Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to optimise operations, enhance decision-making and drive innovation. However, realising this potential requires the following:
- Explicit representations of organizational processes and their dynamics
- Systematic use of related data scattered over different systems having hundreds or thousands of tables
In this talk, Wil van der Aalst, widely recognized as the "Godfather of Process Mining," will explore how Process Intelligence - a groundbreaking fusion of process mining and AI - delivers actionable insights and drives sustainable improvements in industrial environments. Central to this advancement is Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM), an innovative approach that analyses operational processes involving multiple object types (e.g., orders, products, customers), each with its own unique lifecycle. By examining processes through the lens of these interconnected objects, OCPM reveals patterns and bottlenecks often missed by traditional case-centric process mining.
The presentation also introduced a concrete automated process discovery algorithm, i.e., a technique to automatically learn process models from event data. This illustrates that process mining is very different from mainstream AI techniques. The discovered process models provide the basis for contextualizing machine learning problems. Without an explicit representation of the process, one would like to improve, it is very difficult to meaningfully use AI for process improvement.
Biography
Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst is a full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group. He is also the Chief Scientist at Celonis, part-time affiliated with the Fraunhofer FIT. His research interests include process mining, Petri nets, business process management, workflow management, process modelling, and process analysis.
Wil van der Aalst has published over 1100 articles and books. According to Research.com, he is the second highest-ranked computer scientist in Germany and ranked 9th worldwide. According to Google Scholar, he has an H-index of 184 and more than 157.000 citations. Van der Aalst is an IFIP Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and ACM Fellow, and he received honorary degrees from the Moscow Higher School of Economics (Prof. h.c.), Tsinghua University, and Hasselt University (Dr. h.c.). He is also an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy of Europe, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, and the German Academy of Science and Engineering. In 2018, he was awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship.
