Leon J. Osterweil - US grants

Effective processes are of fundamental importance to manufacturing,
government, engineering, and management. In all of these areas greater
understanding and control of key processes can lead to improved
effectiveness. For the past 15 years, it has also been recognized that
processes are fundamental to software development, and that effective
control of processes can lead to similar benefits, such as improved
understanding, coordination, efficiency, and automation. It has been hoped
that this would lead to reductions in software development cost,
improvements in software product quality, and reductions in software
development time. Our hypothesis is that progress towards these goals can
be speeded by establishing a scientific basis upon which to build the
process technologies that will support more effective software production.
This research project will lead to the development of needed improvements
to the Little-JIL process definition language, and the Juliette
interpreter. These improvements will be validated by programming and
running multiuser, iterative software design processes that are effective
in integrating the activities of humans and computer automation. These
processes should be of considerable value in themselves. Their
development, moreover, will sharpen and validate the Little-JIL process
language, resulting in clearer understandings of the underlying
requirements for effective process definition languages.

EIA-0223599
Leon J. Osterweil
Norman Sondeimer
University of Massachusetts Amherst

SGER: Digital Government: Preliminary Evaluation of Process Formulisms for Defining Government Processes

Much of the daily operation of government may be thought of as the faithful and precise execution of prescribed processes (law, rules, regulation). This small grant will explore the potential for the application of a special purpose computer language (LittleJIL) to aid in ensuring the accuracy and efficiency of government processes, such as the issuing of licenses. This preliminary grant will begin the building of a partnership between the PI and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in investigating the potential of this novel idea.

Dispute resolution is a fundamental and pervasive activity of government, requring efficiency, effectiveness and fairness. This project proposes applying process technology to develop and evaluate dispute resolution processes through online delivery. The intention is to improve dispute resolution, and deepen understanding of how to be more successful in developing and evaluating processes with the stringent requirements of public governance. The project focus is on the dispute resolution processes and approaches used by the National Mediation Board (NMB).

Intellectual Merit: The project's intellectual focus is on the applicability of process technology to processes having particularly stringent efficiency, effectiveness and fairness requirements. These, in turn, rest upon the need for strong management of communications and information flow, and strong assurances about security, privacy, and accuracy. The establishment of transparently fair, validated, processes designed by multi-stakeholder collaboration can meet these requirements, and lead to increased trust in government. The research will include evaluation of the success of innovative process definition, analysis, and collaboration technologies in meeting these stringent requirements and in increasing trust. These technologies have succeeded in such domains as software development, medicine, and scientific data processing.; they will now be evaluated in the complex domain of online dispute resolution, with its particularly challenging goal of trust enhancement in an environment where the parties are in dispute. The research is interdisciplinary in nature, involving researchers from computer science, management, and legal studies.

Broader Impacts: Most federal agencies must respond to grievances from citizens and groups, and resolve disputes between the agency and individuals and organizations. The Federal government has recently mandated that its agencies use alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods to resolve disputes. As a result of both Congressional and Presidential action during the 1990s, federal administrative agencies must use non-adversarial dispute resolution whenever possible. Over eighty Federal agencies have such mediation programs. The NMB's clients and sibling organizations will be prepared to adopt these technologies in applying Online Dispute Resolution to their own needs. Results will be distributed through traditional publication venues and also by the UMass Center for Information Technology and Dispute Resolution, the UMass Electronic Enterprise Institute, and the NMB's participation in the US Government Interagency Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Working Group of over 25 agencies.

ABSTRACT
0618957
Leon Osterweil

University of Massachusetts Amherst

This provides travel grants to U.S. students to attend the 2006 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2006) Doctoral Symposium, to be held in May 2006 in Shanghai, China. Selected students who are presenting at the Doctoral Symposium will have an opportunity to publicly discuss their research goals, methods, and results at an early stage in their research, and to receive feedback from an distinguished international panel of experts. Attending the ICSE event is an opportunity to start becoming part of the software engineering community and to have an international research experience.

