For the 
Institute of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS), 2015 was both an exciting and successful year. On the one hand, excellent research results, publications and grants could be achieved. On the other hand, new topics and courses were established in teaching.
Meanwhile the vacant professorship was filled giving DBIS a strong position in research as well as teaching with a focus on process and data science. With the grant for a Doctoral Research Program on Cognitive Computing, Ulm University will receive from the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg in 2016, a good basis for 2016 has been established – both DBIS professors will be participating in this doctoral research program whose co-speaker is Manfred Reichert.
Personnel Changes: A New Database Professor, New Faces, Involvement in Faculty Issues
After the retirement of Peter Dadam in September 2014 and the management take-over by Manfred Reichert in October 2014, the vacant professorship at DBIS could be refilled quickly. 
Since February 2015, Prof. Dr. Martin Theobald has been appointed as second full professor in the institute. In his research, Martin is working with large data sets and advanced database technologies. Together with its already existing research areas, DBIS is well prepared for future research challenges in the process and data sciences.
At the staff level, there were personnel changes in 2015 as well. Altogether five PhD students successfully finished their PhD projects in 2015, four of them already started with their new jobs. Accordingly, new staff members entered the DBIS group and already started to contribute new additions in research and teaching. The members of the current DBIS team originate from four continents (i.e., America, Asia, Africa, and Europe), which demonstrates the increasing internationalisation of the group.
DBIS also played an important role in the Faculty for Engineering, Computer Science and Psychology. Currently, Prof. Reichert is member of the faculty board and faculty council. Furthermore, he is academic dean and program director for Computer Science as well as a member of the student and doctoral examination boards.
DBIS in Research: Chairs, Committees, Keynotes, PhD projects
Chairs and Committee Memberships at International Conferences and Workshops
After having organized the EDOC 2014 conference in Ulm in September 2014, DBIS researchers were actively involved in co-chairing international events in 2015 as well.
Together with Hajo Reijers (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Manfred Reichert was General Co-Chair of the BPM 2015 Workshops, which took place in Innsbruck in September 2015. The BPM workshop post proceedings will appear in Springer’s LNBIP series in 2016. Manfred was also elected as a new member of the BPM Steering Committee. Furthermore, he was Co-Chair of the joint 8th Int'l Workshop on Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare and the 7th Int'l Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care, which took place in the context of the AIME 2015 conference in Pavia in June 2015. The workshop proceedings were published by Springer in its LNAI series in December 2015.
Dr. Jens Kolb was PC co-chair of the EMISA 2015 workshop in Innsbruck and General Co-Chair of the EDOC 2016 workshops in Adelaide, Australia. The workshop proceedings were published in the Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) series and in IEEE proceedings respectively.
Both DBIS professors were members of the program committees of the most relevant conferences in their research area (e.g., ICDE, SIGMOD, BPM, CAiSE, CoopIS, EDOC, and ICWS).
In 2016, DBIS researchers will be involved in the organization of international conferences as well. Martin Theobald is Finance Chair of the SIGMOD 2016 conference, which will take place in San Francisco in June 2016. In turn, Manfred Reichert Tutorial & Panel Chair of the BPM 2016 conference, which will take place in Rio de Janeiro after the Olympic Games September 2016.
Editorships, Keynotes, Publications
Since 2015, both Martin Theobald and Manfred Reichert have been Area Editors of the renowned Information Systems journal, which emphasizes their leading roles in their respective area of research. Additionally, Manfred has been editor-in-chief of the EMISA Journal and editorial board member of several international journals (e.g., Int J Cooperative Information Systems, Business & Information Systems Engineering). Together with Hamid R. Motahari Nezhad (IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA), he was guest editor of a special issue on Enterprise Computing, which was published by Information Systems in December 2015.
