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Alexei
UofT   Alexei Lapouchnian, Ph.D.

Алексей Лапушнян

Welcome

View Alexei Lapouchnian's profile on LinkedIn

I am a business systems analyst, consultant, and a researcher in the areas of requirements engineering (RE), business process management (BPM) and Artificial Intelligence. I have an extensive expertise in requirements engineering (requirements elicitation, modeling, analysis, and documentation), business process modeling, analysis, and improvement, and enterprise architecture. In addition to industry standard  tools and methods, I possess the knowledge of the state of the art in requirements engineering (business analysis) and business process management. My particular focus has been on RE and BPM for flexible, customizable, adaptive, and evolving systems and processes and on integrating AI-based solutions into enterprise systems. Here is the list of my research publications.

Teaching

  • In the Fall of 2016, I was the instructor for INF1341H "Systems Analysis and Process Innovation" at the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at U of T.
  • In the Spring of 2017, I taught the executive version of INF1342H "System Requirements and Architectural Design" at the iSchool at U of T.
  • In the Spring of 2017, I taught ITEC 4040 "Requirements Management" at the School of Information Technology at York University.
  • In the Summer of 2017, I was teaching ITEC 4010 "Systems Analysis and Design II" at the School of Information Technology at York University.
  • In the Fall of 2017, I was the instructor for INF1341H "Systems Analysis and Process Innovation" (executive section) at the Faculty of Informaiton (iSchool) at U of T.
  • In the Winter semester of 2018 I taught both the executive and regular sections of INF1342H "System Requirements and Architectural Design" at the iSchool.
  • I also taught CSC301 "Introduction to Software Engineering" at the Dept. of Computer Science at U of T in the Fall of 2017 and Winter of 2018.
  • In the Fall of 2018 I taught INF1341H "Systems Analysis and Process Innovation" and INF2177H "Information Management and Systems" at the iSchool at U of T.

Research. I am currently developing BI-enabled Adaptive Enterprise Architecture to support enterprise agility and BI-driven adaptivity. In particular, I am looking into the modelign and analysis of:

  • Variability and decision-making in enterprises (at business and IT levels), both at design time and at runtime, in a way that supports handling of multiple (re-)design cycles, feedback, etc.
  • Modeling and analysis of enterprise-wide business process architectures (BPAs), their change/adaptation along a number of dimensions, and their business context.
  • Foreseen and unforeseen changes in the enterprise and their effect on business and IT requirements and design.

I am also working with IBM's Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto on a project titled "Cognitive Business Operations Made Easy" focused on integrating cognitive services into IBM's BPM offerings.

I am currently interested in Requirements Engineering for AI-based systems.

In 2012-2014, I was a member of the NSERC Business Intelligence Network (BIN).

In 2011-2012, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento, Italy working on the ERC-funded project "Lucretius: Foundations for Software Evolution".

In 2011, I graduated with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor John Mylopoulos. My Ph.D. dissertation is titled Exploiting Requirements Variability for Software Customization and Adaptation.

(Click here to view or hide the abstract of the thesis)

The complexity of software systems is exploding, along with their use and application in new domains. Managing this complexity has become a focal point for research in Software Engineering. One direction for research in this area is developing techniques for designing adaptive software systems that self-optimize, self-repair, self-configure and self-protect, thereby reducing maintenance costs, while improving quality of service.

This thesis presents a requirements-driven approach for developing adaptive and customizable systems. Requirements goal models are used as a basis for capturing problem variability, leading to software designs that support a space of possible behaviours – all delivering the same functionality. This space can be exploited at system deployment time to customize the system on the basis of user preferences. It can also be used at runtime to support system adaptation if the current behaviour of the running system is deemed to be unsatisfactory.

The contributions of the thesis include a framework for systematically generating designs from high-variability goal models. Three complementary design views are generated: configurational view (feature model), behavioural view (statecharts) and an architectural view (parameterized architecture). The framework is also applied to the field of business process management for intuitive high-level process customization.

