Speaker: Giovanni Rimassa (Whitestein Tech, Zurich).

Titolo: Processo ai Processi: Gestire Agilmente Casi Spinosi -- Nuove tendenze nel BPM tra knowledge workers e social collaboration.

Abstract: The origins of Business Process Management (BPM) lie in workflow and activity management, but the current latest trends and approaches increasingly recognize the need to widen BPM's scope to include at least data and organizational aspects. This is particularly true when trying to support so-called knowledge workers, highly competent professionals whose tasks are complex, adaptable, and collaborative in nature.
The term Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is gaining popularity as a tag for these scenarios, where experts work together on a set of open cases against the background of a shifting and time-constrained business environment. From an ACM perspective, the very notion of process flow loses its significance and a classic flow-centric BPM approach has little hope to succeed.
The talk will outline the main points of the agent-based, goal-oriented approach to BPM that Whitestein adopted in its suite, leveraging ideas and contributions from Agent Technology and Object Oriented Technology alike, and the concrete application of such an approach to ACM scenarios. It will be argued that the resulting outcome is nothing short that a general paradigm to engineer complex, context-dependent, self-managing systems where human and software actors cooperate towards their shared goals.
The talk will close with some mentions of open issues and future directions, and of collaboration topics and opportunities with academic research on software and multi-agent systems.

Note bibliografiche sul relatore: Giovanni Rimassa is Product Manager at Whitestein Technologies AG in Zürich, Switzerland. He is leading product concept, innovation, and marketing for Whitestein's novel goal-oriented Business Process Management Suite. He is also involved in several projects within the Advanced Technologies Line of Business at Whitestein, dealing with software products and solutions based on Agent Technology. He holds a Ph. D. in Information Technology from the University of Parma, Italy. Since 1995, he has been involved in applied research on concurrent and distributed systems, software engineering and artificial intelligence in both academic and industrial setting, authoring more than 50 papers in international refereed journals, conferences and workshops. He was one of the main contributors to JADE , an open source agent platform that runs from J2ME MIDP to J2EE and is one of the most popular middleware systems to build multi-agent systems.

Speaker: Ozalp Babaoglu (Università di Bologna).

Titolo: Nature-Inspired Techniques for Self-Organization in Dynamic Networks.

Abstract: We examine problems that arise in dynamic network structures such as Peer-to-Peer and mobile ad hoc networks that are characterized by their extreme dynamism and large scale. In such systems, traditional techniques often prove inadequate towards providing simple solutions for their deployment, configuration and management. What is desirable is that these systems be self-configuring, self-monitoring, self-adapting, self-tuning, self-healing, and in general, self-managing. In this talk, I will put forth self-organization as a fundamental abstraction for achieving self-* properties in a bottom-up fashion without having to program them explicitly. I will support this view by illustrating completely decentralized, extremely robust and scalable solutions for important problems that draw inspiration from nature and that are based on a gossiping interaction model.

Note bibliografiche sul relatore: Ozalp Babaoglu is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bologna, Italy. He received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley where he was a principal architect of BSD Unix. He is the recipient of 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX International Recognition Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the UNIX system community and to Open Industry Standards. Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoglu was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He is an ACM Fellow, a resident fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna and serves on the editorial boards for ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and Springer-Verlag Distributed Computing.