Research Funding


My research interests:

I work on service science, business process management, software engineering and medical informatics on the one hand and AI on the other. My work in these areas are closely inter-linked. My work spans the spectrum from the very formal to the very applied. Some of the work I do in services and software engineering crosses over into what might be properly described as management, involving issues such as business process management, strategy and strategic alignment. Some of this research could also be characterized as information systems research. Some of the research I do in AI crosses over into operations research, while some other portions intersect with philosophy and cognitive science. Currently, my work under the (very loosely defined and broad) "services" and "software engineering" banner includes the following problems:

  • Medical informatics: I work with an international network of radiation oncologists, medical physicists and computer scientists in applying data analytics and process analytics to distributed clinical datasets.
  • Services engineering, including service analytics, service optimization, service lifecycle management and compliance issues.
  • Business process management - in particular managing process lifecycles, regulatory and legislative compliance, business rules and related issues.
  • Process analytics: An area of growing interest, where we have interesting recent results on using data analytics for process provisioning (CAISE-16, ICSOC-15, BPM-14), for managing process variants (BPM-15) and for mining process task post-conditions (ER-15).
  • Software analytics: Recent results on predicting risk in OSS projects won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR-15.
  • Requirements engineering(this link describes an older project) and data analytics for RE (e.g., mining requirements models from enterprise data)
  • Model management systems: We're looking at how we might manage large collections of multi-perspective, multi-stakeholder models in a diversity of notations.
  • Agent-oriented conceptual modeling (particularly in the context of i* and TROPOS). Some of my recent work addresses question relating to how agent-oriented conceptual models co-evolve.
  • Rapid Model Discovery (our ER-2007 paper describes some of this)


    My work in AI includes:

  • Knowledge representation and reasoning, including belief revision, belief merging, default reasoning (including anytime techniques for default reasoning and incrementally learning default theories) and the integration of non-monotonic reasoning and constraint programming techniques.
  • Agent-based systems, specifically constraint-based agent programming languages and extensions to AgentSpeak.
  • Constraint programming, where a lot my recent work hhas involved:
    •             Distributed CSP algorithms, in particular the SBDS algorithm.
    •             Semiring CSPs, where we are trying to build a comprehensive suite of solvers.

    My research on supply chain management and optimization brings many of these themes together. I've been involved in several projects with Bluescope Steel and other organizations - this is a link to one of these (an older one): Industry collaborative project with BHP-IT(CSC) (ARC SPIRT project). We have completed another ARC Linkage project with Bluescope Steel's Coated Products division, and are engaged in another ARC Linkage project with Bluescope Steel's Hot Strip Mill.

    Current Students

    • Ahmed Alelaimat (PhD)
    • Muhammad Asjad Khan (PhD)
    • Yazeed Alzahrani (PhD)
    • Rajib Dutta (PhD)
    • Joel Kocherry (PhD)
    • Geeta Mahala (Masters)
    • Wisam Alzubaidi (PhD) (Co-supervisor)
    • Abdulaziz Alhefdhi(PhD) (Co-supervisor)
    • Shien Wee Ng (PhD) (Co-supervisor)
    • Alexis Harper(PhD) (Co-supervisor)


    Students who are about to graduate



    Students who have graduated

    • Dr. Didar Zowghi (PhD) (co-supervised) - currently Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney(UTS).
    • Dr. Louise Leenen (PhD) - currently a senior research scientist at CSIR, South Africa.
    • A/Prof. Aneesh Krishna (PhD) - currently Associate Professor, Department of Computing, Curtin University of Technology, Perth.
    • Dr. Peter Harvey (PhD) - currently research scientist at Actenum Inc., Vancouver, Canada.
    • Dr. Chattrakul Sombattheera - currently Lecturer, Mahasarakham Univ., Thailand.
    • Dr. Chee-Fon Chang (PhD) - currently a post-doctoral research fellow with the Centre for Oncology Informatics at the University of Wollongong.
    • Dr. Aniruddha Dasgupta (PhD) - currently a Professor at IEM, Kolkata, India.
    • Dr. Moshiur Bhuiyan (PhD) - currently IT industry consultant.
    • Dr. Konstantin Hoesch-Klohe (PhD) - currently an industry consultant in Germany
    • Dr. Jantima Polpinij (PhD) - an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, Mahasarakham University, Thailand.
    • Dr. Tri Kurniawan (PhD)- a Lecturer at Brawijaya University, Indonesia.
    • Dr. Evan Morrison(PhD)
    • Dr. Graham Billiau (PhD)
    • Dr. Saugato Mukerji (PhD)
    • Dr. Metta Santiputri (PhD), Assistant Professor, State Polytechnic of Batam, Indonesia.
    • Dr. Karthikeyan Ponnalagu (PhD), Deputy General Manager, Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, Bangalore, India
    • Dr. George Koliadis (PhD)(Posthumously awarded)
    • Dr. Kerry Hinge (PhD)
    • Dr. Morakot Choetkiertikul (PhD) (Co-supervisor)
    • Farzad Salim (Masters) - currently research fellow, University of Wollongong.
    • Ying Guan (Masters)
    • Zerong Chen (Masters)
    • Qiuming Lin (Masters)
    • Surapong Rattanaphuwalux (Masters) (co-supervised) - currently CEO, Innosys, Thailand.
    • Boon Ooi (Masters)
    • Cindy Olivia (Masters)
    • Carlos Enguix (Masters) (co-supervised) - currently research scientist at DERI, Ireland.
    • Syed Osama Ahmed (Masters)
    • Debby Andriani (Masters).
    • Ricky Lin (Masters) - currently Project Manager - IT Infrastructure, Information technology Services, Univ. of Wollongong.

    Post-Doctoral Fellows

    I have had the privilege of working with Dr. Thomas Meyer, Dr. Sergiy Vilkomir and Dr. Richard Booth, who have all been post-docs with me at various points in time. They were followed by Dr. Lam-Son Le and Dr. Chee-Fon Cang. Currently, I work with Dr. Mohamed Samir Barakat and Dr. Matthew Field.