Sumithra Velupillai attended the Twelfth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) and the Workshop MMIES-2: Multi-source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization (MMIES2), both held in conjunction with The 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling) in Manchester, August 16 – 23. Coling is one of the most important conferences in Computational Linguistics, with around 500 attendants.

At CoNLL Sumithra presented the article Mixing and Blending Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies together with her colleagues Yvonne Samuelsson, Oscar Täckström and Mark Fishel during a poster session at the conference. The work was the result of joining the shared task Joint Learning of Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies within the course Machine Learning 2 organized by GSLT. The group ranked 6 out of 20! The full article can be found here:

http://people.dsv.su.se/~sumithra/publications/CoNLL/CONLL_Mixing_Blending.pdf

At MMIES2 Sumithra presented the article Automatic Construction of Domain-specific Dictionaries on Sparse Parallel Corpora in the Nordic languages which was co-written with associate professor Hercules Dalianis. In this article Nordic domain-specific dictionaries were created automatically by utilizing multilingual corpora from the web site Hallå Norden and a word alignment approach. The work was part of the research project TvärSök.

The full article can be found here:

http://people.dsv.su.se/~sumithra/publications/MMIES2/Velupillai_Dalianis_MMIES2_ack.pdf

Some photos:

Sumithra at a demo session:

The opening reception, with Manchester’s mayor in the middle:

We, Martin Hassel, Eriks Sneiders, Tessy Ceratto, Ola Knutsson (CSC), Viggo Kann (CSC) and Magnus Rosell (CSC) are preparing an application to Vinnova – Deadline sept 2, 2008: Title: IMAIL-Intelligent mail answering service for eGovernment, other partners Försäkringskassan (Swedish Social Insurance Agency) and Euroling AB

Abstract
The project vision is to design and develop eGovernment services that facilitate efficient communication between government agencies and citizens and companies, which will lead to a transformed and improved government.
The overall goal of the demonstrator is to show how further development of today´s tools and technologies can improve the communication between large organizations and people. The demonstrator will run on Försäkringskassan and help to automate the communication between these organizations and the people by processing text-based inquiries, primarily e-mail based queries.
Our tools and technologies will
1. automate answering of a large part of the incoming e-mail flow,
2. improve right-on-time answers to inquiries asked through electronic devices.

Two year project = 4.6 million SEK

This year was till now a very good one from the scientific point of the research papers accepted for publication in the volumes of the conferences proceedings of different international conferences for the seven members of the IT Management research group (Group Leader – Dr. Lazar Rusu, PhD students: Edephonce N. Nfuka and Georg Hodosi and four potential PhD students from autumn 2008: Johnny Flores, Anayanci Lopez, Norman Vargas and Mohamed El Mekawy). Moreover a book chapter named “IT Governance in the Public Sector: A Case Study in a Developing Country” having as authors: Edephonce N. Nfuka and Lazar Rusu has been developed in this year and has been submitted for the final evaluation to the reviewers of the “Handbook of Research on ICT-Enabled Transformational Government: A Global Perspective”, in order to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc. www.igi-global.com). A list of the main conferences and the research papers accepted for publication in the volumes of the conferences proceedings in 2008 and 2009 are described below.