In 2015, again DBIS researchers were invited for several talks at international conferences, workshops, and summer schools. Manfred Reichert was invited keynote speaker of the „14th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research (BIR 2015)“, which took place in Estonia in August 2015, and invited keynote speaker of the „International Workshop on Process Engineering“ organized in the context of the BPM 2015 conference in Innsbruck in September 2015. Furthermore he provided colloquium presentations at several universities as well as an invited talk at the Process Day of the Austrian Society for Process Management. Martin Theobald, in turn, gave a course on information extraction and automated generation of semantic knowledge bases in the context of the 25th International Summer School in Jyväskylä (Finland).
In 2015, DBIS researchers and PhD students were very successful regarding scientific publications. This includes a number of accepted journal articles (e.g. Information Systems, Information & Software Technology, Software & Systems Modeling, and Systems & e-Business Management) as well as accepted full papers at top conferences (e.g., BPM 2015, CAiSE 2015, CoopIS 2015, EDOC 2015, ER 2015, SCC 2015, and CBMS 2015). Altogether, in 2015 DBIS published more than 30 refereed papers.
Concerning citations, DBIS papers were again ranked top by several journals. For example, out of more than 400 articles that had appeared during the last 5 years in the Computers & Industry journal, the second most cited one (according to Scopus) has been co-authored by Manfred Reichert. Furthermore, DBIS articles published in other journals (e.g., Int J Coop Information Systems and Data & Knowledge Engineering) have been among the most cited ones as well.
Completed PhD Projects and Doctoral Thesis Award
In 2015, five PhD students who had been supervised by Manfred Reichert completed their PhD projects – a number that have not been reached yet. On 1 June 2015, Dr. Matthias Lohrmann successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled „Business Process Quality Management“. He was followed on July 22, 2015 by Dr. Bernd Michelberger who finished his PhD project on „Process-Oriented Information Logistics: Aligning Process Information with Business Processes“. A special day for DBIS was July 29, 2015 – with Dr. Jens Kolb („Abstraction, Visualization, and Evolution of Process Models“) and Dr. Markus Hipp („Navigating in Complex Process Model Collections”) two PhD students successfully defended their thesis at one and the same day. Finally, on 5 October 2015, Dr. Rüdiger Pryss successfully completed his PhD thesis entitled „Robust and Context-Oriented Execution of Mobile Activities in a Process Environment”. DBIS is proud of its young doctors and their excellent scientific contributions.
After Vera Künzle who had received the doctoral thesis award granted by the Ulmer Universitätsgesellschaft in July 2014, Dr. Maximilian Dylla, Neu-Ulm, won one of the two Dissertation Awards granted by the division for Databases and Information Systems of the German Informatics Society.
Several of our PhD students introduced their PhD project in a colloquium presentation at the faculty level last year. Hence, it can be assumed that there will be reasons to celebrate in 2016 as well.
Current and Future Research Projects: A Broadly Diversified Portfolio
In 2015 DBIS was involved in a variety of national and international projects, which address both basic and applied research. The grants for these projects stem from various sources including the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), the European Union (EU), and industrial partners.
At the beginning of the year, we acquired a project funded by the BMWi in its research program “Zentrales Innovationsprogramm Mittelstand (ZIM)”. With Persis a regional partner from industry has been involved in this project as well. Furthermore, DBIS was successful with acquiring a project in the context of BMWi‘s EXIST research program. Finally, DBIS has been pleased about the continuation of its long-term research collaboration with the Daimler AG.
Our EU FP7 project as well as two DFG projects were closed in 2015. With the aforementioned grant for the Doctoral Research Program on Cognitive Computing, which Ulm University will receive from the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg, an excellent basis has been established for 2016 and the following years – both DBIS professors will be participating in this doctoral research program whose co-speaker will be Manfred Reichert. Additional research proposals are under preparation.
A Strong National and International Research Network
Both the national and international research network of the institute are excellent. As chairman and steering committee member of the GI SIG EMISA, Prof. Reichert has been well connected to the German scientific community. Furthermore, he has been a member of the steering committee of the GI technical branch on Databases and Information Systems. Amongst others, national research collaborations exist with the Technical University of Munich as well as the Universities of Constance, Regensburg, Saarbrücken, and Magdeburg.
