I am a graduate student at the Lab for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
My research interests include validation of formal process definitions, process modeling languages, exception handling patterns in processes and techniques for supporting continuous process improvement. I have been studying the above in the context of modeling and analyzing medical processes.
There is evidence that important and critical processes (such as medical processes) performed in our everyday lives contain defects that could lead to a variety of negative consequences. These processes, however, are complex and non-trivial to reason about. A natural approach to understanding and reasoning about such complex processes is to create models which preserve the features of interest but leave out other irrelevant details that unnecessarily complicate the understanding and the analysis. It turns out, however, that it is hard to create accurate models and thus any meaningful process understanding and analysis greatly depends on the validation of the process model, i.e. on the increasing of one's confidence that the model is actually an accurate representation of the real process. I am interested in the problem of validating process models.
Many of the errors in processes occur during exceptional/non-typical scenarios when people may not be well-trained, when they work under time or other kinds of pressure. I am interested in studying exceptional scenarios in processes and how they can be modeled to facilitate the understanding, analysis, and improvement of processes.
