Tel-Aviv University - Computer Science Colloquium
Sunday, January 17, 14:15-15:15
at 14:00 In the last few years, workflow management has become a hot topic in the research community and in the commercial arena. Workflow systems hold the promise of facilitating the efficient everyday operation of many enterprises and work environments. Workflow management is multidisciplinary in nature encompassing many aspects of computing: database management, distributed systems, messaging, transaction management, mobile computing, collaboration, business process modelling, integration of legacy and new applications, document management, etc. Many academic and industrial research projects have been underway for a while. Numerous products are currently in use. The capabilities of these products are being enhanced in significant ways. Standardization efforts are in progress under the auspices of the Workflow Management Coalition and OMG. As has happened in the RDBMS area with respect to some topics, in the workflow area also, some of the important real-life problems faced by customers and product developers are not being tackled by researchers. Based on my experience founding and leading the Exotica workflow project at IBM Research, and my close collaboration with the IBM FlowMark (now called MQSeries Workflow) and Lotus Notes product groups, in this talk, I will discuss the issues relating to contemporary workflow management systems. I will also elaborate on various directions for research and potential future extensions to the design and modelling of workflow management systems.
Bio:
C. Mohan, after finishing his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 1981, joined the IBM Almaden Research Center. In June 1997, he was named an IBM Fellow for being recognized worldwide as a leading innovator in database transaction management. He received the 1996 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award in recognition of his innovative contributions to the development and use of database systems. Since late 1996, he has been leading the Dominotes project whose goal is to enhance Lotus Domino/Notes by introducing transactional recovery. Earlier, he led the Exotica workflow management project. During 6/98-7/99, he is on a sabbatical at INRIA, Rocquencourt (France). Mohan has received numerous IBM awards: 1 Corporate Award, 7 Outstanding Innovation Awards, 2 Research Division Awards and the 9th Plateau Invention Achievement Award for patent activities (28 issued, 4 pending). His algorithms have been implemented in several IBM and non-IBM products, and university prototypes. He is the primary inventor of the ARIES family of recovery and locking methods, and the industry-standard Presumed Abort commit protocol. He was the Americas Program Chair for the 1996 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, the Program Chair of the 1987 International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems, and a Program Vice-Chair of the 1994 International Conference on Data Engineering. He is an editor of the VLDB Journal, and Distributed and Parallel Databases - An International Journal.
For colloquium schedule, see http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~matias/colloq.html