As in previous years, there has been a fruitful collaboration between DBIS and three Viennese Universities in 2015, which resulted excellent joint publications. Additionally, the long-term strategic collaboration DBIS holds with Barbara Weber’s research group was very productive regarding high-quality publications. The same applies to our collaborations with the Penn State University and the Universities of Antwerp, Verona, Rome and Valencia as well as the Universities of Applied Sciences from Ravensburg-Weingarten, Neu-Ulm, and Aalen. Altogether more than 15 of the papers we published in 2015 were co-authored by external partners.
Finally, DBIS has been a member of the European BPM Round Table, the IFIP Working Group 5.8 „Enterprise Interoperability“, and, since 2015, the IFIP Working Group 8.1 „Design and Evaluation of Information Systems“.
DBIS in Teaching: Strong Involvement, New Courses, and High Attendance Rates
Regarding the involvement of DBIS in teaching, important changes happened in 2015: First and foremost, DBIS increased its commitment for teaching Management Science students. For several years, DBIS has already offered relevant Master courses (e.g., Business Process Management, Business Process Intelligence) for them. Since this winter term, DBIS additionally teaches Bachelor courses (e.g. Introduction to Programming, Information Systems) in Management Science. Furthermore, Prof. Reichert will coordinate the teaching offers in the priority program on Computer Science for Management Science students. Due to his strong commitment, the board of the Faculty of Mathematics and Economic Sciences (Ulm University) decided to coopt Manfred Reichert in the Faculty of Mathematics and Economic Sciences.
With the start of Prof. Theobald as new database professor, DBIS teaching offers in the field of database management systems were renewed. In addition to the well-established course on database management systems, three new courses were designed: Information Retrieval & Web Mining (Master), Introduction to Data Science (Bachelor / Master), and Big Data Analytics (Master). These new courses are complemented by exciting projects and seminars related to database technology and non-traditional database architectures. Furthermore, DBIS continues its strong involvement in the Bachelor courses of the Computer Science programs. In the summer term, for the first time, Manfred Reichert taught the Bachelor course “Information Systems”.
DBIS has been very involved in the design and structuring of the new international Masters in Cognitive Systems as well. On one hand, several DBIS courses (e.g. Introduction to Data Science, Big Data Analytics, Information Retrieval and Web Mining) are taught in English language. On the other, DBIS designed the interdisciplinary subject „Cognitive Agents, Companions, and Mobile Apps in Healthcare“, which comprises several courses in English language. Finally, as academic dean Prof. Reichert actively supports the design and structuring of the Cognitive Systems Masters.
In 2015, attendance figures were very positive for the already established DBIS courses. About 150 students subscribed to the Business Process Management course this winter term. Our Master course Business Process Intelligence, in turn, was attended by more than 50 students. Besides lectures, exercises and laboratory hours, for both courses there are exciting guest lectures with speakers from industry. We were also happy about the positive feedback and high attendance figures we achieved in the courses taught by Marc Schickler in the context of the applied subjects Mobile Business Applications (Bachelor) und Advanced Mobile Application Engineering (Master). Both students and DBIS staff were enthusiastic about the outcomes of the 2015 edition of these courses. The DBIS lab as well as the DBIS courses on Database Management Systems, Information Systems and Service-Oriented Computing re-enjoyed a great popularity in 2015 as well. Finally, DBIS was engaged in giving pupils insights into Computer Science during a BOGY internship.
In general, DBIS aims at a close linkage of teaching and research. Accordingly, many of the results obtained in the context of Master and Bachelor theses could be directly transferred to successful publications. Remarkably, DBIS students won prestigious awards again. In May 2015, DBIS master student Stefan Büringer received the eXXcellence Award for his outstanding Master thesis on the development of a cloud platform for business process administration, modelling and execution. The same award was handed out to our Master student Karoline Blendinger in November 2015 for her master thesis on tablet applications for the elderly.
DBIS students may be looking forward to exciting teaching offers in 2016. In addition to the already established DBIS lab, we will design a lab course related to business process modelling.
The DBIS team wishes its students, partners and friends a happy new year and is looking forward to successfully collaborating with them in 2016 as well.