Prof. Dr. Wil van der Aalst named 2021 IEEE Fellow
Piscataway, New Jersey, USA, November 25th, 2020. prof.dr. Wil van der Aalst, from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, has been named an IEEE Fellow. He is being recognized for his contributions to process mining and workflow processes. Wil van der Aalst is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world and is commonly referred to as the “Godfather of process mining” with many software companies founded based on his ideas.
The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one-percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. Prof. Van der Aalst is the leading researcher in Workflow Management (WFM) and laid the foundations for the Business Process Management (BPM) discipline. At a very early stage, he noted the importance of data-driven process analysis and created the first process mining techniques for process discovery, conformance checking, and predictive process analytics. Currently, there are over thirty commercially available process mining tools (Celonis, ProcessGold/UiPath, Mehrwerk Process Mining, Myinvenio, Minit, QPR, Disco/Fluxicon, Lana, PAFnow, etc.) based on his work over the past two decades.
Van der Aalst is a full professor at RWTH Aachen University leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group. He is also part-time affiliated with the Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik (FIT) and a member of the Board of Governors of Tilburg University. He also leads the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining. 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. Van der Aalst 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 IFIP Fellow and elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy of Europe, 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.
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