For the Institute of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS), an eventful year is coming to its end. Both in teaching and research DBIS was able to achieve considerable success. Furthermore, important decisions were made regarding the institute’s future. Looking back at 2013 is therefore worth one’s while.

Consistent further development of practically oriented DBIS courses

Regarding teaching, DBIS extended its range of practically oriented courses significantly. Furthermore, it set up new courses for business students. Overall, we are happy about the positive feedback we received as well as the high numbers of students participating in these new courses.

Since autumn 2013 DBIS has offered two new focus projects for media informatics students: Mobile Business Applications (Bachelor) and Advanced Mobile Application Engineering (Master). The students participating in these projects will learn how to systematically develop mobile applications for smart devices in a team. DBIS has gained distinguished experiences with the development of mobile applications in recent years and will now apply this knowledge in these focus projects. Another innovative teaching concept, provided since spring 2013, has been the DBIS Lab, a course which enables student teams to gain profound hands-on knowledge in analyzing, modeling and implementing business processes based on existing BPM technologies. In comparison to other German universities, these newly introduced courses are unique and without competition at the moment. Finally, DBIS has offered three master courses for business students with great success: Business Process Management, Business Process Intelligence, and Document Management Systems. 

Research at the top international level: awards and keynotes

Regarding research, we have had notable success in 2013. First of all, DBIS researchers received a couple of international awards. Apart from several best paper awards, the BPM Test of Time Award is particularly noteworthy. It was handed over to DBIS researchers at the BPM 2013 conference in Beijing, honoring them for the most influential paper in the BPM conference series during the last decade. As another success, at the CAiSE conference a previous DBIS paper was selected as one of the most seminal contributions in the field of information systems engineering during the last 25 years. Furthermore, DBIS researchers were invited for keynotes and tutorials (ER 2013, IWEI 2013, EVL-BP 2013, Daimler BPM Day), program committee chairs (EDOC 2013, EMISA 2013), and program committees (e.g., CaiSE 2013, BPM 2013, ICWS 2013). Finally, several DBIS articles have been among the most cited papers in international journals (e.g., Data & Knowledge Engineering). Altogether, these awards and nominations underline the high relevance and impact of DBIS research.

Completed PhD projects: awards and woman power

In 2013, Dr. Vera Künzle and Dr. Linh Thao Ly successfully defended their PhD theses (both honoured with summa cum laude). DBIS is proud of its two power ladies who successfully combined the work on their thesis with family life.

Current and future research projects: a broadly diversified portfolio

DBIS is currently involved in a variety of national and international research projects, which address both basic and applied research. The grants for these projects stem from a variety of organiations including the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the European Union (EU), several donations, and industrial partners. Recently, we acquired a project together with partners from the University of Constance, whose grant is provided by the research program “Research Initiatives, Infrastructures, Network and Transfer Platforms” in the context of the third line of funding of the DFG excellence initiative. Furthermore, DBIS is pleased about the continuation of its long-term research collaboration with the Daimler AG with whom we signed another research contract continuing our sustainable research on methods, concepts and tools targeting at the flexible support of automotive engineering processes.

Expanding our national and international research network

DBIS has been successful in expanding its national and international research network. In addition to the collaborations, we have had with the universities of Innsbruck, Vienna, Aalen and Ravensburg-Weingarten for several years, in 2013 we started collaborations with the Penn State University as well as the Universities of Haifa, Verona, Valencia and Sevilla. All these collaborations have resulted in common scientific publications. Furthermore, DBIS has become a member of the European BPM Round Table, the IFIP Working Group 5.8 „Enterprise Interoperability“ and several other international research networks. Finally, at the national level, interdisciplinary collaborations with psychologists from the Universities of Constance, Regensburg and Ulm were started.

Setting the institute's future course

In 2013, a decision about the institite's future course was made as well. In March 2013, Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert got an offer for a full professorship and chair from the University of Bonn. However, Ulm University successfully negotiated with Prof. Reichert convincing him to stay in Ulm. Hence, Prof. Reichert will succeed Prof. Dr. Peter Dadam in office as Prof. Dadam is given emeritus status in September 2014. In particular, this agreement will allow DBIS to continue its successful way in teaching and research.

In general, 2014 will become an exciting year for the DBIS team. In September 2014, we will host the 18th IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC 2014). EDOC 2014 – the “Enterprise Computing Conference” – will be the eighteenth conference in a series that provides the international key forum for researchers and practitioners in the field of enterprise computing. Apart from that, several PhD students will submit and defend their theses in 2014.

The DBIS team wishes its students, partners and friends a happy new year and is looking forward to successfully collaborating with you in 2014 as well.