Education
2008-2012
Ph.D. from the Department of Information Management, Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
Graduation date: April 27th, 2012
Supervisor: Prof. M.P. Papazoglou
Dissertation title: “Towards a Comprehensive Framework for Business Process Compliance”
Dissertation summary: Today's enterprises demand a high degree of compliance of business processes to meet regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel III. To ensure continuous guaranteed compliance, it should be enforced during all phases of the business process lifecycle, from the phases of analysis and design to deployment, monitoring and evaluation. This course of research primarily concentrates on design-time aspects of compliance management and secondarily on business process runtime monitoring; hence, providing preventive lifetime compliance support. While current manual or ad-hoc solutions provide limited assurances that business processes adhere to relevant constraints, there is still a lack of an established generic framework for managing these constraints; integrating their relationships; maintaining their traceability to relevant sources and business processes; and automatically verifying their satisfiability. As one of the key steps towards a comprehensive compliance management framework, we propose a compliance refinement methodology and a compliance conceptual model for refining, specifying and managing compliance specifics and integrating them with business processes. Furthermore, we propose the Compliance Request Language (CRL), grounded on temporal logic and compliance patterns, for the formal specification of compliance requirements. This enables design-time automated compliance verification and analysis, while shielding the complexity of formal languages from the users. Moreover, CRL supports the specification of non-monotonic requirements, which enables the relaxation of some compliance requirements to handle exceptional situations. As a complementary step, we also propose a root-cause analysis approach to reason about and analyse detected design-time compliance violations that can aid the user to resolve compliance deviations. Finally, based on CRL and XPath, the subsequent runtime monitoring of the running business process instances is conducted to detect online violations during business process executions.
Committee: Prof. M.P. Papazoglou (Tilburg University), Prof. W.J. van den Heuvel (Tilburg University), Prof. Eleni Stroulia (University of Alberta), Prof. M.S. Hacid (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1), Prof. E. Debois (Université du Luxembourg).
2005-2007
Master’s in Information Systems at Cairo University, Faculty of Computers and Information, Information Systems Department, Egypt.
Thesis title: “Efficient Techniques for Building Web Services ”
Thesis summary: The main focus of this thesis is on investigating and studying the automatic composition problem Web Services. Automatic Web Services composition is one of the biggest challenges in this area. As a prerequisite step to enable this novel goal, Web Services should be based on a rich description model, which captures not only their exposed signatures, but also their visible behaviours. The main contribution of the thesis is the development of a UML profile that simulates a rich service description and composition model, i.e. Colombo Model. The UML profile acts as an intermediate step to the formal specifications of the Colombo model; hence, detaching the complexity of such low-level and complex specifications from the user. We have also proposed a set of related XML document types that can serve as a Colombo underlying XML language. Besides, we have introduced the transformation scheme from this UML profile into the XML document types. Furthermore, we have proposed to verify and analyse the correctness of the resulting composite web service by mapping it to Process Algebraic (PA) formalisms.
2003-2004
Master’s preparatory year at Cairo University, Faculty of Computers and Information, Information Systems Department, Egypt.
General Grade: Very Good.
Pre-Masters Research Project title: Peer-to-Peer Search Networks.
Pre-Masters Research Project Grade: Very Good.
Description: One year of theoretical, practical and research study as a preparatory stage to undertake the subsequent Master’s program. The advanced courses studied include: E-Commerce, Multimedia Databases, Information Systems Auditing, Information Systems Architecture, Object-oriented Databases.
1997-2001
Bachelor in Information Systems at Cairo University, Faculty of Computers and Information, Information Systems Department, Egypt.
General Grade: Very Good (83%) with honour degree.
Rank: Seventh.
Graduation Project: “A Complete Transportation Guide Between Cairo and Other Governorates: EasyTrans”. The project is primarily concerned with the analysis, modelling, design and development of a software system that works as a guide for all means of transportations inside Greater Cairo, and between Cairo and other governorates.
Graduation Project Grade: Excellent.
Description: Four years of distinguished high-quality theoretical and practical studies of computer science and information systems related courses. More specifically, my specialty is primarily focused on the Information systems discipline. Examples of the courses studied are: Database; Systems modelling, analysis, design and implementation; distributed databases, data mining, data warehousing, software engineering, data structures, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics…etc.
