The process and the blockchain: A story of miners


A process describes the temporal evolution of a system. Capturing the rules that govern its control flow helps to understand the boundaries of its behaviour. That is the essence of the research field called process mining. A blockchain can be defined at large as an immutable distributed ledger on which transactions between peers are recorded. Transactions are cryptographically signed and are meant to transfer digital commodities between parties. The validation and publication of transactions is the job of the nodes called miners. Lately, the blockchains have undergone a paradigm shift from mere electronic cash systems to a universal platform endowed with internal programming languages, on top of which decentralised applications can be built. That has been the turning point enabling the execution of processes on blockchains. This talk revolves around recent advancements in research concerning the execution and mining of processes on the blockchain. The discourse will include a focus on the automated discovery of behavioural specifications from process data, and, in turn, on the extraction of process data from blockchains.

19/07/2019

Time: 10:30
Venue: Dipartimento di Informatica, Via Salaria 113, Third Floor, Seminari Lecture Room

Bio: Claudio Di Ciccio is an assistant professor at the Institute for Information Business and member of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna), Austria. His research interests include process mining, declarative process modelling, and blockchains. He has published more than 60 research papers and articles, among others in Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, and ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems. He is a member of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining. In 2015, he received the best paper award of the 13th conference on Business Process Management. In August 2018 he has been nominated Researcher of the Month at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering with honourable mention in 2013 at Sapienza, University of Rome, with a thesis on the automated discovery of flexible workflows from semi-structured text data sources.

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