A Conceptual Model and Typology for Information Systems Controls

Controls are widely used in business and are often related to information technology (IT) because IT systems are used to implement business controls and because the introduction of IT entails additional control concerns. Thus, control aspects should be part of information systems analysis and design. Furthermore, information systems need to be examined for completeness and correctness of their controls. However, despite the importance of IT controls, no general, well formalized framework is available to guide the analysis of controls requirements, the design of controls in systems, and the audit of existing systems. This paper presents a conceptual framework of controls based on an ontological foundation and an extended typology of IT controls. The framework can be used to analyze IT control issues and manage IT control assets. An initial evaluation of the typology using a published control framework and an example indicates its potential usefulness

Ongoing Tracking of Engagement in Motor Learning

Teaching motor skills such as playing music, handwriting, and driving, can greatly benefit from recently developed technologies such as wearable gloves for haptic feedback or robotic sensorimotor exoskeletons for the mediation of effective human-human and robot-human physical interactions. At the heart of such teacher-learner interactions still stands the critical role of the ongoing feedback a teacher can get about the student's engagement state during the learning and practice sessions. Particularly for motor learning, such feedback is an essential functionality in a system that is developed to guide a teacher on how to control the intensity of the physical interaction, and to best adapt it to the gradually evolving performance of the learner. In this paper, our focus is on the development of a near real-time machine-learning model that can acquire its input from a set of readily available, noninvasive, privacy-preserving, body-worn sensors, for the benefit of tracking the engagement of the learner in the motor task. We used the specific case of violin playing as a target domain in which data were empirically acquired, the latent construct of engagement in motor learning was carefully developed for data labeling, and a machine-learning model was rigorously trained and validated

The WHY in Business Processes: Discovery of Causal Execution Dependencies

A crucial element in predicting the outcomes of process interventions and making informed decisions about the process is unraveling the genuine relationships between the execution of process activities. Contemporary process discovery algorithms exploit time precedence as their main source of model derivation. Such reliance can sometimes be deceiving from a causal perspective. This calls for faithful new techniques to discover the true execution dependencies among the tasks in the process. To this end, our work offers a systematic approach to the unveiling of the true causal business process by leveraging an existing causal discovery algorithm over activity timing. In addition, this work delves into a set of conditions under which process mining discovery algorithms generate a model that is incongruent with the causal business process model, and shows how the latter model can be methodologically employed for a sound analysis of the process. Our methodology searches for such discrepancies between the two models in the context of three causal patterns, and derives a new view in which these inconsistencies are annotated over the mined process model. We demonstrate our methodology employing two open process mining algorithms, the IBM Process Mining tool, and the LiNGAM causal discovery technique. We apply it on a synthesized dataset and on two open benchmark data sets.Comment: 20 pages, 19 figure

Proceedings of the 1st joint workshop on Smart Connected and Wearable Things 2016

These are the Proceedings of the 1st joint workshop on Smart Connected and Wearable Things (SCWT'2016, Co-located with IUI 2016). The SCWT workshop integrates the SmartObjects and IoWT workshops. It focusses on the advanced interactions with smart objects in the context of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), and on the increasing popularity of wearables as advanced means to facilitate such interactions

Augmented Business Process Management Systems: A Research Manifesto

Augmented Business Process Management Systems (ABPMSs) are an emerging class of process-aware information systems that draws upon trustworthy AI technology. An ABPMS enhances the execution of business processes with the aim of making these processes more adaptable, proactive, explainable, and context-sensitive. This manifesto presents a vision for ABPMSs and discusses research challenges that need to be surmounted to realize this vision. To this end, we define the concept of ABPMS, we outline the lifecycle of processes within an ABPMS, we discuss core characteristics of an ABPMS, and we derive a set of challenges to realize systems with these characteristics.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur

Controls in business and IT : formalization and application

Controls in business are the means used to ensure business operations comply with a set of given rules, such as legal requirements, standards, and policies. Business compliance with regulations has gained particular importance due to the introduction of legislation to prevent business misconduct, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in the U.S. One outcome is that controls are more widely used and are often related to Information Technology (IT), because IT systems are used to implement business controls, and because the introduction of IT entails additional control concerns. Thus, control aspects should be an integral part of the analysis and design of information systems. Furthermore, information systems need to be examined for the completeness and correctness of their controls. Despite the importance of controls, no general, well-formalized, framework is available to guide the analysis of control requirements, or the design of controls in systems. This work introduces a conceptual framework for controls, based on an ontological foundation. The framework is built upon the key notion of the control system, from which two complementary views were derived: the Enterprise View (EV) which conceptualizes control as a `thing', and the Process View (PV) which conceptualizes control as an `action'. Based on these views, two concrete applications were developed to evaluate the correctness and usefulness of the underlying conceptual framework. A classification scheme, or a typology, was derived from the EV and can be used to manage control assets. The second application is a process modeling grammar enrichment, which was derived from the PV and is designed to explicitly incorporate control activities in two alternative styles. Both proposed applications were empirically evaluated, concluding their effectiveness in promoting better organizational compliance.Business, Sauder School ofGraduat

Reusable Derivation of Operational Metrics for Architectural Optimization

AbstractMaintaining coherence between system functional, performance, production and operational requirements is a key to the ability to optimize the design of large-scale systems. Different architectural configurations entail significant differences in functionality, performance, ease of manufacturing/assembly and operational behavior. While the first two are the usual concerns in architectural tradeoff analysis, the last two, reflected by manufacturability and operational metrics, such as manufacturability and affordability, are often neglected in architectural optimization. In this work, we propose a methodology to derive the formal specification of operational metrics applicable to design optimization based on life cycle processes, such as “manufacturing”, “sunny day operation”, and “unplanned maintenance”. These operational metrics are presented in the context of an industrial case study for an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) to provide context for the recommended approach. We suggest an approach to (1) define libraries of reusable operational metrics based on architectural properties, (2) build reusable data processing patterns to calculate these architectural properties, and (3) map calculated architectural parameters to a specific design model

Self-organizing maps for multi-objective pareto frontiers

Decision makers often need to take into account multiple conflict-ing objectives when selecting a solution for their problem. This can result in a potentially large number of candidate solutions to be considered. Visualizing a Pareto Frontier, the optimal set of so-lutions to a multi-objective problem, is considered a difficult task when the problem at hand spans more than three objective func-tions. We introduce a novel visual-interactive approach to facilitate coping with multi-objective problems. We propose a characteriza-tion of the Pareto Frontier data and the tasks decision makers face as they reach their decisions. Following a comprehensive analysis of the design alternatives, we show how a semantically-enhanced Self-Organizing Map, can be utilized to meet the identified tasks. We argue that our newly proposed design provides both consis-tent orientation of the 2D mapping as well as an appropriate vi-sual representation of individual solutions. We then demonstrate its applicability with two real-world multi-objective case studies. We conclude with a preliminary empirical evaluation and a qualitative usefulness assessment