The Explainable Business Process (XBP) - An Exploratory Research

Providing explanations to the business process, its decisions and its activities, is an important key factor for the process in order to achieve the business objectives of the business process, and to minimize and deal with the ambiguity of the business process that causes multiple interpretations, as well as to engender the appropriate trust of the users in the process. As a first step towards adding explanations to business process, we present an exploratory study to bring in the concept of explainability into business process, where we propose a conceptual framework to use the explainability with business process in a model that we called the Explainable Business Process XBP, furthermore we propose the XBP lifecycle based on the Model-based and Incremental Knowledge Engineering (MIKE) approach, in order to show in details the phase where explainability can take a place in business process lifecycle, noting that we focus on explaining the decisions and activities of the process in its as-is model without transforming it into a to-be model

ACoPla: a Multiagent Simulator to Study Individual Strategies in Dynamic Situations

One important issue in multi-agent systems is how to define agents’ interaction strategies in dynamic open environments. Generally, agents’ behaviors, such as being cooperative/altruistic or competitive/adversarial, are defined a priori by their creators. However, this is a weak premise when considering interaction among anonymous self-interested agents. Whenever agents meet, there is always a decision to be made: what is the best group interaction strategy? We argue that the answer depends on the amount of information required to make a decision and on the deadline proximity for accomplishing the task in hand. In certain situations, it is to the agents’ advantage to exchange information with others, while in other situations there are no incentives for them to spend time doing so. Understanding effective behaviors according to the decision- making scenario is still an open issue in multi-agent systems. In this paper, we present a multi-agent simulator (ACoPla) to understand the correlations between agents’ interaction strategy, decision-making context and successful task accomplishment rate. Additionally, we develop a case study in the domain of site evacuation to exemplify our findings. Through this study, we detect the types of conditions under which cooperation becomes the preferred strategy, as the environment changes

Agents to assist in finding help

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-105).The problem of finding someone who might be able to help with a particular task or knowledge area exists everywhere, be it in groups of students or corporate settings. Time and effort are spent looking for relevant information when another person in the community could easily provide assistance. Our approach to addressing this problem is to use software agents to assist the search for expertise. Previous research on this topic has been mostly in the areas of information marketplaces, referral systems or information repositories. We built a system, called Expert Finder, which provides a testbed for ideas and techniques developed in the context of this thesis. Expert Finder analyzes previous work of both the novice and the expert to automatically categorize expertise and match it with the user's problem while providing a community-based incentive mechanism. We present alternative profiling and incentive mechanisms to those that had been presented in previous work. We chose the Java Programming domain for our initial implementation and testing of the system. Expert Finder uses each user's Java source files to determine their expertise and uses a Java domain model to match questions and experts. It keeps track of users' willingness to help out as a measure of the social capital in the community. We ran some tests using the prototype system to assess how well these ideas worked, and results are also reported in this thesis.by Adriana Santarosa Vivacqua.S.M

Mobile Sound Recognition for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing

Human perception of surrounding events is strongly dependent on audio cues. Thus, acoustic insulation can seriously impact situational awareness. We present an exploratory study in the domain of assistive computing, eliciting requirements and presenting solutions to problems found in the development of an environmental sound recognition system, which aims to assist deaf and hard of hearing people in the perception of sounds. To take advantage of smartphones computational ubiquity, we propose a system that executes all processing on the device itself, from audio features extraction to recognition and visual presentation of results. Our application also presents the confidence level of the classification to the user. A test of the system conducted with deaf users provided important and inspiring feedback from participants.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure

GROUP 2018 Special Issue Guest Editorial: Another 25 Years of GROUP

For over 25 years, the ACM International Conference on Supporting GroupWork (GROUP) has been and will continue to be the premier venue for research on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work,Human–Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, and Socio-Technical Studies. The three papers in this special issue demonstrate GROUP’s continued commitment to diverse research approaches, emerging technologies, and collaborative work. We hope you enjoy these papers and, like us, look forward to another 25 years of GROUP.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146739/1/Robert et al. 2018.pdfDescription of Robert et al. 2018.pdf : Articl

Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement

Emergency plans are fundamental for the speedy and effective response in disaster situations. Plans are often constructed by teams of experts, who apply their knowledge to define response procedures, but lack part of location-specific knowledge that can be very relevant to make decisions during responses. Such knowledge is, however, in the minds of people who use those spaces every day, but are not involved in the planning processes. In this paper, we advocate for citizens' involvement in emergency plan elaboration via Public Participation, a mechanism long time used in other areas of e-government. We define a process for the elicitation of citizen's knowledge via public participation, and present the results of a study on its potential impact, where individuals used different collaborative tools to volunteer knowledge to be used in emergency plan improvement.Penadés Gramage, MC.; Vivacqua, AS.; Borges, M.; Canos Cerda, JH. (2011). Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1133

Collaboration and Decision Making in Crisis Situations

[EN] Emergencies are critical situations that demand immediate action to avoid adverse consequences to life and property. Recent events around the world highlight the importance of the theme. A key challenge in Emergency Management is decision-making under time pressure, with an overload of unconfirmed, uncertain and conflicting information, including the management of many people, with distinct and possibly fluid roles, in different places. Collaboration in these settings is an interesting element, since emergency response generally involves multiple agencies and the public, which, having different views, protocols and priorities, must act in concert to handle the situation. In addition, an increasing amount of virtual information is necessary to inform and manage volunteers. The goal of this workshop is to identify and map the main challenges of collaboration in crisis situations, review current research methods and approaches to address them and address the lack of formal processes, structures, methodologies and tools.Adriana S Vivacqua is partially supported by CNPq grant 308425/2012-0 and FAPERJ grant E26/103.029/2012. Vaninha Vieira is partially supported by CNPq grant 490084/2013-3Vivacqua, AS.; Garcia, ACB.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Comes, M.; Vieira, V. (2016). Collaboration and Decision Making in Crisis Situations. ACM. 503-508. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2855520S50350

Hemorragia pulmonar como manifestação do lúpus eritematoso sistêmico

The authors report a case of a 19-year-old woman admitted for the investigation of fever and hemolytic anemia for the previous 2 months. As an inpatient, she had convulsions and sudden loss of consciousness, developing hemoptysis, hypoxia, and respiratory insufficiency. Examination showed pericardial effusions on the echocardiogram and bilateral alveolar condensations on the thoracic radiograph. A hypothetical diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus was made, and measurement of the antinuclear factor was requested along with daily pulse therapy methylprednisolone, in spite of which the outcome was fatal. Afterwards, the result of the antinuclear factor test was positive, with a titer of 1:5120, showing a fine punctiform pattern, fulfilling the criteria for systemic lupus erythematosus according to the American College of Rheumatology. Secondary pulmonary hemorrhage in this connective tissue disease is an uncommon but serious complication that involves a high level of mortality in spite of intensive treatment, as is also reported in the literature.Os autores relatam o caso de uma paciente de 19 anos admitida para investigação de febre e anemia hemolítica, com dois meses de evolução. Durante a internação apresentou crises convulsivas tônico-clônicas e queda súbita no nível de consciência, evoluindo com hemoptise, hipoxemia e insuficiência respiratória. Os exames evidenciaram derrame pericárdico ao ecocardiograma e condensações alveolares bilaterais à radiografia de tórax. Foi levantada a hipótese diagnóstica de lúpus eritematoso sistêmico sendo solicitada a pesquisa do fator antinuclear e iniciada terapia com pulsos diários de metilprednisolona, a despeito da qual a paciente evoluiu para o óbito. Posteriormente o resultado do fator antinuclear mostrou-se positivo, em título de 1:5120, padrão puntiforme fino, preenchendo critérios para lúpus eritematoso sistêmico segundo o Colégio Americano de Reumatologia. A hemorragia pulmonar secundária a esta doença do tecido conjuntivo é uma forma incomum e grave de manifestação da doença que evolui com alta mortalidade, apesar do tratamento intensivo, conforme descrito na literatura