III: Small: Collaborative Research: Mining and Optimizing Ad Hoc Workflows

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Ad hoc workflows are everywhere in service industry, scientificresearch, as well as daily life, such as workflows of customerservice, trouble shooting, information search, etc. Optimizing adhoc workflows thus has significant benefits to the society.Currently the execution of ad hoc workflows is based on humandecisions, where misinterpretation, inexperience, and ineffectiveprocessing are not uncommon, leading to operation inefficiency.The goal of this research project is to design and developfundamental models, concepts, and algorithms to mine and optimize adhoc workflows. The project includes novel research on the followingkey areas: (1) Network Modeling and Structure Mining. A network modelis built that statistically captures the execution characteristicsof ad hoc workflows, and is optimized to improve the execution ofnew workflows with respect to different optimization objectives.(2) Workflow Artifact Mining. The network model built on workflowexecutions is then extended with workflow artifact mining to realizean optimization system that is able to take advantage of bothexecutions and text contents. (3) Role Discovery and RelationAssessment. A computational framework is built to analyze the rolesand relationships of agents involved in ad hoc workflow executionsin order to further optimize workflows.Advances from this project include models to represent ad hocworkflows, algorithms for mining hidden collaborative models, andtechniques that optimize ad hoc workflow processing. The projectbridges two emerging research areas: service science and networkscience, and enriches the principles and technologies of data mining.It also enhances research infrastructure through the collaboration ofteam members from different areas (data mining, database, andnetwork). This research is tightly integrated with education throughstudent mentoring and curriculum development. Publications, software and course materials that arisefrom this project will be disseminated on the project website:URL: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~xyan/smartflow.htm