To the WSKS 2008 – 1st World Summit on Knowledge Society (http://www.open-knowledge-society.org/summit.htm) that will be held in Athens, Greece, 24-28 September 2008 we have two papers accepted for publication in Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Springer Communications in Computer and Information Science. Moreover both papers are considered for publication in 2010 in a special issue in the International Journal of Technology Management (IJTM). The final decision about the publication of our papers in IJTM will be taken after the WSKS 2008 conference in Athens. The title of the papers, authors and the abstract of these papers are following below.
The first paper is named “Strategic IT Alignment in Swedish Public Healthcare System” and the authors of the paper are: Lazar Rusu, Yu Huang (former KTH/EMIS student) and Ali Turab Rizvi (former KTH/ICT Entrepreneurship student).
Abstract. Information and communication technology (ICT) is not only beneficial for the business sector but has a lot to offer for the public sector as well. In fact, the public sector can benefit the most by the advancement of ICT that it offers numerous potential benefits in terms of improvements for patients, health and elderly care professionals and decision makers. In this context this research paper has studied the healthcare sector in Stockholm and has analyzed if their IT strategy is aligned with the government strategy. During this analysis we have found a lot of models developed for the alignment of business and IT strategy but we haven’t found any model for the alignment of IT with the government strategy. Therefore in the analysis we have done in this paper we have proposed an integrated model and used the Swedish healthcare system as a case study in order to see if their IT strategy is aligned with their government’s strategy.
The second paper is named “Strategic Use of Information Technology in Profit and Non-Profit Organizations from Tanzania and Sweden” and the authors of the paper are: Johnny Flores, Anayanci Lopez, Norman Vargas and Lazar Rusu.
Abstract. Organizations have to deal with a dynamic environment such as new technologies, entrepreneurial ideas, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, and regulatory change. A key for a well-functioning company is an efficient and effective strategic use of Information Technology (IT) supporting the business strategies, goals, and needs. It is also referred as Strategic Business and IT Alignment which is interpreted as a continuous process of conscious and coherent interrelation of all components and personnel of the business and the IT in order to contribute to the organization’s performance over time. This paper reports an analysis of the Business and Information Technology Alignment by using Luftman’s Strategic Maturity Assessment Model in case of a Tanzanian Profit Company and a Swedish Non-profit Company where both organizations have an intensive use of Information Technology.

To the MCIS 2008 – Mediterranean Conference in Information Systems (http://www.mcis2008.org/) that will be held in Hammamet, Tunisia, 23-26 October 2008 we have a paper accepted for publication in the conference proceedings (and indexed in AIS-eLibrary http://aisel.aisnet.org/search.asp). The title of the paper, authors and the abstract of this paper is following below.
The paper is named “Information Technology Outsourcing: A Case Study of Best Practices in two Swedish Global Companies”and the authors of the paper are: Georg Hodosi and Lazar Rusu.
Abstract. The paper describes the research approach for defining of a new set of best practices for IT Outsourcing (ITO) that will help the Swedish global companies to improve their ITO performance. To define a new set of best practices we have done a research investigation in two Swedish global companies and we have compared their practices versus the recommendations from the research literature review of IT outsourcing. As we have seen till now the best practices for IT outsourcing are underrepresented in the research literature however there are fairly well represented in the ITO practitioners’ world. From the research literature of ITO, we have selected about 88 best practices and from this set, we have compiled and reduced them to 18 best practices by eliminating the duplicates and removing the generic best practices that are not exclusively related to ITO. Furthermore, we have asked the companies part of our case study about their opinion about these 18 best practices and how they have implemented. The results of this research have shown that 57% of the best practices have been accepted and practiced by these global companies. On the other hand, we have also found a new best practice that has not been mentioned in the research literature and which the companies from our case study recommended. Moreover the results of our research have shown up that 26% of the best practices have been rejected by these global companies and we argue that the reason for this high discrepancy in fact is caused by “The buyer-seller dilemma”.

To the itAIS 2008 – 5th Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS (http://www.itais2008.org/) that will be held in Paris, France on 13-14 December 2008 we have a paper accepted for publication in the conference proceedings. The title of the paper, authors and the abstract of this paper is following below.
The paper is named “The Strategic Role of IT: A Case Study in Retail Companies from Sweden” and the authors of the paper are: Lazar Rusu and Mohamed El Mekawy.
Abstract. Information technology (IT) has become today more important that it was before for the business strategy. As we see now the current business environment is a dynamic, fast-changing and highly competitive one. Therefore in such an environment, it is essential that business managers understand the potential use and critical role of IT. According to McKeen and Smith (2009) strategic alignment is only one of the problems that are facing IT managers in developing of an IT strategy and in the authors opinion IT is more important today in the development and delivery of the business strategy. In this context the goal of our paper has looked to investigate, through a case study research approach, two successful Swedish retail companies and the strategic role of IT in their business. The selection of the retail companies has been done based upon the fact that both companies are competing in the same marketplace and in this way we could compare and analyse the differences between them regarding the strategic role of IT.

To the HICSS-42 – Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_42/apahome42.htm) that will be held in Waikoloa, Hawaii on January 5-8, 2009 we have a paper accepted for publication in the conference proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society. The title of the paper, authors and the abstract of this paper is following below.
The paper is named: ”The State of IT Governance in Organizations from Public Sector in a Developing Country” and the authors of the paper are: Edephonce N. Nfuka, Lazar Rusu and Paul Johannesson.
Abstract. Today in many organizations in the public sector the use of IT has become crucial in sustaining and extending the organizations’ strategies and objectives. This pervasive use of technology has caused a critical dependency on IT that calls for specific focus on IT Governance. This paper discusses the current state of IT Governance practices in five public sector organizations from a developing country, like is Tanzania. The results of this research approach are looking to the IT Governance mechanisms in place in terms of structures, processes and relational mechanisms. It also includes a discussion on the problems and consequences inherent to inadequate IT Governance practices and inhibitors to effective IT Governance for the further improvement of public service delivery in this environment.

I have just returned from a six weeks visit at the BPM group at QUT, where I was invited by Dr Chun Ouyang.

During my stay I worked on:
1) A revision of our report on open source tools evaluation with the workflow patterns. The extended and updated version of the paper is available here;
2) A book chapter on open source workflow management systems.

At QUT, I attended the following presentations:
1) The Oracle Unified Method by David Burke (Oracle Corporation, USA);
2) YAWL and Second Life (a Youtube video of the product can be found here);
3) An Examination of Activity Labelling Practices in Process Modelling by Jan Recker’s.

A part of my work plan at QUT was to get familiar with the YAWL4film application. Chun was kind and gave me a detailed presentation and demonstration of the system.

During my visit at QUT, on demand by industry representatives, I also started the Workflow Patterns Google group, which is meant to provide a discussion forum for the workflow patterns. Your are welcome to join in.

Last Sunday I left Stockholm for a six weeks long visit of the BPM group at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) in Brisbane, Australia. On my way to Brisbane I stopped for a couple of days in Tokyo to visit John Mettraux, who is the main driving force behind OpenWFE – one of the open source workflow management systems I evaluated recently.

John had invited me to join him on a meeting of the BPM interest group in Tokyo, called BPMinna, and give a short presentation of YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language – the language and open source WFMS developed by the research groups of Prof. Wil van der Aalst and Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede from QUT and TUE). The meeting took place in Shibuya (“one of the busiest places in Tokyo”) last Monday evening. It was organised by Wakizaka-san from Cosolva and hosted by iKnow. It started with a brief demo of iKnow’s product (which is a software product for supporting the teaching and learning of English for Japanese speaking people), followed by my presentation of YAWL (which can be downloaded here YAWL-Tokyo-July08-2.zip), and a presentation of the latest news on OpenWFEru (Ruote for short, i.e. the Ruby version of OpenWFE) given by John. The meeting attracted 25 attenders, both developers and business analysts, from companies such as IT Frontier Corporation, Oracle, Casio, Toshiba etc. The other two presentations were given in Japanese.

The meeting continued with a social dinner in a traditional Japanese restaurant which I was invited to. I would like to express my thanks to John Mettraux for inviting me to this meeting, to Wakizaka-san both for organising the meeting and for translating and annotating my presentation to Japanese, and to BPMinna for showing interest in YAWL and for a delicious dinner.

The second day of my visit was spent on discussions on WFMS with John. John also helped me with installing Ruote on my machine, as I am intending to having a look of it during the time in Australia.

John, thanks for your time and great hospitality!

Link to John’s blog post for the event.