La Sapienza - Università di Roma

Speaker: Claudio Di Ciccio 

Affiliation: University of Utrecht

Summary:  Multi-party business processes rely on the collaboration of various players in a decentralized setting. Blockchain technology can facilitate the automation of these processes, even in cases where trust among participants is limited. Transactions are stored in a ledger, a replica of which is retained by every node of the blockchain network. The operations saved thereby are thus publicly accessible, which benefits transparency, reliability, and persistence. Smart contracts can encode the system behavior agreed upon by the involved parties to define the behaviour of collaborative processes. Rule enforcement, traceability and non-repudiation are thus catered for, too. However, data, objects and services in the outer world are not directly accessible from within a blockchain execution environment. On one hand, access to limited information hinders the adoption of programmable blockchains as an effective aid to process intelligence. On the other hand, transferring every bit of off-chain information on-chain is not only impractical but also undesirable, as this operation could violate typical confidentiality requirements in enterprise settings. In this talk, we discuss and explore approaches aimed at strengthening the bond between process and blockchain execution environments, balancing between knowledge sharing and secrecy preservation.

Biography: Claudio Di Ciccio is an associate professor at the Department of Information and Computing Science of Utrecht University (Netherlands). Previously, he was an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science of Sapienza University of Rome, and, earlier on, an assistant professor at the In­sti­tute for In­form­a­tion Busi­ness of the Vi­enna Uni­versity of Eco­nom­ics and Busi­ness (WU Vi­enna), Aus­tria. He received a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering in 2013 at Sapienza. His research interests include Process Mining, Formal Methods, Automated Reasoning in AI, and Blockchain Technologies.
Claudio Di Ciccio is a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining. He serves on the program committee of prestigious conferences in his field, including IJCAI and BPM with the role of senior PC member, and was a PC chair of the Blockchain Forum at BPM in 2019 and 2024, the third Int. Conference on Process Mining in 2021, and the twentieth Int. Conference on Business Process Management in 2022. Also, he was a General Chair of the fifth Int. Conference on Process Mining in 2023.
For more information and contact details, visit http://claudio.diciccio.net/

Registration: No registration is required for this seminar.