TCBIS Chair Election

Candidate Hui Lei

Position Statement

It is an exciting time to work in business informatics and systems, as the community is presented with both opportunities and challenges. Enterprises and their IT systems are a critical element of our rapidly developing digital society. There is an ongoing need to push towards new frontiers of business modeling, automation, monitoring and analytics technologies, in order to evolve enterprise applications and exercise business controls more effectively. Furthermore, advances in IT have given rise to new paradigms of enterprise computing: socially synergistic business processes, integration of cloudhosted and on-premise enterprise applications, real-world-aware business solutions, and business intelligence driven by big data, just to name a few. It is indeed gratifying that business informatics is a fertile ground for research with potential for immense and tangible impact on society. On the other hand, the multi-disciplinary and crosscutting nature of business informatics has led to seemingly substantial overlaps between our community and some other communities. It is important that we clearly define our technical identity and core competencies as a community, and foster the continued growth of the community.

If elected as TCBIS Chair, I will work with the membership to execute on the following:
  • Promoting partnerships across academia, industry, and government. The TC is in a uniquely advantageous position to facilitate the interaction among various segments of the community. We should nourish innovative academic research and help draw connections to industry applications. We should engage industry in identifying grand research challenges and validating research results, in order to maintain the relevance and value of our field. We should also increase the visibility of our community to government funding agencies, enhance our reputation with them, and provide input on the creation of research programs at the national and international levels.
  • Nurturing the next generation of researchers and practitioners. The future of our community lies in the young researchers and practitioners, and we need to actively engage them. We should attract them to the field by providing them with stimulating forums and motivating them with significant technical challenges and potential for profound impact. We should make community events more accessible to them by consciously involving young professionals and reducing the financial burden for student participation. In addition, we should offer enriched educational opportunities through mechanisms such as tutorials, short courses, and doctoral consortia.
  • Providing high-quality outlets for technical work. Highly selective conferences are essential services to the members of our community. They are vital to retaining current members as well as recruiting new members. We should help grow our conferences in both their reach and quality. We should be able to crisply articulate the different focuses of our main conferences, so that they complement one another for the most part and collectively cover the wide spectrum of research themes in our area. We should continuously adapt our conferences to serve the evolving needs of community members, while preserving the distinctness of our community.
I believe that my experience in research, leadership and professional activities has prepared me well to serve this community. I look forward to an opportunity to help TCBIS reach a new level of professionalism, growth, and influence.
 

Biosketch

Hui Lei holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University. He is Manager of the Cloud Management Services Department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He has assumed various leadership roles in IBM, including Strategy Consultant for IBM’s worldwide research in Distributed Computing and in Programming Models and Tools, and global research lead of Connectivity and Integration Middleware. He is also a visiting professor of Sun Yat-sen University in China.
 
Dr. Lei’s research interests include service-oriented computing, business process management, and cloud computing. He is the author of over 60 scholarly papers and over 40 issued or pending patents. His work has impacted several IBM WebSphere products, has been recognized by IBM as Research Accomplishments and an Outstanding Research Accomplishment, reported in more than 250 mainstream media outlets, and featured in an IBM commercial aired on national television. He is a recipient of multiple Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and multiple Invention Achievement Awards from IBM.
 
Dr. Lei has participated in many conferences and workshops as a General Co-Chair, PC Co-Chair, or keynote/invited speaker. In particular, he has been actively involved in the IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE), one of the key conferences sponsored by TCBIS. He has served as a PC Co-Chair of ICEBE in 2005, 2007, and 2012, and a Track Chair of ICEBE 2010. He serves on the editorial board of the Springer Journal of Service-Oriented Computing and Applications, has been a Program Committee Member for 40 international conferences and workshops, and has served as a guest editor for several IEEE and ACM journals.