Visual Attention Demanding Environment and its Trust Based Evaluation
The focus of the work would be the development of a software environment providing human-aware ambient support for a human performing a task that demands substantial amounts of attention. The agent will obtain human attention-awareness in an adaptive manner by use of a dynamical model of human attention, gaze sensoring preferably by an eye-tracker, and information about features of the objects in the environment which is parameterised for characteristics of the human specified above. The agent will use a built-in adaptation model to adapt on the fly, the values of these parameters to the personal characteristics of the human. The software agent is assumed to be implemented in a component-based manner. For example it can be applied in a setup for a task where the human has to identify enemies and allies, and eliminate the enemies. It can be further extended to include the trust value on agent depending on its previous experiences. Contact Person: Dr. Muhammad Umair
An Ambient Intelligence Platform supporting Context Aware Planning
Computing has become increasingly mobile and pervasive today; these changes imply that applications and services must be aware and adapt to highly dynamic environments. This is the vision of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). Today, building context-aware AmI applications is a complex and time consuming task. This research project aims at the realization of an agent oriented platform for the building and rapid prototyping of context-aware AmI applications. An application developed through this platform will run on the Android operating system on smart phone of the user and will assist the user in the achievement of his objectives. Our research relies on three aspects: (1) Building a platform for the development of AmI applications. (2) The platform should have the context modelling capability which includes tasks like acquiring, discovering, interpreting, accessing various contexts. (3) A context aware planning mechanism that generates the plans according to the current context, monitors the execution of the plans by user and modifies the plans if the context changes. This last also requires anticipating the user requirements from the current context, proposing new objectives, planning for the new objectives and merging the newly computed plans to the existing plans of the user. Contact Person: Dr. Muhammad Adnan Hashmi
Productivity and Social Network Analysis of the BPM Community
The aim of this study is to collect the peer-reviewed publications being done in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) and perform productivity and academic social network analysis on the collected data. For the study, the research being done in the field of business process management will be gathered by employing a structured literature review protocol (see sample protocol [1]). According to the literature protocol, at first the articles published in the leading journals and conferences will be collected. Subsequently, a multiphase relevance screening will be conducted based on a strictly defined inclusion and exclusion criteria to generated a dataset that represents the research being done by the BPM community. The dataset will then be used to analyze productivity and social network analysis of the BPM community based on a set of pre-defined metrics (see metrics in [2]). The benefits of employing the structured protocol are, traceable results will be produced; the selected set of studies is unbiased from personal preferences and representative of the existing body of knowledge. Contact Person: Mr. Muhammad Khurram Shahzad
[1] R.J.B. Vanwersch, Khurram Shahzad, K. Vanhaecht, P.W.P.J. Grefen, L.M. Pintelon, J. Mendling, G.G. van Merode, H.A. Reijers. Methodological Support for Redesigning Business Processes in Healthcare: A Literature Review Protocol. International Journal of Care Pathways. Vol. 15, No.4, pp. 119-126, 2011.
[2] H.A. Reijers, M. Song, H. Romero, U. Dayal, J. Eder, J. Koehler. A Collaboration and Productiveness Analysis of the BPM Community. In, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Business Process Management(BPM 2009), Springer LNCS Vol. 5701, 1-14, 2009.
