(Tutorial Proposal in ISEC 2023 – 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (Feb. 23 – Feb 25, 2023) proposed to be organized at IIIT Allahabad, Prayagraj (UP)

 ●        Name and affiliation of the proposer(s)

(i)     Prof. Dr. Om Prakash Vyas,

Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad 

Prayagraj, India 211015

 Email: opvyas@iiita.ac.in

(ii)   Dr. Ranjana Vyas

Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad 

Prayagraj, India 211015

Email: ranjana@iiita.ac.in

●         An abstract of the session topic (maximum of 1500 characters)

Brief Introduction & Justification:

The outbreak of COVID-19 brought about a significant shock in the global economy and has changed the Organozational functionalities a even afterwards as Mckinsey shares, respondents are now expecting that at least 80% of their consumer interactions are digital compared to the pre-pandemic era. As a result, most organizations have placed the Digital Transformation at the forefront of organizations’priorities.

Reasonating with fast changing customer needs and changing technology ladscape, Digital Transformation, often conceived alongwith the Software Engineering as the underlying enabler, is no longer a nice to have but a necessity for businesses in the post-Covid world. 

Digital Transformation involves the use of technology in creating new, and modifying current, business processes, customer experiences and cultures to meet the requirements of a dynamic market. Transformation goes beyond traditional software project management approaches and inegrating the data driven organizational practices into automation projects are providing an edge to the organizations and for those already embarked on their digital transformation journey are in a much better position to survive and thrive in the new normal.

Digital Transformation finds Process Transformation as the foundation technology upon which to base future investment and transformation projects. Also that while Process Transformation is the main driver of process optimization as well, but without a roadmap and clear steps for introducing technology to operationally dependent processes, business leaders struggle to find long-term benefits in process transformation and risk spending time and effort on low-value automation initiatives.

Process Mining, positioned at the interface between Process Transformation and Data Science, combines event data with process models and intends to gain insights, identify bottlenecks, predict problems, and optimize organizational processes. Process Mining, already being used for high-volume processes in large organizations, will soon become the ‘new normal’ for smaller organizations as well. 

Target Audience

The tutorial is aimed at providing introducion to Process Mining as keystone in Digital tansofrmation with Process Modeling, Process Analytics, Process Discovery and Conformance techniques with Process enhancement capabolities. The Tutorial will be immensely beneficial to Software Engineers, System Managers, IT Project managers alongwith students, reseacrh scholars and faculty members in broad field of IT alongwith Business Analyst, Business Process Re-engineering professionals and consultants as well.

Tutrial Contents and schedule

Despite a huge surge in Digital Transformation, the organizations are facing many challenges including inefficient and redundant processes, Silos in the organization, and fast changing IT infrastructure and resources.  While Business Processes are rapidly becoming a key differentiator still organizations are able to figure out the status realted to the Process in-practice compared to Process as it was designed. It is proposed to present the basics of Process Modeling from BPMN to Petri nets alongwith various tools as prevalent these days.

Process Transformation Tutorial

Session 01: Business Process Modeling: Concepts and Tools.

Session 02: Business Process Mining  & Analytics: Techniques and Tools

Process Mining Research Trends & Tools

 Process Transformation includes Process Discovery, Conformance Checking, and Model Enhancement, positioning them as three verticals of Process Mining, there are a number of technical challenges that need to be overcome to realize the vision of data driven optimization of business processes. The Process Transofrmation is thus being proposed to be explored at following levels:

1.     When it comes to creating process models, event logs generated by process-oriented information systems are treated as a critical resource. Conformance checking can be formulated as an optimization problem with the model and log repair. Thus, conformance checking corresponds to solving optimization problems that grow exponentially in the size of the model and the length of traces in the event log

2.   Optimization metaheuristics have also been widely applied in the context of automated process discovery, with the goal of gradual discovery and advancement of process models to achieve a tradeoff between accuracy and simplicity. The most notorious of these approaches are those based on evolutionary (genetic) algorithms. However, several other metaheuristics have been researched, such as Imperialist competition algorithms, swarm particle optimization, and simulated glow in this context.

With rapidly growing applications in This special session invites original unpublished research contributions that demonstrate current findings in the area of application of data science and optimization techniques for process mining, with special reference to algorithms for process discovery, conformance checking, and process model enhancement.

Objectives

A list of at Resource persons / researchers from IIITA who, based on their research expertise, could deliver talk and hands-on in the special session

• Prof. Dr. Om Prakash Vyas.

• Dr. Ranjana Vyas.

• Ms. Uphar Singh.

• Mr. Ayush Sinha

●         A short bio of the organizer(s) with a section on relevant prior experience in organizing academic events- 

Brief CV of Prof. Dr. O.P. Vyas

Om Prakash Vyas is a Professor of Information Technology and Dean of Technology Development at Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, which is established as ‘Institute of National Importance’ enacted by Indian Parliament. 

