This year the BPM conference will take place in Hoboken, USA. Aside from the typical wealth of scientific presentations and workshops, this year’s BPM conference will also once again feature a demonstration track.

As a member of the reviewing committee for the demo track, I am happy to relay the call for demonstrations to you:

This track is intended to showcase innovative Business Process Management (BPM) tools and applications that may originate either from research initiatives or from industry. The Demonstration Track will provide an opportunity to present and discuss emerging technologies with researchers and practitioners in the BPM field.

My opinion has always been that working software is essential for making BPM research relevant. Software provides an easily verifiable proof of the feasibility and practical applicability of what would otherwise only be nice theoretical ideas. And last but not least, it makes these ideas immediately accessible to a wider audience of practitioners.

If you have implemented your research ideas in software, you should definitely consider demoing it at the BPM conference. Your tool can get exposure to leading BPM researchers and professionals, and the feedback you will get may alone be worth the effort.

• Call for demonstrations (web site)
• Call for demonstrations (PDF)
• BPM 2010 web site

As the kick-off to a new interview series here on our blog, we have been talking to Hajo Reijers about being at the intersection between industry and science. Hajo is an associate professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. He is well-known from his work on Business Process Redesign (BPR) best practices, and he does not shy away from empirical research.

Among other things, he tells us what drove him into academia, what the 1st International Workshop “Process in the Large” is about, and where he sees the biggest benefit for process mining. We greatly enjoyed our conversation with Hajo, and we hope that you’ll find it as interesting and inspiring as we do.

We will offer a hands-on process mining session at the next BPM roundtable on 26 April. After this session you will understand the different phases of a process mining project, and you will be able to get started and play around with your own data based on freely available tools.

Like the last roundtable, this event will take place on the campus of Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands). Be quick to sign up here if you want to participate, because the session is limited to 50 people.

We’ll be doing this in English, but we will have some Dutch native speakers around to help out with the practical part. (Contact us if you cannot sign up because the session is full — We’ll see what we can do.)

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

– C.A.R. Hoare¹

1. You can find a lot more great programming quotes in this stack overflow thread. ↩

There’s no such thing as fact anymore, only opinion. The closest thing we have to fact is “common opinion”. Everything is an opinion. The way you dress is an expression of your opinion. Your religious beliefs are your opinion. The music you turn up loud is your opinion. For most people it’s easier to just agree. For me the hardest thing is to ‘just’ agree and that is what sparks creativity, the feeling that something can be better, the feeling that something’s missing. The feeling that something’s needed.

– Kanye West

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

– Dieter Rams¹

1. You can find some more background and explanation to Dieter Rams’ “Ten Principles for Good Design” here. ↩

Sometimes real life has an incredible knack for information visualization…

(via kottke)

The Business Process Management (BPM) Round Table is a new initiative of the Eindhoven University of Technology to bring together Dutch BPM professionals and researchers.

The kick-off meeting takes place on Monday, 22 February from 16:00 to 18:00 in ‘de Zwarte Doos’ on the campus of Eindhoven University of Technology. It will be held in Dutch. See this flyer (in Dutch) for the detailed program, route description, and background information. Participation is free of charge.

If you want to attend, you are asked to register until 15 February (tomorrow) by sending a brief email to bpmroundtable@tue.nl.

Update: There is now an official website, where you can find information about the upcoming meetings: http://www.bpmroundtable.nl/.

Most people are impressed with fractals, and there is lots of material. But this one is an amazing 10 min zoom into the Mandelbrot set.

Mandelbrot Fractal Set Trip To e214 HD from teamfresh on Vimeo.

(Alert: If you don’t like the techno music, either switch sound off or check out this version, which has more of a rock music sound track.)

Apparently, the shown fractal is larger than the universe:

The final magnification is e.214. Want some perspective? a magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all of them all away. If you were “actually” traveling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light.

From the universe to black holes: At the University of Stuttgart researchers have developed an application which enables the user to interactively explore the stellar sky in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild black hole (via kottke.org).

They also have videos. See for example this 8 sec simulation, where the observer quasistatically (not that I would want to pretend that I actually understand what that means) approaches the black hole.

So, there is no point. It’s just cool stuff.

This 3-minute TED talk from Derek Sivers nicely exemplifies the dynamics of how movements emerge. I especially liked the emphasis on the early followers — important players that we all too often forget, when we identify movements only with their leaders.