Mohammad Shafahi

A Coopetition Space for Complex Product Specification

Due to peculiarities and complexities embedded in complex service-enhanced products, e.g. automated buildings, these products are one-of-a-kind, largely customized, and may involve a large number of competitive / cooperative multi-stakeholders. Life cycle of complex products typically includes a substantially long creation phase, followed by its operation and evolution phases that last over decades. Although, the majority of complex product components (e.g. equipment and services) are specified gradually and by varied stakeholders during its creation stage, further specifications are also provided later on to support its evolution. This paper addresses challenges in both specification of varied and numerous components, and managing these specifications thought-out the complex product life cycle. We address reusability, modularity, and federated sharing requirements in the coopetition space of complex product specification, and within the context of Virtual organizations Breeding Environments (VBEs). Our developed product specification system, which is already alpha tested, addresses these identified requirements, and is described and exemplified.

BioMed Xplorer - Exploring (Bio)Medical Knowledge using Linked Data

Developing an effective model for predicting risks of a disease requires exploration of a vast body of (bio)medical knowledge. Furthermore, the continuous growth of this body of knowledge poses extra challenges. Numerous research has attempted to address these issues through developing a variety of approaches and support tools. Most of these tools however, do not sufficiently address the needed dynamism, lack intuitiveness in their use, and present a rather scarce amount of information usually obtained from a single source. This research aims to address the aforementioned gaps through the development of a dynamic model for (bio)medical knowledge, represented as a network of interrelated (bio)medical concepts, and integrating disperse sources. To this end, this paper introduces BioMed Xplorer, presenting a model and a tool that enables researchers to explore biomedical knowledge, organized in an information graph, through a user friendly and intuitive interface. Furthermore, BioMed Xplorer provides concept related information from a multitude of sources, while also preserving and presenting their provenance data. For this purpose a RDF knowledge base has been created based on a core ontology which we have introduced. Results are further experimented with and validated by some domain experts and are contrasted against the state of the art.

On service-enhanced product recommendation guiding users through complex product specification

Complex service-enhanced products such as solar power plants and intelligent buildings are one-of-a-kind and highly customized by nature. As such on one hand the specification of their sub-products and services involve a wide variety of competitive/cooperative stakeholders and on the other hand through different stages of their long life cycle, these specification are generated in different sessions and go through many iterations. These characteristics of complex products make the process of specifying their components difficult and time-consuming. We have previously defined the tools for specification of both sub-products and their enhancing services related to complex products [1], [2]. In this paper we introduce an approach for the use of a recommender system to assist designers of sub-products with reusing the existing specifications, as well as for recommending business services that can enhance the defined sub-products. Considering that multitudinous (hundreds to thousands) components present in complex products, their specifications cannot be accomplished without proper reuse of related existing specifications in the system, shared by different stakeholders. The introduced recommender system assists designers with their specification of new components, using the previously specified components in the system, and discovers/ranks those similar components, while matching the preferences and requirements set by the users.

Specification and Configuration of Customized Complex Products

This paper addresses the design of an information system for specification of complex configured products, such as the solar power plants or large intelligent buildings, which by nature are designed, constructed, installed, operated, and maintained through virtual consortium of enterprises. In other words, typically a number of virtual organizations are involved during the entire life cycle of these products. The involved companies include the equipment suppliers, business service providers, and tailored software system developers, that form a consortium typically coordinated and managed by an EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) contractor or a so called project developer. Furthermore, remote access is required through the cloud to different elements of the complex product’s specification, to effectively support these products. An approach and a set of mechanisms are introduced in the paper for effective cloud-based specification of such complex products. The addressed generic system supports different involved stakeholders with customization of the planned complex product, satisfying both their preferences and mandatory standard criteria. The specification system is being implemented as a generic pilot information system, supporting iterative specification of configured sub-products for the planned complex product. This information system also constitutes the base for the next step of this research, focused on semi-automating the process of sub-products cataloging and building an intelligent recommender for complex product configuration, in dialogue with the user.

Competence Matching in Collaborative Consortia for Service-Enhanced Products

To exploit new market challenges in manufacturing industries, collaborative environments permit that different stakeholders achieve value creation and differentiated products when addressing the design and development of products that include associated business services (service-enhanced products). In order to facilitate a suitable context for networks of SMEs in the domain of highly customized and service-enhanced products, the GloNet project addressed collaborative networks with different configurations and purposes. In this context, this paper is focused on how a collaborative consortia for service-enhanced products can be created having into account the requirements for a new product and the necessary normalization of organization’s competences.

Enhancing Robust Execution of BPMN Process Diagrams: A Practical Approach

As a standard modeling language for definition of business processes and services, BPMN is used both within the organizations as well as for co-creation of joint services to run among the networked organizations. However, introducing certain constructs, such as OR-join and Complex-join in BPMN Process Diagrams (BPDs) can lead to execution problems, due to ambiguities inherent in these constructs in relation to their execution semantics. Although these constructs are often used to represent the real-world behaviors, none of the existing approaches applied by the BP management systems are practically tuned to disambiguate and support their proper execution. Rooted in workflow patterns concept, we first introduce a set of algorithms to automate the identification of ambiguous patterns (i.e., workflow patterns that include OR-join constructs). Then, we introduce a set of equivalent unambiguous BP fragments that can substitute those ambiguous patterns. To this end, we have conceptualized the identification of three OR-join ambiguous patterns by applying the RPST technique, represent a set of unambiguous solutions for their substitution, and implemented our method as the proof of concept for our approach.

Phishing through social bots on Twitter

This work investigates how social bots can phish employees of organizations, and thus endanger corporate network security. Current literature mostly focuses on traditional phishing methods (through e-mail, phone calls, and USB sticks). We address the serious organizational threats and security risks caused by phishing through online social media, specifically through Twitter. This paper first provides a review of current work. It then describes our experimental development, in which we created and deployed eight social bots on Twitter, each associated with one specific subject. For a period of four weeks, each bot published tweets about its subject and followed people with similar interests. In the final two weeks, our experiment showed that 437 unique users could have been phished, 33 of which visited our website through the network of an organization. Without revealing any sensitive or real data, the paper analyses some findings of this experiment and addresses further plans for research in this area.

Accelerating the Exploitation of (bio)medical Knowledge Using Linked Data

Early identification and treatment of a diseases, especially when chronic, can reduce severe complications for the patients, doctors, and the society as a whole. Therefore, becoming aware and having insight about the state of the art findings on diseases, if communicated properly to different stakeholders, will benefit all. The medical research field, however, is vast and dynamically evolves with new discoveries. Additionally, new results are being continuously generated. The new discoveries on diseases address their diagnosis, prognosis, and possible treatment pathways for each disease, which are typically published in medical articles. Research results, however, are not reflected in practice by practitioners, unless they are officially verified by governments and authoritative health institutes, and appear in medical guidelines. Developing the medical guidelines requires identifying every relevant medical article, traversing through and validating it, as well as gathering and inter-relating that data to the information from other relevant sources, such as the drug interaction databases.