QUT is celebrating the award of one of Germany’s most valuable and prestigious research prizes to Adjunct Professor Wil van der Aalst in QUT’s Science and Engineering Faculty.
Professor van der Aalst has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship and 5,000,000 Euro (A$7,366,000) for research of his choosing.
Hailed by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as one of the leading minds in computer science, Professor van der Aalst has been an adjunct professor at QUT since 2003 and has collaborated on research in business process management with QUT Information Systems researchers.
He is regarded as the founder of the young field of process mining, where so-called event logs are used as a starting point for process-based analysis.
As event logs contain information about the actual execution of processes, such analyses are based on evidence and not on intuition or perception.
The field of process mining has developed a range of dedicated and specialised techniques, inspired by related fields such as data mining and machine learning.
The open source tool ProM developed under the leadership of Professor van der Aalst is a state-of-the-art and feature-rich process mining tool, which is widely used in academia and in industry.
He has co-authored with Associate Professor Moe Wynn and Professor Arthur ter Hofstede many published research papers in this field, most recently on the use of event logs to discover work prioritisation patterns, mine human resource profiles, and evaluate and predict overall process risk.
Professor van der Aalst’s process mining work has also informed research conducted by Professor ter Hofstede and Associate Professor Wynn for the Motor Accidents Insurance Commission.
Professor ter Hofstede said the School of Information Systems looked forward to continued research collaboration with Professor van der Aalst.
Media contact: Niki Widdowson, QUT Media, n.widdowson@qut.edu.au
After hours: Rose Trapnell, 0407 585 901 or media@qut.edu.au.
