SITIS'06 Keynotes (To be completed)

Title: Emergent Semantics and Self-Organization in Organizational Workflows

Talk Abstract:
Organizations have witnessed an increasing demand for access to data and services from multiple sources to support operational control and decision making requirements. The economic globalization trend further exacerbates this situation and leads inevitably to decentralized organizational structures with multiple units acting autonomously and in parallel. Effective coordination in this environment of distributed and heterogeneous business services within and across these organizations requires access to relevant and accurate information and flexibility to seamlessly integrate them into coherent and contingent organizational workflows in response to rapidly changing economic conditions. To support and facilitate this objective, organizations are making their own services available on the Internet through Web Services and also use others’ services both to customize their internal processing and to interact with business partners. The ability to effectively integrate data and to compose services has a direct bearing on the organizational performance. If the services and information systems have been developed independently, they are likely to be semantically heterogeneous, in that they differ in logical interpretations of data and domains captured by each system, in structural representations, in data models, and in naming and format specifications of data and services. To enable seamless and flexible interaction among the various autonomous agents, there is a need for mechanisms to resolve the likely semantic conflicts to arise. Ontologies have been used as forms of “a-priori” agreements on concepts for this purpose. However, their use may be often insufficient in ad-hoc and dynamic situations where the interacting parties do not anticipate all the interpretations and where “on-thefly” integration and composition must be performed. Our contention is that these ontologies must emerge from the interactions between the partners, and the workflows must self-organize to meet the business requirements based on these emergent ontologies. Only then, will we have an approach which truly and effectively supports complex and dynamic integration and composition, and thereby, the ad-hoc architecting of contingent organizational workflows.

Speaker's Bio:
Professor Ouksel received the M.Sc. and the PhD degrees in computer science from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 1985. After four years abroad, teaching and consulting in information technology and strategic planning and transfer, he joined the College of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1989 and holds also an appointment in the Computer Science department. He was for several years the Director of the Management Information Systems PhD program and the Center for Management of Information Technology and Telecommunications (CMITT) in the same college.  Dr. Ouksel is currently the director of the CISORS (Cooperative Information Systems and Organizational Research and Services) Lab.

Dr Ouksel's research interests and contributions are in two tracks: (i) information technology strategic planning, business process reengineering, organizational learning and performance, information technology diffusion, information economics: Pricing issues and effects on market share, and information non-disclosure and impacts on automated exchanges; (ii) mobile ad-hoc networks, wireless and mobile sensor networks and data management, peer-to-peer data management, and semantic issues on the web and in virtual inter-organizational information systems. He has published several articles in leading journals and presented papers at international conferences in the above areas. He has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator in research grants from federal, state, and city agencies, as well as the private sector totaling over $5M. Dr. Ouksel is a member of several professional organizations in the information technology and management science areas. He is currently in the editorial board of the Journal of Distributed And Parallel Databases (DAPD) and the International Journal of E-Business Research (IJEBR). He was also for several years in the editorial board of the Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems. He was or will be keynote speaker at (in 2006, IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Services and AAMAS-CIOW: Coordination of Inter-organizational Workflows, Agents and Semantic Web-based Models, and IEEE-SITIS) and panelist at several conferences on cutting-edge research and industry issues in information systems and computer science. He participates as steering or program committee member at several conferences on mobile, sensor technologies, semantic web and enterprise systems.

Dr. Ouksel has provided consulting services to private corporations such as Ameritech (currently SBC) and AT&T in information technology strategic planning and business process reengineering involving Fortune 500 companies such as Motorola, Ford, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and First Chicago Bank (currently CHASE). One example project involves investigating the impact of telecommunications on health care delivery and its implications on organizational structure and management. He has also provided strategic planning and information systems reengineering to several public entities, such as the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the City of Chicago. In consulting for the Chicago Manufacturing Technology Consortium (CMTEC) managed by the Economic Development Commission of the City of Chicago, his role was to assess the scope of technology application and information technology integration, recommend ways of applying technology to reengineer organizational structures, and evaluate the impact of technology on product/cost quality at several small and medium-sized firms in the Chicago area. Dr. Ouksel has also consulted for Rush/Presbyterian hospital in information systems strategic planning.

Dr. Ouksel is the director of the CISORS LAB

Prof. Mongi A. Abidi University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA abidi@utk.edu

Title:
Talk Abstract:
Speaker's Bio:

Dr. Mongi A. Abidi, Professor and Associate Department Head in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, directs activities in the Imaging, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems Laboratory. Dr. Abidi has been conducting research in the field of three-dimensional imaging, specifically in the areas of scene building, scene description, and data visualization. Dr. Abidi is also involved in the areas of robotic multisensing, landmark tracking and sensor calibration, data fusion and probabilistic reasoning, and enhancement of medical images.

Since joining UTK as a faculty member in 1986, Dr. Abidi has acted as either principal investigator or co-principal investigator for research contracts totaling over $16 million. Dr. Abidi is currently acting as principal investigator for three programs. The first program is the 3D Imaging and Data Fusion for Robotic Manipulation and Inspection, part of the DOE's multi-university Research Program in Robotics. The second program is the 3D Imaging and Data Fusion for Automotive Simulation and Design, part of a multi-university program with the U.S. Army TACOM. The third program involves two projects, Gate-to-Gate Automated Video Tracking and Location and Operator Assisted Threat Assessment for Carry-on Luggage Inspection, both with National Safe Skies.

In addition to his research duties, Dr. Abidi teaches senior and graduate courses at UTK in the fields of pattern recognition, image processing, computer vision, and robotics. He has developed three courses in image processing and robotics. He has also taught industrial courses in the areas of mathematical transforms for engineers, data fusion, fuzzy logic, and neural networks.

Dr. Abidi is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi, Eta Kappa Nu, and the Order of the Engineer. He received the First State Award in primary graduation, the First State Award in secondary graduation, and the First Presidential Principal Engineer Award. He holds memberships in the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, Pattern Recognition Society, Association of Computing Machinery, and the International Society of Optical Engineering. Dr. Abidi is the recipient of the following awards: 2002-2003 Dun & Bradstreet Who’s Who in Executives and Business, 2002 United Who’s Who in Empowering Executives and Professionals, 2002 Marquis Who’s Who in America, Strathmore’s Lifetime Who’s Who Award, 2001-2003 Philips Professorship Award, 2001 Science Alliance Faculty Award, 2001 Brooks Distinguished Professor Award, 1999-2001 Weston Fulton Professorship, 1997-2000 Magnavox Professorship, and 1995 Chancellor's Award for Research and Creative Achievement. He is author or co-author of over 150 publications in computer vision and robotics journals and conference proceedings. He is co-editor of the book Data Fusion in Robotics and Machine Intelligence, published by Academic Press in 1992 and co-editor of the following book chapters: Logical Combinatorial Pattern Recognition: A Review, Recent Research Developments in Pattern Recognition, Transworld Research Networks, 2002; Positron Emission Tomography: Image Filtering, Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, Marcel Dekker, 1993; and A Regularized Solution to Multi-Dimensional Data Fusion, Data Fusion in Robotics and Machine Intelligence, Academic Press, 1992.