Yun-Heh Chen-Burger

Research interests

Dr. Jessica Chen-Burger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. She was previously a Research Fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) within the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has authored a book “Automating Business Modelling” and over 60 publications in scientific conferences, books, and journals, many of which are widely cited (h-index 18 on Google Scholar as of 2024). She has served as General co-Chair of the international conference KES AMSTA since 2016, and as Co-Editor of the Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies series (Springer) since 2016, alongside other editorial roles.

Together with her research associates and PhD students, she has worked on a range of topics including business intelligence, virtual and intelligent workflows, process technologies and process mining, optimisation techniques, and, more recently, sentiment analysis of short-text data for prediction in volatile domains. Much of this research is grounded in the use of knowledge- and intelligence-based approaches to understand complex domains through the development of formal and semi-formal models, that can be combined with machine learning methods in a hybrid approach. These models are subsequently formalised to provide a foundation for semantics-based inference, automated verification, and validation, as well as for the automatic composition and execution of dynamically formed virtual workflow systems and the development of predictive systems in volatile domains. These approaches can also be integrated with data and process mining techniques to derive insights from large volumes of unstructured and real-time data, including time-series data.

She was nominated for the Student Union Oscars, for the category of Best Postgraduate Research Supervisor by the Student Union, Heriot-Watt University, in 2024. She was nominated for the Pioneering in Education Global Teaching Team Award by the university as a part of the Graduate Apprentice Academic Leadership Team in 2026. 

Jessica has over 20 years of experience in modelling, particularly in areas such as business and enterprise modelling, ontology development, and the provision of automated intelligent support systems. She was a project co-proposer and Co-Investigator, leading an intelligent workflow team from the University of Edinburgh for the €2 million EU-funded Fish4Knowledge project. She also served as co-proposer and Co-Investigator for the business systems team at the University of Edinburgh on the €400K+ EU-funded EcoBusiness project (2009–2012). In addition, she was Principal Investigator on two RCUK Digital Economy grants. Earlier in her career, she contributed expertise to the EU-funded OpenKnowledge project through PhD supervision. She has also been Principal Investigator on several advanced knowledge transfer and industrial research projects, collaborating with organisations such as BT (UK), Edify (USA), Baker Hughes (Germany), KPI (USA), RBS (UK), Aquillo Consulting, and Taiwanese EcoGrid.