Keynote Speaker
Invited Speaker: Andrea Marrella
Andrea Marrella is an Associate Professor of Engineering in Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome. Andrea has co-authored over 110 scientific publications in major outlets in the AI and information systems areas, winning a Best Paper Award at CAiSE 2017. Andrea is an Editorial Board Member of the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality and ACM Computing Surveys. Among his recent scientific appointments, he has been the Workshop Chair of the 19th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2021) and PC Chair of the RPA track of BPM 2022. He was the General Chair of 5th International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM 2023), and is the PC Co-Chair of BPM 2024. Andrea pioneered the application of AI techniques to untangle complex challenges from the BPM domain, such as synthesis of process models, adaptation of production processes using digital twins, and optimal alignment of execution traces against their underlying process models. In 2023, he co-authored the Manifesto on AI-Augmented BPM, presenting the vision to make processes more adaptable, proactive and explainable through AI. In 2023, he was appointed to organize and chair the AAAI 2023 Bridge Program on AI and BPM. From 2022, he coordinates the working group on AI and BPM of the AIxIA community. Since 2021, he is the Local PI of the H2020 project DataCloud, focusing on empowering process mining with AI to develop a new breed of Big Data pipeline discovery solutions. In 2024, he organized the Dagstuhl seminar on Improving Trust between Humans and Software Robots in Robotic Process Automation.
Talk title: Balancing Autonomy and Trust to Enable Intelligent Robotic Process AutomationÂ
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a maturing technology that sits between the fields of Business Process Management (BPM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). RPA allows organizations to automate high-volume and repetitive tasks performed by human operators. These tasks are enacted using a software (SW) robot that works on the applications’ user interfaces (UIs) as the original human operators did. The current generation of RPA tools is driven by predefined rules and manual configurations made by expert users rather than intelligent solutions, making the current practice time-consuming and error-prone. In this talk, we focus on a recent line of research devoted to leveraging the combined use of process mining and reasoning about actions in AI to evolve RPA from a mere automated technology to a (framed) autonomous solution capable of complex decision-making activities. In this journey, we also conceptualize the notion of trust between humans and SW robots by discussing the research challenges to pioneer new trust-aware solutions that work in partnership with the human workforce and strike the right balance of autonomy and trust for achieving intelligent RPA.