marcomontali

research

intro

I am an associate professor at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
Together with Prof. Diego Calvanese, we coordinate a small but very motivated group of people working on the combination of processes and data.

My research activity focuses on theoretical, methodological and experimental aspects of knowledge representation and automated reasoning for the formal specification, verification, synthesis, planning, monitoring, mining, and intelligent management of dynamic systems operating over data. I consider in particular (artifact- and data-centric) business processes to capture the internal behavior of complex organizations, and multiagent systems to tackle their mutual interactions. I am particularly interested in application scenarios related to business services, interaction protocols, clinical guidelines, and construction engineering.

To attack such challenging problems, I advocate an interdisciplinary approach combining insights and techniques from artificial intelligence and knowledge representation, computational logics, conceptual modeling, database theory, formal methods, business process management, and multiagent systems.

On these topics, I authored a Springer monograph and more than 150 papers, published in top-level, peer-reviewed international journals, conferences and workshops.

My h-index is 32, and my i10-index is 71 (source: Google Scholar, as of May 2019).
Here are my Google Scholar and DBLP pages.

research topics

Foundations:
  • artificial intelligence
  • knowledge representation and reasoning
  • computational logics
  • formal methods, model checking, synthesis
  • runtime verification and monitoring
  • reasoning about actions
  • conceptual modelling, ontologies, databases
  • Petri nets with data and other models of concurrency
Applications:
  • business process management
  • artifact- and data-centric processes
  • data managament
  • decision management
  • process mining (see Process Mining Manifesto)
  • open multi-agent systems
  • organizations, services, and commitments
  • declarative distributed computing

awards

Career awards:
  • 02/2017. Faculty Outstanding Achievement Award 2016, as a member of the Faculty of Computer Science at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano who provided outstanding scientific contributions and service to the Faculty.
  • 06/2016. Outstanding IJCAI PC member at IJCAI 2016.
  • 09/2015. Recipient of the Artificial Intelligence "Marco Somalvico" 2015 Prize, given by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence to the best under 35 Italian researcher who autonomously contributed to advance the state of the art in Artificial Intelligence.In its report, the Prize Committee declared that:
    Of particular significance and impact is his contribution to the development of innovative AI techniques in the context of Business Process Management, an area in which he is one of the top recognized persons in Europe (in spite of his young age).
  • 06/2009. Recipient of the 2007-2009 "Marco Cadoli" Distinguished Dissertation Award, given by the Italian Association for Logic Programming to the most outstanding italian PhD thesis focused on computational logic.
Best paper awards:

organization of events

CILC 2018 Program Chair of the 33rd Italian Conference on Computational Logic
BPM 2018 Program Chair of the foundations track at the 16th International Conference on Business Process Management
BPM 2017 Publicity Co-chair of the 15th International Conference on Business Process Management
BPAI 2017 Co-chair of the 1st International Workshop on Business Process Innovation with Artificial Intelligence, in conjunction with BPM 2017
ESSLLI 2016 Member of the Organization Committee of the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
PODS 2015 Proceedings and Publicity Chair of the 34th ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems
SAC 2015 Co-chair of the Enterprise Engineering Track at the 30th ACM Symposium On Applied Computing
RR 2015 Doctoral Consortium Chair at the 9th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems
DAB 2015 Co-chair of the 4th Workshop on Data- & Artifact-Centric BPM , co-located with BPM 2015
SETN 2014 Co-chair of the special session on Action Languages: Theory & Practice
ICSOC 2013 Demo co-chair of the 11th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing
KiBP 2013 Co-chair of the 2nd International Workshop on Knowledge-intensive Business Processes
PAI-2013 Co-organizer of the 2nd Workshop on Popularize Artificial Intelligence , in conjunction with AI*IA 2013
SPB'12 Organization co-chair of the Joint Workshop on Security in Business Processes , in conjunction with BPM 2012
PAI-2012 Co-organizer of the Workshop on Popularize Artificial Intelligence , in conjunction with AI*IA 2012
RuleML 2011 Demo co-chair of the 5th International Symposium on Rules
ISCL 2011 Chair of the doctoral program at the Third International Spring School on Computational Logic

research projects

08/2018-now
Principal Co-investigator for the UNIBZ Project Data-Aware Controllers for Manufacturing (DACoMan), funded by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
01/2018-now
Principal Investigator for the UNIBZ Project Reasoning and Enactment for Knowledge-Aware Processes (REKAP), funded by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
06/2017-now
Principal Co-investigator for the UNIBZ Project Planning for WORkflow Management (PWORM), funded by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
01/2017-now
Investigator for the ERDF Project Collaborative Construction Process Management (COCkPiT), funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
06/2016-now
Principal Co-investigator for the Euregio (Bolzano-Innsbruck-Trento)Interregional Project Network IPN12 Knowledge-Aware Operational Support (KAOS), funded by the European Region Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino (EGTC).
01/2016-now
Principal Co-investigator for the UNIBZ Project Ontology-Driven Process Mining (OnProm), funded by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
01/2015-now
Principal Investigator for the UNIBZ Project Knowledge-driven Enterprise Distributed cOmputing (KENDO), funded by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
09/2014-08/2016
Co-responsible for the Research Project Verification and Synthesis from Components of Processes that Manipulate Data (VeriSyncopated), funded by the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano.
11/2013-10/2016
Investigator for the EU FP7 IST-IP Project Scalable End-user Access to Big Data (Optique), funded by the European Commission.
06/2011-05/2014
Investigator for the Project MAnaGing Completeness of Data (MAGIC), funded by the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano.
02/2012-02/2014
Co-responsible for the Project Automated Extraction and Verification of Clinical Guidelines (VeriCliG), funded by the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano.
05/2011-05/2013
Investigator for the EU FP7 IST-STREP Project Artifact-centric Service Interoperation (ACSI), funded by the European Commission. The project has been ranked excellent.
PRIN 2007
Investigator for the MIUR PRIN Italian Project 2007-7WWCR8 Forms of Correlation between Italian Style, Touristic Flows and Made in Italy’s Consumers Trends, coordinator Prof. Bernardo Valli.
FIRB 2005
Investigator for the FIRB italian Project RBNE05BFRK Knowledge-Oriented Technologies for Enterprise Aggregation in Internet (TOCAI.IT), coordinator Prof. Maurizio Lenzerini.
PRIN 2005
Investigator for the MIUR PRIN italian Project 2005-011293 Specification and Verification of Agents Interaction Protocols, coordinator Prof. Alberto Martelli.