In addition, the thesis proposes a modeling framework for capturing domain variability through contexts and applies it to goal models. A single goal model is used to capture requirements variations in different contexts. Models for particular contexts can then be automatically generated from this global requirements model. As well, the thesis proposes a new class of requirements-about-requirements called awareness requirements. Awareness requirements are naturally operationalized through feedback controllers – the core mechanisms of every adaptive system. The thesis presents an approach for systematically designing monitoring, analysis/diagnosis, and compensation components of a feedback controller, given a set of awareness requirements. Situations requiring adaptation are explicitly captured using contexts.

Most of my previous research was on using intentional (goal) and social (i*) models for modeling, analysis, and design of adaptable and customizable systems and processes. I was and still am interested in:

  • Exploiting various kinds of variability (especially intentional and contextual) in Software Engineering and in Requirements Engineering for customizable, adaptable/adaptive, and evolving systems;
  • Business Process Modeling and Management (especially adaptive and customizable business processes);
  • Software Engineering for Multiagent systems.

I am grateful to the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto for having provided me with their fellowship to study adaptive business processes.

I was an M.Sc. student in the Department of Computer Science at York University before starting at U of T. My research was on requirements engineering for multiagent systems. Particularly, I worked on integrating the i* modeling framework with the Cognitive Agents Specification Language for requirements engineering under the supervision of Professor Yves Lespérance. My M.Sc. thesis is titled Modeling Mental States in Requirements Engineering -- An Agent-Oriented Framework Based on i* and CASL.

Professional Activities

Program Committee Member:

  • 5th International i* Workshop (iStar 2011), Trento, Italy, Aug 29-30, 2011.
  • 2nd International Workshop on requirements@run.time 2011, Trento, Italy, Aug 30, 2011.
  • 24th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2012), Gdansk, Poland, June 25-29, 2012.
  • 4th International Workshop on Requirements, Intentions and Goals in Conceptual Modeling (RIGiM'12), Florence, Italy, Oct 2012.
  • 6th International i* Workshop (iStar 2013), Valencia, Spain, Jun 17-18, 2013.
  • 5th International Workshop on Requirements, Intentions, and Goals in Conceptual Modeling (RIGiM'13), Hong Kong, Nov 2013.
  • 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2014), Thessaloniki, Greece, June 16-20, 2014.
  • 7th International i* Workshop (iStar 2014), Thessaloniki, Greece, June 16-17, 2014.
  • 1st International Workshop on Business Processes in Collective Adaptive Systems (BPCAS 2014), Haifa, Israel, Sep 8, 2014.
  • 27th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2015), Stockholm, Sweden, June 8-12, 2015.
  • 8th International i* Workshop (iStar 2015), Ottawa, Canada, Aug 24-25, 2015.
  • 3rd International Workshop on Modeling and Reasoning for Business Intelligence (MORE-BI), Stockholm, Sweden, Oct 22, 2015.
  • 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2016), Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 13-17, 2016.
  • 9th International i* Workshop (iStar 2016), Beijing, China, Sep 12-13, 2016.
  • 4th International Workshop on Modeling and Reasoning for Business Intelligence (MORE-BI), Gifu, Japan, Nov 2016.
  • 15th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2017), Barcelona, Spain, Sep 10-15, 2017.
  • 10th International i* Workshop (iStar 2017), Essen, Germany, June 12-13, 2017.
  • 27th Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CASCON 2017), Toronto, Canada, Nov 6-8, 2017.
  • 28th Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CASCON 2017), Toronto, Canada, Oct 29-31, 2018.
  • Reviewer:

  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Requirements Engineering Journal
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Information Systems Journal
  • Software Quality Journal
  • International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE)
  • International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)
  • International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)
  • International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE)
  • International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems
       (SEAMS)
  • International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS)
  • IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modelling (PoEM)
  • International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)
  • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
  • ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Requirements Engineering Track 


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    © 2019 Alexei Lapouchnian. Email: alexei at cs dot toronto dot edu