Wil van der Aalst - 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-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik (FIT), and a member of the Board of Governors of Tilburg University. He also has unpaid professorship positions at Queensland University of Technology (since 2003) and the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e). Until December 2017, he was the scientific director of the Data Science Center Eindhoven (DSC/e) and led the Architecture of Information Systems group at TU/e. Currently, he is also a distinguished fellow of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento, deputy CEO of the Internet of Production (IoP) Cluster of Excellence, co-director of the RWTH Center for Artificial Intelligence. His research interests include process mining, Petri nets, business process management, workflow automation, simulation, process modeling, and model-based analysis. Wil van der Aalst has published more than 265 journal papers, 22 books (as author or editor), 580 refereed conference/workshop publications, and 85 book chapters. Many of his papers are highly cited (he is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world and has an H-index of 163 according to Google Scholar with over 123,000 citations), and his ideas have influenced researchers, software developers, and standardization committees working on process support. He has been a co-chair of many conferences, including the Business Process Management conference, the International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, the International Conference on the Application and Theory of Petri Nets, the International Conference on Process Mining, and the IEEE International Conference on Services Computing. He is also editor/member of the editorial board of several journals, including Business & Information Systems Engineering, Computing, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Software and Systems Modeling, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, the International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, the International Journal on Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures, Computers in Industry, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, and Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency. He has chaired the steering committee of IEEE Task Force on Process Mining from 2009 until 2021 and chaired the steering committee of the International Conference Series on Business Process Management from 2003 until 2017. He previously served on the advisory boards of several organizations, including Fluxicon, Celonis, ProcessGold/UiPath, and aiConomix. In 2012, he received the degree of doctor honoris causa from Hasselt University in Belgium. He also served as scientific director of the International Laboratory of Process-Aware Information Systems of the National Research University, Higher School of Economics in Moscow. In 2013, he was appointed as Distinguished University Professor of TU/e and was awarded an honorary guest professorship at Tsinghua University. In 2015, he was appointed as an honorary professor at the National Research University, Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is also an IFIP Fellow, IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen), Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen), the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea), and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste). In 2018 he was awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship, Germany’s most valuable research award (five million euros).
For more information about his work visit: http://www.processmining.org and http://www.wvdaalst.com.