Yelena Yesha
Automating the Delivery of Governmental Business Services Throught Workflow Technology
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Dr. Yelena Yesha, will talk about Automating the Delivery of Governmental Business Services Through Workflow Technology. Governments provide a wide range of services to individual citizens, businesses and to other agencies within the same government. Information required to obtain government services is available, but is scattered across many web pages, documents, forms, news, rules and regulations, maps, and other sources, maintained by different government agencies. As a result, it is often quite challenging to extract the relevant information from these abundant and/or hidden sources, to determine which agencies need to be contacted, what exact steps are needed, and in which order they must be taken. Although many government agencies have their own web sites that can process citizens’ requests, entrepreneurs must independently contact each agency and submit business information to each one redundantly as user information is rarely shared across agencies. In this work, we describe an approach based on workflow technology that guides entrepreneurs through the process of obtaining a government service, in particular, establishing a new business. This approach has many desirable characteristics: customized workflow generation, decentralized workflow management and automatic execution of the workflow, which are essential for an effective eGovernment environment. (joint work with Drs. Adam, Atluri and Chun from Rutgers University)

Yelena Yesha received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Science form York University, Toronto Canada in 1984, and the M. Sc. and PhD degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University in 1986 and 1989, repectively. Since 1989 she has been with the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she is presently an Exceptional Research Professor. In addition, from December 1994 through August 1999 Dr. Yesha served as the Director of the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences at NASA. Her research interests are in the areas of distributed databases, distributed systems, mobile computing, digital libraries, electronic commerce, and trusted information systems. She published eight books and over one hundred refereed articles in these areas. Over the years Dr. Yesha’s research has been extensively funded by NASA, NSF, NIST, NSA, DHMH, and IBM. Currently Prof. Yesha is serving as principal and co-principal investigator on seven projects funded by NSF and IBM. During 1994, Dr. Yesha was the Director of the Center for Applied Information Technology. Dr. Yesha is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of the ACM.
IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Ben Kobler
Ben.Kobler@nasa.gov

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