IFIP Working Groups 2.6 and 2.12/12.4
In conjunction with the 39th international conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2013)

With the increasing automation of business processes, growing amounts of process data become available. This opens new research opportunities for business process data analysis, mining and modeling. The aim of the IFIP 2.6 - 2.12 International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis is to offer a forum where researchers from different communities and the industry can share their insight in this hot new field.
This year the symposium will be inserted among the VLDB 2013 workshops and will feature a number presentations on recent research results and competitive PhD seminar. All this in the charming setting of Riva del Garda at the north-western corner of Lake Garda, at the southern edge of the Italian Alps, near the Dolomites.

* Call for Papers
The IFIP International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis (SIMPDA 2013) offers a unique opportunity to present new approaches and research results to researchers and practitioners working in business process data modeling, representation and privacy-aware analysis.
The symposium will bring together leading researchers, engineers and scientists from around the world. Full papers must not exceed 15 pages. Short papers are limited to at most 4 pages. All papers must be original contributions, not previously published or under review for publication elsewhere. All contributions must be written in English and must follow the LNCS Springer Verlag format. Templates can be downloaded from: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
Accepted papers will be published in a pre-proceeding volume with an ISBN. The authors of the accepted papers will be invited to submit extended articles to a post-symposium proceedings volume hich will be published in the LNBIP series (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, http://www.springer.com/series/7911), scheduled for early 2014 (extended papers length will be between 7000 and 9000 words). Around 10-15 papers will be selected for publication after a second round of review.

* Topics
- Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:
- Business Process modeling languages, notations and methods
- Data-aware and data-centric approaches
- Variability and configuration of process models
- Process Mining with Big Data
- Process simulation and static analyses
- Process data query languages
- Process data mining
- Privacy-aware process data mining
- Process metadata and semantic reasoning
- Process patterns and standards
- Foundations of business process models
- Resource management in business process execution
- Process tracing and monitoring
- Process change management and evolution
- Business process lifecycle
- Case studies and experience reports
- Social process discovery
- Crowdsourced process definition and discovery

* Workshop Format:
In accordance to our historical tradition of proposing SIMPDA as a symposium, we propose an innovative format for this workshop:
The number of sessions depend on the number of submissions but, considering the previous editions, we envisage to have four sessions, with 4-5 related papers assigned to each session. A special session (with a specific review process) will be dedicated to discuss research plan from PhD students.
Papers are pre-circulated to the authors that will be expected to read all papers in advance but to avoid exceptional overhead, two are assigned to be prepared with particular care, making ready comments and suggestions.
The bulk of the time during each session will be dedicated to open conversations about all of the papers in a given session, along with any linkages to the papers and discussions within an earlier session.
The closing session (30 minutes), will include a panel about open challenges during which every participant will be asked to assemble their thoughts/project ideas/goals/etc… that they got out of the workshop.

* Call for PhD Research Plans
The SIMPDA PhD Seminar is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world. The goal of the Seminar is to help students with their thesis and research plans by providing feedback and general advice on how to use their research results.
Students interested in participating in the Seminar should submit an extended abstract describing their research. Submissions can relate to any aspect of Process Data: technical advances, usage and impact studies, policy analyses, social and institutional implications, theoretical contributions, interaction and design advances, innovative applications, and social implications.
Research plans should be at most of 4 page long and should be organized following the following structure:
Abstract: summarizes, in 5 line, the research aims and significance.
Research Question: defines what will be accomplished by eliciting the relevant the research questions.
Background: defines the background knowledge providing the 5 most relevant references (papers or books).
Significance: explains the relevance of the general topic and of the specific contribution.
Research design and methods: describes and motivates the method adopted focusing on: assumptions, solutions, data sources, validation of results, limitations of the approach.
Research stage: describes what the student has done so far.

* SIMPDA PhD award
A doctoral award will be given by the SIMPDA PhD Jury to the best research plan submitted.
- Student Scholarships
An application for a limited number of scholarships aimed at students coming from emerging countries has been submitted to IFIP.
In order to apply, please contact paolo.ceravolo@unimi.it

* Organizers

CHAIRS
- Rafael Accorsi, University of Freiburg, Germany
- Paolo Ceravolo, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
- Philippe Cudré-Mauroux , University of Fribourg, Switzerland

ADVISORY BOARD
- Karl Aberer, EPFL, Switzerland
- Ernesto Damiani, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
- Tharam Dillon, La Trobe University, Australia
- Dragan Gasevic, Athabasca University, Canada
- Marcello Leida, EBTIC (Etisalat BT Innovation Centre), UAE
- Erich Neuhold, University of Vienna, Austria
- Maurice van Keulen, University of Twente, The Netherlands

-------Important Dates-------
- Submission of Full Papers: June 10th 2013
- Submission of PhD Research Plans: June 10th 2013
- Notification of Acceptance: July 10th 2013
- Submission of Camera Ready Papers: August 5th 2013

* Venue
The conference will take place in the Conference Center of Riva del Garda:
More info on: http://www.vldb.org/2013/conference_venue.html