2008-2012
Ph.D. from the Department of Information Management, Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
Graduation date: April 27th, 2012
Supervisor: Prof. M.P. Papazoglou
Dissertation title: “Towards a Comprehensive Framework for Business Process Compliance”
Dissertation summary: Today's enterprises demand a high degree of compliance of business processes to meet regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel III. To ensure continuous guaranteed compliance, it should be enforced during all phases of the business process lifecycle, from the phases of analysis and design to deployment, monitoring and evaluation. This course of research primarily concentrates on design-time aspects of compliance management and secondarily on business process runtime monitoring; hence, providing preventive lifetime compliance support. While current manual or ad-hoc solutions provide limited assurances that business processes adhere to relevant constraints, there is still a lack of an established generic framework for managing these constraints; integrating their relationships; maintaining their traceability to relevant sources and business processes; and automatically verifying their satisfiability. As one of the key steps towards a comprehensive compliance management framework, we propose a compliance refinement methodology and a compliance conceptual model for refining, specifying and managing compliance specifics and integrating them with business processes. Furthermore, we propose the Compliance Request Language (CRL), grounded on temporal logic and compliance patterns, for the formal specification of compliance requirements. This enables design-time automated compliance verification and analysis, while shielding the complexity of formal languages from the users. Moreover, CRL supports the specification of non-monotonic requirements, which enables the relaxation of some compliance requirements to handle exceptional situations. As a complementary step, we also propose a root-cause analysis approach to reason about and analyse detected design-time compliance violations that can aid the user to resolve compliance deviations. Finally, based on CRL and XPath, the subsequent runtime monitoring of the running business process instances is conducted to detect online violations during business process executions.
Committee: Prof. M.P. Papazoglou (Tilburg University), Prof. W.J. van den Heuvel (Tilburg University), Prof. Eleni Stroulia (University of Alberta), Prof. M.S. Hacid (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1), Prof. E. Debois (Université du Luxembourg).
2005-2007
Master’s in Information Systems at Cairo University, Faculty of Computers and Information, Information Systems Department, Egypt.
Thesis title: “Efficient Techniques for Building Web Services ”
Thesis summary: The main focus of this thesis is on investigating and studying the automatic composition problem Web Services. Automatic Web Services composition is one of the biggest challenges in this area. As a prerequisite step to enable this novel goal, Web Services should be based on a rich description model, which captures not only their exposed signatures, but also their visible behaviours. The main contribution of the thesis is the development of a UML profile that simulates a rich service description and composition model, i.e. Colombo Model. The UML profile acts as an intermediate step to the formal specifications of the Colombo model; hence, detaching the complexity of such low-level and complex specifications from the user. We have also proposed a set of related XML document types that can serve as a Colombo underlying XML language. Besides, we have introduced the transformation scheme from this UML profile into the XML document types. Furthermore, we have proposed to verify and analyse the correctness of the resulting composite web service by mapping it to Process Algebraic (PA) formalisms.
2003-2004
Master’s preparatory year at Cairo University, Faculty of Computers and Information, Information Systems Department, Egypt.
General Grade: Very Good.
Pre-Masters Research Project title: Peer-to-Peer Search Networks.
Pre-Masters Research Project Grade: Very Good.
Description: One year of theoretical, practical and research study as a preparatory stage to undertake the subsequent Master’s program. The advanced courses studied include: E-Commerce, Multimedia Databases, Information Systems Auditing, Information Systems Architecture, Object-oriented Databases.
1997-2001
Bachelor in Information Systems at Cairo University, Faculty of Computers and Information, Information Systems Department, Egypt.
General Grade: Very Good (83%) with honour degree.
Rank: Seventh.
Graduation Project: “A Complete Transportation Guide Between Cairo and Other Governorates: EasyTrans”. The project is primarily concerned with the analysis, modelling, design and development of a software system that works as a guide for all means of transportations inside Greater Cairo, and between Cairo and other governorates.
Graduation Project Grade: Excellent.
Description: Four years of distinguished high-quality theoretical and practical studies of computer science and information systems related courses. More specifically, my specialty is primarily focused on the Information systems discipline. Examples of the courses studied are: Database; Systems modelling, analysis, design and implementation; distributed databases, data mining, data warehousing, software engineering, data structures, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics…etc.