The Customer Experience Activity within Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs is looking for an intern to work on visualization of flowcharts that specify business processes. Such a flowchart specification serves as input to a workflow engine, which executes/coordinates the task that is defined by the flowchart. The flowchart is designed by a domain expert (in our case usually a telecom customer service expert) via a graphical interface. Every execution of the flowchart is recorded in a log file, and the recorded data can be used to monitor, analyze, and optimize the flowchart.

We are currently developing a tool that can assist the domain expert to interact with recorded workflow executions, e.g. to play back a single execution, or to visualize many executions at the same time. One of the challenges is to design visualizations that are easily understood by the domain expert. For example, it turns out to be important to stay close to the visual layout of the flowchart as it was designed by the expert. Another challenge is to develop a prototype implementation, for example in a web-browser environment using HTML, SVG, and Javascript.

We are primarily interested in candidates that are pursuing a Masters degree in Computer Science, preferably with a background or specialisation in Software Engineering and visualization. Any prior experience with workflow engines, BPM, graphs, HTML, SVG, and/or JavaScript is considered a plus.

The intern will work in our offices in Antwerp, Belgium.