This research will evaluate a generative approach to creating families of processes, by generating families of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) processes, and evaluating them through use at the National Mediation Board (NMB). The generative approach will be guided by NMB specifications of process goals, which will vary in emphasis according to different weightings of both tangible goals, such as resolving a specific conflict, and such nontangible goals as empowerment and relationship-building. The process families will be generated by binding different combinations of process concerns, such as coordination, agent behaviors, and artifact flows, into a high-level metaprocess framework. The generated process instances will also include specified instrumentation and measurement vehicles. This will facilitate the evaluation of the processes by NMB and project researchers and will form the foundation for evaluation of the overall generative approach. This approach will require a process definition language that features clear separation of concerns. An example is the Little-JIL process definition language, developed at UMass, which will be used as the basis for this research. The project will add to understanding of process generation and process technology in general, while also creating useful processes for the NMB, and a superior framework for social science experimentation with dispute resolution processes as well as processes in general. The project team includes computer science researchers, an ODR expert, dispute resolution researchers, and representatives from the NMB. The team has conducted successful NSF-funded research on a previous project, whose results indicate the need for the research proposed here.

Intellectual Merit: This project continues the exploration of the value of using software engineering perspectives and technology to deal with processes as rigorously definable objects. The main issue addressed here is the management of families of processes. Previous research indicates that organizations like NMB require families of processes, rather than a single process, and that such processes may not always be aimed at producing a single product nor one that is tangible. Use of a process definition language featuring clean separation of concerns seems to be a promising way to address these needs, and that approach will be pursued and evaluated in this research, thus making an important contribution to understanding the formal nature of processes. A process generation framework will be built and used to generate real ODR processes that will be used and evaluated by the NMB. The rigor and precision of these processes, and their incorporation of vehicles for evaluation, will facilitate the comparison of processes that differ in precisely documented ways. This will be an important contribution to social science research, supporting the ability of social scientists to perform precise experimentation with processes, with ODR processes being used as a first example.

Broader Impact: The ODR processes provided will be of considerable value to the NMB in a number of ways. The processes will improve NMB's effectiveness in dealing with disputes in the airline and railroad industries. They will also serve as an aid that NMB can use to train new personnel. The clarity and precision of the processes will render them suitable subjects for ongoing discussion and evaluation, leading to improvements in conflict resolution effectiveness. Moreover, success at the NMB will demonstrate the applicability of these ideas and approaches to the dozens of other government agencies responsible for dispute resolution.

NSF Proposals 0820198/0820138

Title: Process-Centered, Analysis-Driven System Development Applied to Human-Intensive Medical Processes

PIs: Lori Clarke, Philip Henneman, George Avrunin, Elizabeth Henneman, and Leon Osterweil

This project presents a new approach to developing human-intensive systems in which the coordination among human participants, hardware devices, and application software systems are specified in an executable, process-definition language. Process definitions are subjected to rigorous analysis in order to detect defects and evaluate proposed improvements. Such validated process definitions can then be used to drive simulations and train process participants. The proposed approach is to be evaluated by developing a process support environment that is then used to define and analyze medical processes. Medical processes provide a particularly good evaluation domain as they are human-intensive, involve diverse software applications and hardware devices, and are both safety critical and error prone. Separating and rigorously analyzing the coordination aspects of complex, human-intensive systems represent a paradigm shift from current development practices. This approach provides a strong technical and methodological basis for the engineering of human-intensive systems, leading to systems that are scalable, understandable, and able to amplify human efficacy and control. Finally, this process-centered approach has the potential to improve the quality and reduce the cost of medical care.

One of the Federal government's missions is to act as an unbiased mediator in the resolution of disputes. One avenue for achieving resolution is the court system. There are other avenues, though, such as the National Mediation Board (NMB) which is required to mediate labor disputes in the railway industry.

Building on a three-year collaborative technical project between NSF and NMB, this workshop will develop a broad technical and socio/legal research agenda for on-line dispute resolution and labor negotiation/mediation in Federal transporation agencies. In addition to a report to be widely distributed, the event will allow a forum for a broad selection of interested parties to begin forming a community of interest. Attendees will include lawyers, transportation experts, and computer scientists from academia, industry and Federal agencies that have mediation responsibilities.

This project is developing and evaluating the application of iterative process improvement technology to assure the privacy, security, reliability, and trustworthiness of elections, which are the very cornerstone of democracy. The focus of the project is to locate mismatches between existing voting systems and the processes that are currently using them in the conduct of elections. These mismatches can result in vulnerabilities or inaccuracy in elections. This project demonstrates how to remediate such vulnerabilities through the use of iterative process improvement. The methodology uncovers vulnerabilities by modeling processes and examining how discrepancies between the characteristics of these processes and the behaviors of voting systems that are used by the processes can lead to such vulnerabilities. In this way, this project is making a novel and important contribution to defending one of the most critical processes of democracy.

