In this talk we will present issues that must be addressed in order to make clouds viable for enterprise HPC, and will review research, based on existing or simulated cloud systems, that provide insight into problems solving. Advanced modeling and simulation techniques are a basic aspect of performance evaluation that is needed before the costly prototyping actions required for cloud systems.
Eleni D. Karatza is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Dr. Karatza's research interests include Computer Systems Modeling and Simulation, Performance Evaluation, Grid and Cloud Computing, Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems, Resource Allocation and Scheduling and Real-time Distributed Systems.
Dr. Karatza has authored or co-authored over 180 technical papers and book chapters including four papers that earned best paper awards at international conferences. She is senior member of IEEE, ACM and SCS and she served as an elected member of the Board of Directors at Large of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (2009-2011). She has served as Program Chair and Keynote Speaker in International Conferences and she is Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal "Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory" and Area Editor of the "Journal of Systems and Software" of Elsevier.
Professor Eleni Karatza Homepage.
Professor Terry Young
Department of Information Systems and Computing
Brunel University
United Kingdom
Professor Terry Young joined Brunel as Professor of Healthcare Systems after a 16.5 year career in industry, which started in broadband research and led in the end to healthcare strategy.
His initial research, after a PhD in laser spectroscopy, lay in finite element modelling of photonic devices and optical circuits. Later, with project and line management, his experience broadened to include business development and corporate technology strategy, mainly in healthcare.
In 2001 he joined Brunel University and he has focused on healthcare since then, winning more than £13M in Research Council grants. The largest of these, MATCH, involves three other universities (Birmingham, Nottingham and Ulster) and looks at the value of technology to care delivery. Another recent project, RIGHT, involved four other universities (Cambridge, Cardiff, Southampton and Ulster) and explored the use of simulation and modelling in service provision.
His recent publications address healthcare delivery in terms of services, systems and technology, including commercial and investment decisions, uptake and adoption.
Professor Terry Young Homepage.
Professor Ramesh Sharda
Institute for Research in Information Systems
Oklahoma State University
USA
Professor Wil van der Aalst
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Eindhoven University of Technology
The Netherlands
Professor Osman BALCI
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
USA
Conducting a successful Modeling and Simulation (M&S) project poses significant challenges for engineers, analysts, managers, stakeholders, and sponsors. The use of an effective life cycle is critically important to meet the challenges. This keynote speech presents a comprehensive M&S life cycle created by the speaker. The M&S life cycle describes the blueprint (detailed plan or program of action) of an M&S application during its lifetime (from birth to retirement), and provides structured guidance to an M&S developer (engineer), analyst, manager, organization, and community of interest. The M&S life cycle specifies the work products to be created under the designated processes together with the integrated verification and validation and quality assurance activities. The M&S life cycle is critically needed to modularize and structure the M&S development and provide valuable guidance for project management. The M&S life cycle also identifies areas of expertise in which to employ qualified people. This keynote speech identifies which process to execute first to start an M&S project, which processes to execute one after the other, and which work products to produce one after the other throughout the entire life cycle until the project is successfully completed. The knowledge of such a comprehensive M&S life cycle is crucially needed to be able to conduct a successful M&S project.
OSMAN BALCI is a Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), USA. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Bogaziçi University (Istanbul) in 1975 and 1977, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Syracuse University (New York) in 1978 and 1981. Dr. Balci serves as ACM SIGSIM Chairman (2008-2011) and Editor-in-Chief of ACM SIGSIM M&S Knowledge Repository. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of two international journals: Annals of Software Engineering (1993-2002) and World Wide Web (1996-2000). He currently serves as an Area Editor of ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation and Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Category Editor of ACM Computing Reviews. He served as an elected Director at Large of the Society for M&S International (2002-2006). Most of Dr. Balci's work has been funded by the U.S. Navy since 1983. From 1998 to 2004, he provided technical services for the U.S. National Missile Defense and Missile Defense Agency programs in the areas of M&S verification, validation and accreditation (VV&A) and complex system independent verification and validation (IV&V). His current areas of expertise center on network-centric software engineering; architecting network-centric software-based systems; software IV&V; M&S methodology; M&S VV&A, testing, certification, credibility assessment, and quality assessment.