PC membership and review activity

Senior PC Member for:
2017
  • 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2017)
  • 15th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2017)
2016
  • 19th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multiagent Systems (PRIMA 2016)
PC Member for:
2019
  • 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19)
  • 1st International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM 2019)
2018
  • 37th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS 2018)
  • 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18)
  • 16th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2018)
2017
  • 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017)
  • 1st International Joint Conference Conference on Rules and Reasoning (RuleML+RR 2017)
  • International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP 2017)
  • 5th International Workshop on Declarative/Decision/Hybrid Mining and Modelling for Business Processes (DeHMiMoP’17)
  • 32nd Italian Conference on Computational Logic (CILC 2017)
2016
  • 25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2016)
  • 22nd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2016)
  • 15th International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2016)
  • 15th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2016)
  • 14th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2016)
  • 31st Italian Conference on Computational Logic (CILC 2016)
2015
  • 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015)
  • 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15)
  • 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2015)
  • 13th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2015)
  • 24th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2015)
  • 9th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR 2015)
  • 9th International Web Rule Symp. (RuleML 2015)
  • 2nd International Conference on Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (MIS4TEL 2015)
  • 30th Italian Conference on Computational Logic (CILC 2015).
2014
  • 23rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2014)
  • 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2014)
  • 12th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2014)
  • 8th International Conference on Web Reasoning And Rule Systems (RR 2014)
  • 29th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2014)
  • 11th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods (WS-FM:FASOCC 2014)
  • 4th International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis (SIMPDA 2014)
2013
  • 12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2013)
  • 28th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2013)
  • AI*IA 2013 Workshop on AI meets Business Processes (AIBP2013)
2012
  • 23nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2013)
  • 1st International Workshop on Knowledge-intensive Business Processes (KiBP 2012)
2011
  • 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011)
  • 26th Italian Conference on Computational Logic (CILC 2011)
2008
  • AI*IA 2008 Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems and Bioinformatics (MAS&BIO 2008)
Reviewer for the following international journals:
  • ACM Transactions on Database Systems (ACM TODS)
  • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ACM TOSEM)
  • Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
  • Journal of Computer and System Science (JCSS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE)
  • IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (IEEE TSC)
  • Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS)
  • Theoretical Computer Science (TCS)
  • Information Systems (IS)
  • AI Communications
  • Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS)
  • Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE)
  • SIGMOD Record
  • Springer Computing
  • Fundamenta Informaticae
  • LNCS Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency (ToPNoC)

supervision and evaluation of students

PhD Students:
Ongoing
  • Since 2014: supervisor of Andrey Rivkin on the topic modeling, enactment, and verification of data-aware processes.
  • Since 2017: supervisor of Alessandro Gianola on the topic SMT techniques for data-aware processes.
Former
  • 2012-2016: co-supervisor of Ario Santoso on the topic verification of data-aware business processes in the presence of ontologies.
  • 2012-2015: supervisor of Anna Roubickova on the topic theoretical and experimental analysis of case-based planning techniques.
  • 2011-2015: co-supervisor of Dmitry Solomakhin on the topic combining process and ontological modelling. The thesis was not concluded, since Dmitry found a job in the industry.
Evaluation of PhD Theses:
2018
2016
2015
  • Vice-chair of the examination panel for the final defense of Silvano Colombo Tosatto on Proving Regulatory Compliance: Business Processes, Logic, Complexity, University of Luxembourg and University of Turin.
2013
  • External reviewer for the PhD Thesis by Claudio di Ciccio on Process Mining of Artful Processes, Sapienza Università di Roma.
  • Reviewer and member of the examination panel for PhD defense by Marius Kaminskas on Context-aware Music Recommendation: Recommending Music for Places of Interest, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
2012
  • Reviewer and member of the examination panel for the PhD defense by Martin Rezk on Reasoning about Actions in Transaction Logic, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
Supervision of MSc and BSc theses:
2018
  • MSc thesis by Gianluca Stivan on Kiki: weak memory models for parallel data processing.
  • MSc thesis by Aman Sinha on Database-centric colored Petri nets.
2017
  • MSc thesis by Simone Tritini on the Formalization of object-centric behavioral constraints.
  • BSc thesis by Luca Sabiucciu on a Tool for the verification of data-aware business processes.
2015
  • EMCL MSc thesis by Alina Aleksandrova on Engineering data-aware commitment-based multiagent systems.
  • MSc thesis by Manfred Gerstgrasser on Ontology-Based Data Access and relational mapping.
  • BSc thesis by Riccardo Steffano on A Reactive Event Calculus reasoner running in JAVA.
2013
  • EMCL MSc thesis by Andrey Rivkin on Formal verification of data-aware business processes based on Petri nets.
2006-2011
  • Co-supervisor of approx. 30 BEng and MEng theses, focused on artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and automated reasoning, formal methods and software engineering, and with applications in the following fields: business process management and process mining, service-oriented systems, open multi-agent systems, clinical guidelines and care-flow protocols, embedded systems, model-driven engineering, scheduling and allocation.