The project tests the results on the election processes and systems of Yolo County. Part of the research is to model that county's processes using the process definition language, and examining what these processes require and expect from the voting systems they use. The existing voting systems can then be examined to determine whether they meet the requirements and expectations of the processes using them. Where mismatches occur, the vulnerabilities created by such mismatches can be assessed, improvements suggested, and the methodology can show how the suggested improvements address the mismatches and remove the vulnerabilities.

This project will develop and evaluate software to support people engaged in online social deliberation, especially as it relates to dispute resolution and collaborative inquiry. The software will model and monitor deliberative processes skills while people are either in collaboration or involved in settling disputes. Applications will be in three domains that already support online conversations: 1) online dispute resolution (e.g., eBay and the U.S. National Mediation Board); 2) collaborative learning in open-ended inquiry learning environments; and 3) dialog and deliberation on civic and ethical issues. The project will scaffold situations, adding structure or focusing attention on social processes, support improvement of individual skills, and facilitate a. Wisdom of crowds that enables participants to produce improved results. This project involves faculty across five departments: legal studies, psychology, political science, computer science and education.

Intellectual Merit. This research advances social issues (collaboration, dispute resolution, and critical thinking) and computation techniques (online dispute resolution, argumentation and collaboration). It furthers research into building social communities, explores issues of coaching and collaboration and develops evaluation tools for measuring the effect of online support.

Broader Societal Impact. This project advances the understanding of online human-human communication. It will enable more people to access social deliberative tools, promote interest in discussion among more people and improve the quality of on-line disputes as well as collaborations. The project lays the groundwork for more intelligent communication in online communities, creates new understandings of the complexities of collaboration and produces new modes of synergistic online discussions.

This project will develop and evaluate a prototype system to provide on-line process monitoring and guidance to the performers of health care processes. An Institute of Medicine report has estimated that nearly 100,000 people per year die in US hospitals from preventable errors, and subsequent reports have suggested that many of these errors arise due to the complexity of hospital processes. The project will demonstrate how contextual information (retrospective, current, and prospective) can be used to provide process performers with timely information that could reduce errors, provide expedited warnings of impending hazards, and improve outcomes. Techniques to accumulate and represent historical data will be developed and will feed into profile-based analysis techniques that will evaluate probabilities and support making fine-grained process distinctions. These capabilities will provide a strong technological foundation for evidence-based, continuous process improvement.

Project technologies will be evaluated first using synthetic event streams generated by process model driven simulations, then by human simulations with nursing students using patient mannequins, and finally with medical professionals in simulated clinical settings. Processes to be examined include blood transfusion, chemotherapy, medication administration, and patient identification verification. Early community success in applying medical checklists and recent experimental results with proactive process guidance in a hospital emergency department are positive indications that the approaches proposed here have an excellent chance of gaining acceptance and improving medical outcomes. Moreover, the technologies developed here, although evaluated specifically for health care, will also apply to human-intensive systems increasingly employed in a wide range of domains in society. The validated medical processes and the proposed prototype will be an effective framework for educating medical professionals in current best practices. This project will also educate computer science and engineering students about the challenges posed by the medical domain, encouraging a new generation of specialists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. Its societal appeal will also help engage bright, energetic minority and female students thereby helping broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM generally and in computer science and engineering particularly.

This project explores process composition tools as applied to elections, concentrating particularly on mail-in and Internet voting. This includes exploration of how to compose systems from pre-analyzed process components, how to analyze the vulnerability of these systems to attacks, and how to guarantee that important security properties are ensured for the resulting composed system. The underlying processes represent aspects of national and local elections, their composition produces an election process, and analysis of the composition gives insight into potential errors or attacks on the election.

Elections are human-intensive processes, processes that directly involve humans in important decision-making and coordination activities, including their interactions with hardware and software components. Providing an approach for formally reasoning about human participation extends current security work. The project also breaks new ground by exploring process-based approaches for modeling and defending against attacks.

The project works closely with government agencies at both the national and local levels to provide in-depth realistic evaluation of results.

Election officials in the U.S. can directly employ the results of this work to make U.S. election processes more verifiably secure, simpler, and easier to change as new technologies, laws, and regulations are imposed. Moreover the technologies developed in this project can be used in most human-intensive processes that have critical security concerns.