week one
june 13 - june 17


  Monday, June 13:

On my first day of work at UMass, I got lost in Amherst walking to the Computer Science Building.  Luckily, I made it on time to meet my mentor, Professor Lori Clarke, and meet several members of the LASER (Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research) lab.  Everyone was friendly and accommodating, and I even got my own workstation and cubicle.  Professor Clarke set me up with Rachel Cobleigh, a graduate student in LASER who I would be working the most closely with this summer.  Rachel was very friendly and patiently answered the many questions I had.  She also provided me with some reading material to get me oriented to the LASER lab research.  After the introductions, I got right down to business with the Little-JIL software application tutorials, studying every aspect and taking notes on its finer points.  For lunch, Professor Clarke was very kind to treat the entire lab to lunch.  Good food, good conversation--I felt welcomed although I was very far from home.  After lunch, we had a lab-wide meeting and I was introduced to more members of the lab.  I was told to "keep track of my confusions" when using the tutorials for the Little-JIL and PROPEL applications because I would be one of the first users of those tutorials, and they needed to know how useful it actually was.  To finish off the day, I continued to work through examples in Little-JIL, including the real-life case of the Blood Transfusion Process.  I walked home that hot summer's day feeling confident that the summer would be fun and interesting and full of hard work.



Tuesday, June 14:

The second day of work was full of more Little-JIL research and orientation to the lab and UMass campus.  Rachel gave me a very detailed map of UMass, and also told me where the best food and gyms could be found on campus.  I filled out the paperwork to obtain a student id card so that I could take advantage of all the opportunities UMass students have on campus--access to the gyms, the ability to borrow books from the library, student discounts, and things of that nature.  I became more familiar with the Little-JIL software and began looking at the PROPEL (Property Elucidation) documentation.



Wednesday, June 15:

I studied more in-depth aspects of the Little-JIL application using a sample process that I created.  This process was meant to show the steps involved for an agent to watch an Oriole's game.  Basically, the agent could either go to Camden Yards, purchase tickets, and watch the game at the stadium, or he/she could watch the game at home, or, if all other things failed, he/she could play baseball outside.  This simple process turned out to be complex and raised several questions regarding the nature of processes, exceptions, and the flow of the Little-JIL application.  It gave me good experience working through every part of the Little-JIL application, as well as understanding the semantics of the diagrams produced.  Once I completed the diagram, Rachel sat down with me to review the "Watch Oriole Game" process.  I asked her several questions (the use of exceptions and how parent nodes should handle them, the true meanings behind symbols in the diagrams, how to print the diagrams out on paper, etc), and she was very helpful in improving my diagram and my methods for which to build it.  She even brought up a subject that I had not put very much thought into, which was the consistent use of language and objects within the diagram.  For example, in one of my steps, I have the agent "Go to Camden Yards", which is the Baltimore Oriole's stadium, but in another step in response to an exception, I have the agent "Leave Baltimore".  Rachel noted that the agent may not be aware that Camden Yards is in Baltimore, so he/she might not know exactly which actions to take.  After thinking about this more, I understood the need for detailed consistency within a diagram to avoid the wrong implications and actions.  Later on Wednesday, we had a Process Group meeting with Dr. Osterweil.  We discussed the need for a strong process among several organizations, including the Federal Government to run better elections, hospitals to follow stricter protocols, and the National Mediation Board to stay consistent with its negotiation procedures with labor unions.  After the meeting, I studied the PROPEL software and tried to make logical links between the properties and the process diagrams between PROPEL and LittleJIL.



Thursday, June 16:

  We went on a field trip to BayState Medical in Springfield, MA to discuss the use of process management with several doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.  A member of our lab, Sandy, performed a demonstration of LittleJIL's capability to capture a medical process in detail, while the medical professionals asked several questions.  Although the intended purpose of the trip was to simply introduce LittleJIL and its methodologies to the medical professioals, it turned out to be a constructive session on what types of things LittleJIL would consistently be good at modeling.  The medical professionals immediately pointed out deficiencies within the diagrams, noting even that there was no consistently performed process for many medical procedures.  They felt that the use of a set process for each procedure, whether it be chemotherapy or blood transfusion or the measuring of Body Surface Area to prescribe medicines, would be extremely beneficial for training new employees and for legal purposes in risk management.  At the end of the meeting, the LASER lab members who were present arranged another meeting with several of the medical professionals to discuss LittleJIL and one medical process in detail.  Back in the lab at UMass, I looked at PROPEL a little bit more, but had to stop and look up more information about Automata Theory because I was unfamiliar with it.  Much of the PROPEL software revolved around the state of the objects and its properties, so knowing the basics of Automata proved to be important.



Friday, June 17:

  There were 2 lab meetings today: one in the morning for the Medical Safety group (of which I was their newest member) and the lab-wide LASER meeting in the afternoon.  Usually at the Medical Safety meetings, Beth Henneman, a professor in the nursing program at UMass and employee at BayState hospital, would provide insight and a nurse's perspective on medical processes so that she could be our 'resident expert'.  Unfortunately, she could not make it to this meeting.  Instead, Professor Clarke and a subset of the members of the lab discussed recent happenings regarding Medical Processes.  Rachel talked about her recent trip to Arlington, VA, where the military has a strong demand for the use of a process within the blood bank.  There was talk of another possible conference to discuss strong processes with the Bethesda Naval Hospital in the fall.  Between meetings, I refined my "Watch Oriole Game" process and looked at the PROPEL documents a little bit more.  I also went out to lunch with another DMP student that is here for the summer.  She is doing research in an engineering lab and is coding in Java, so it was refreshing to meet with her to discuss being "the new girl" and getting adjusted to life in Amherst, although she attends school at Mount Holyoke.  In the afternoon's LASER lab-wide meeting, we went around the table and discussed what every member had been working on for the past week.  It was very interesting to hear that all the members had been working on their respective pieces of the larger project as a whole.