With long academic experience of over 03 decades, his teaching and research field covers Software Engineering, Data Science, Machine Learning, IoT-Cloud federation and Cyber Defense Framework. Having worked as Visiting Professor / Scientist in Inria-France, Paderborn-Germany, Uni. Messina – Italy, NTNU-Norway and NII-Tokyo, Japan, Prof. Vyas is an active researcher with more than ~ 150 publications hacing h-index 23 and i-20 index of 49. 

Prof. Vyas is having active collaboration with Cyber Security Center (C3i) of IIT Kanpur which is India’s first research testbed in defensive strategies for the Critical Infrastructure. Having active collaboration with reputed European Universities, Prof. Vyas is currently PI and Coordinator of Indo-Norway ICT project in broad field of secure and optimise use of Energy Infrastructure in the context of Smart Cities (Funded by Research Council of Norway, Deptt. of Science and Technology-New Delhi, India) with Norwegian collaborators – National University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Gjøvik, Norway and Institute of Energy Research, Norway. 

Following are further details of assignments which were successfully handled/ongoing by him amongst the significant ones; 

• He has worked as a scientist (under the Invited Professor Scheme} at Inria-Lille, France in the Project “ IoT deployment for Smarter cities” in June-July 2015.

• He has Worked on Indo-Japanese Collaborative work with NII-Tokyo (Japan) in ‘Linked Open Data Mining’-2013 and also in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 engaged in Teaching and Research in Data Science and Business Analytics with University of Paderborn, Germany.

• He has successfully organised five day workshop / short term course on the emerging fields like Advances in Business Informatics, Advances in Data Analytics that includes extensive brainstorming and hands-on sessions during 2019-20.

• He has successfully organised a five day Faculty development program supported by AICTE Training And Learning (ATAL) Academy, Government of India on the topic Cyber Physical Security for Critical Infrastructure. (2020)

• He is actively leading a research group on the Process Mining and Data driven optimization in collaboration with Process and Data Science group (PADS) University of Aachen, Germany who are pioneers in the Process Mining domain.

• Involved as organizing committee member of various prestigious conferences including “16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference ISEC 2023”.

• Successfully organized “3rd International Conference on Machine Learning, Image Processing, Network Security and Data Sciences” as an Advisory Committee member.

• Successfully organized Workshop on ‘IT Innovation for Smart Cities’  jointly with Dr. Nathalie Mitton- Inria, France  (14th – 15th March 2015) 

• Organised Colloquium on Business Informatics as short term course (14th Dec. 2017).

• Successfully organised Short term Course on “Big Data Analytics with Hadoop” conducted at IIIT Allahabad, India, as academic outreach activity for students of  Tula’s Institute, Dehradun in self financed mode.

Brief of Dr. Ranjana Vyas

Dr. Ranjana  Vyas is currently working at Govt. of India’s Indian Institute of Information Technology-Allahabad (IIITA) as Assistant Professor (Business Informatics) since July 2013 and is also Coordinator of NewGen IEDC (New Generation Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Center) at IIIT Allahabad.

Dr. Ranjana has stayed in various countries of Europe for more than 18 months, and having awarded with prestigious DAAD Scholarship, Dr. Ranjana worked in Germany’s Technical University of Kaiserslautern (Research group BISOR- Business Intelligence ) as Post doctoral fellow (2010) and is assoictaed with various reputed Universities / Institutes like Rostock University, Germany, ISI- Turino (Italy), teaching the subjects like Software Requirement Engineering, Digtal Marketing and Business Process Modeling. With academic Interests in the overlapping areas of Data Science and Process Science i.e. Recommender Systems, Churn Prediction, Business Process Analytics, she worked in active collaboration with Prof. Artus KG of University Paderborn-Germany (2017-19) involving academic exchange of Faculties and Students from both the countries. Also she was invited by Germany’s Hof University of Applied Sciences for the invited talk titled ‘Business Process Re-engineering: from BPM to Process Mining’ ( July 2022). 

From the past 09 years she has been actively enaged in organizing various events including IT Entreneurship mentoring program, Hackathon and various Symposiums in the broad areas of IT. With various publications  (~ 30) in various peer reviewed journals and prestigious conferences and along with overseas assignment as detailed.

1. Overseas Assignments:

1. Visit to Bielefeld University, Germany to deliver course Module “PROCESS MINING: Bridging the gap between Process Science and Data Science”- Summer Semester – June 2022.

2. Visit to Germany under by IGSTC (Indo German Science and Technology Center) to participate and present research work  in Indo-German Symposium on “Smart Cities: Challenges & Opportunities” to be held from 27-29 April 2016 in Berlin (Germany)- fully funded by Govt. of Germany & Govt. of India.

3. Research Collaboration visit to Deptt. of Business Intelligence (Uni. Paderborn-Germany)- 23rd to 25th April 2016, June 2017 for work in the areas of Recommender Systems with Prof. Artus KG.

4. Invited (with full financial support) by Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation-Turin, Italy to participate in “2nd European Ph.D. School” (06 days in November 2007) and presented research work.

5. Stayed and Studied in Germany during 1996-97 for 18 months. (German Language courses, Computer Courses).