Prof. Hajo Reijers, University of Utrecht, NL
IPN is organising a special, online series of colloquia in which world-renowned computer scientists give their view on the progress in, and future of the field of computer science. These colloquia will feature thought-provoking presentations that are of interest to a broad (academic) computer science audience. Although these colloquia are initially aimed at the Dutch computer science community, they are open to interested people around the world!
Abstract
Every organization runs on processes: admitting patients, granting permits, approving loans. Process Science studies how such processes unfold, how they can be modeled and analyzed, and how they can be improved, and it rests on foundations from computer science.
Processes are programs. The soundness of workflow nets is decidable, process discovery learns behavioral models from incomplete and noisy data with formal guarantees under well-defined assumptions, and conformance checking is a search problem with considerable algorithmic depth. Beyond these classic topics, the field now also predicts how running processes will unfold and recommends interventions to improve their outcomes. Process mining, which originated largely in the Netherlands, has turned these results into a worldwide industry.
Yet processes are not only programs: they emerge from the interplay of people and organizations. People deviate, improvise, and work around rules, often for good reasons. This is where the field produces some of its most compelling computational questions: When is a deviation an error and when is it a workaround? How can excessive bureaucracy be detected in event data? And what should verification mean once AI agents carry out work alongside humans?
This talk shows how Process Science unites formal rigor with sociotechnical insight, and why that combination makes it one of the most exciting frontiers of computer science today. It closes with a set of open problems that call for the full breadth of the Dutch computer science community.
Bio
Prof. Hajo A. Reijers is a full professor of Computer Science at Utrecht University, where he leads the Process Science research group. Before joining Utrecht, he held academic positions at Eindhoven University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In industry, he worked as a consultant at Deloitte and Accenture and as an R&D manager at Lexmark; today, he advises start-ups in his field. His research spans process mining, automation, and innovation, with particular attention to how information technology shapes the way organizations work. His work on the understandability of process models, including the widely adopted Seven Process Modeling Guidelines (7PMG), has influenced how process models are designed in research and practice. He is co-author of the textbook Fundamentals of Business Process Management, which is used in process management courses at some 400 universities worldwide. He chairs the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Business Process Management and serves as Vice Editor-in-Chief of the journal Business & Information Systems Engineering.
Date, Time, Location
The colloquium will take place on 9 December 2026, 16:00-17:00 CEST
The colloquium will be hosted as a Teams webinar. You can join the colloquium via teams.
We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Afterwards you can find the recording and other recordings on the IPN colloquia overview page.