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People of ACM European Chapters - Bálint Molnár

December 18, 2018

Can you briefly describe your own line of research and how you became interested in this area?

Primarily, I am involved in business information systems, enterprise resource systems, and enterprise and information architecture. My research interest includes related fields including web technologies in information systems; use of formal methods that are grounded in mathematics for information systems modeling, business process modeling, workflows (hypergraph theory, finite state machine, business process modeling notation, ontologies); description logic; and application of modern methods of data analytics.

In your area of research, what recent advance/emerging subfield will yield important advances in the years ahead?

As the quality of software underlying information systems and of information systems themselves becomes increasingly interconnected, formal model-checking, mathematical-based methods for verification and validation in the software realm will be extended to information systems. These methods have already been gaining ground in areas such as security, control, safety, reliability, and trusted systems. The customized approach of these techniques will be applied to models of information systems represented by mathematical formalism.

Progress on data science, machine learning, and computational and artificial intelligence provides new opportunities for pattern recognition within the formal models, thus enabling predictive and prescriptive services for analyzing, designing, operating and maintaining information systems.

Will you tell us a little about the Hungarian ACM Chapter?

The chapter has 24 active members. Most of them are members of the Committee on Information Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Regular meetings are in line with the meetings of the Committee.

Members of the chapter participate in organizing and supporting conferences that are run and managed by international and national bodies, as well as Hungarian universities. This year we supported the European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems and the Computer Science Education Conference for secondary school teachers. Our chapter members also take an active role in the organization and assessment of the National Scientific Students' Associations Conference.

How is participation in the chapter beneficial for members?

Being a member of the chapter provides opportunities for building social networks within science and gives members access to helpful information and resources. For example, being able to access the ACM Digital Library connects members with the most up-to-date knowledge for use in university education and research. The members of the chapter also try to raise interest in ACM among PhD students and to help them to build social networks. The chapter distributes information about various events including conferences, invited talks, and ACM-organized student contests to all our members and a network of Hungarian computing students.