March 27, 2015: Invited Speaker Seminar: Applications of Semantic Technologies for Process Representation and Reasoning

Dr. Xing Tan

Friday, March 27, 2015 at 10:15 a.m.
Room EV003.309

Abstract

Reasoning about composite processes in many industrial applications requires use of a graphical formalism such as Petri nets and Activity Diagrams of UML, for representing and modeling complicated flows of control in these processes. Availability of accurate semantics for these graphical formalisms however, is further required in order to support automated reasoning about these processes. Through axiomatizing Petri nets and UML activity diagrams as Situation Calculus-based logical action theories, we are able to assign a practically intuitive, and mathematically rigorous, semantics to these two influential modeling formalisms. The theories are called SCOPE (Situation Calculus Ontology of PEtri nets) and SCAD (Situation Calculus theory of Activity Diagrams), respectively. This seminar will provide an introduction to SCOPE. It will also review some interesting applications of SCOPE, e.g., in the fields of medical informatics, supply chain management, and software tool development.

Biography                                                                                                                                                                  

Xing Tan is currently a Course Director at the School of Information Technology, York University. He received his PhD in Industrial Engineering from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto in 2012. Most recently he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa in the NSERC-CREATE program. In 2013 he also served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa. In the past few years, he also worked for high-tech companies. Xing conducts research in the area of complex process representation and reasoning, dealing mainly with how process knowledge can be represented symbolically and manipulated in order to allow automated inferences. His recent collaborative research expedition, on the topic of formal clinical practice guidelines representation and reasoning, received nomination for a distinguished paper award at the 2014 annual symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA).