On July 16, 2013 Vera Künzle successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled

Object-aware Process Management

at Ulm University, Germany. The DBIS team is pleased to congratulate Vera on her successful PhD defense (with honors, summa cum laude) and wishes her all the best for her future. Vera's PhD advisor and PhD promotor has been Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert (see picture together with Vera and Prof. Dr. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma).

In her PhD, Vera Künzle has developed the PHILharmonic Flows framework, which enables object-aware process management in a very flexible and comprehensive manner. In particular, the framework not only provides a highly original process modeling approach, but also establishes a well-defined operational semantics enabling the robust execution of object- and process-aware applications as well as the automatic and dynamic generation of end-user components for them (e.g., overview tables and user forms). Overall, a holistic framework integrating data, functions, processes and users offers promising perspectives in order to overcome the numerous limitations of contemporary business process management systems. PHILharmonic Flows hence provides an important contribution towards the realization of more flexible process management technology in which daily work can be done in a more natural and flexible way.

Members of the PhD committee:

• Prof. Dr. Uwe Schöning (Chairman)
• Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert (Promotor and First Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Helmut Partsch (Second Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma (External Referee, University of Vienna)
• Prof. Dr. Peter Dadam (Core Committee Member)
• Prof. Dr. Franz Schweiggert (Core Committee Member)