Monday, 1 December 2025 @ 13:30–14:30 CET
On-site:
University of Vienna
Seminarraum 8 (OG01)
Kolingasse 14–16
1090 Vienna
Online:
https://univienna.zoom.us/j/67032386717?pwd=g8HOG2oRrWK6T5cvmRA7bv17QRzq72.1
Meeting ID: 670 3238 6717
Passcode: 440328
Data-Driven Analysis of Organizational Operations using Process Mining
Abstract :
Processes structure the operations of organizations, comprising sets of activities that together produce outcomes valuable to the organization or its clients. With the rise of digitization initiatives, these processes are increasingly supported by IT systems. Consequently, the execution of an organizational process generates data records in the form of event logs. Such logs serve as the foundation for process mining—the data-driven analysis of organizational processes. Process mining encompasses a wide range of tasks. For example, organizations can leverage process mining to extract valuable insights, make informed decisions, and optimize their processes by constructing process models, compared true execution against expectations, and creating simulation, prediction, and recommendation models.
Given this context, the talk will serve three main purposes. It will begin with a brief introduction to process mining and the kind of data it relies on. Next, Han van der Aa will present ongoing research directions, particularly those pursued by his team in the Workflow Systems and Technology Group. These directions span technical topics—such as process simulation and prediction—as well as theory-driven and empirical studies, including investigations into the interpretability and effectiveness of process mining outputs and their visualizations. The talk will conclude by highlighting connections with related research fields, such as machine learning, visual analytics, and operations research, with a focus on promising application areas.
Bio :
Han van der Aa is a full professor of Process-Oriented Information Systems at the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of Vienna (since 2024), where he is the head of the Workflow Systems and Technology Research Group. Before that, he was a junior professor at the University of Mannheim (2020-2024) and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2018-2020). He holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, obtained in 2018.
His research focuses on process mining and analysis, with emphasis on the considerations of natural language, uncertainty, and privacy. His research has been published in premier conferences (BPM, CAISE, ICPM, ICDE, SIGMOD) and journals (IS, TKDE, TSE, DSS).
