Profile
In 1989 I received my Master's degree with high distinction (cum laude) from the Computer Science Department of the University of Nijmegen (in Dutch: Radboud Universiteit) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In 1993 I received my PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science from the same university. My PhD-thesis, entitled 'Information Modelling in Data Intensive Domains', dealt with the formal foundations of conceptual data modelling and conceptual process modelling. In this thesis, the conceptual modelling technique NIAM was extended with advanced conceptual modelling constructors and a formal set-theoretic foundation was given. The resulting technique was called PSM. LISA-D served as a conceptual query language for PSM and its denotational semantics was given in terms of path expressions. LISA-D exploits the natural language base of PSM and allows for an easy formulation of complex queries. Task Structures were introduced for the description of processes and they were defined in terms of Process Algebra. The research described in my PhD-thesis was carried out both at the department of information systems of the University of Nijmegen (1 day per week) and at the Software Engineering Research Centre in Utrecht, The Netherlands (4 days per week). At SERC, my research focused on meta-CASE technology in the context of the SOCRATES project and on formalization of methods and techniques in the context of the ESPRIT II project PROOFS.
After receiving my PhD thesis I worked as an assistant professor at the department of information systems of the University of Nijmegen for a few years. Research in this period focused on further extending the work on formal foundations of conceptual modelling. In particular, a category theory framework for conceptual data modelling was defined. I was involved in a formalization of Jakobson's Objectory in terms of Process Algebra. I also supervised about a few Master thesis students in this period.
In January 1996 I started working as a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science from the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia. Research dealt with the feasibility of situational method engineering, the conceptual specification of workflows (in the context of the PhD-research of Alistair Barros) and workflow verification.
In January 1997, I started working as a lecturer at the School of Information Systems of the Queensland University of Technology. In August 1999 I was promoted to Senior Lecturer (backdated to August 1998) and received the 1998 Faculty's Outstanding Performance Award for my research. In August 2000 I was appointed Associate Professor and in December 2004, Marlon Dumas and I won the Dean's Excellence in Research Award in the Faculty of Information Technology. In August 2008 I was promoted to Professor. In 2012 I formally became Head of Discipline of Business Process Management in the School of Information Systems of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Queensland University of Technology. In 2016 I became acting Head of the School of Information Systems and since April 2017, I am officially the Head of this school.
My research activities in the past twenty years have focussed on the conceptual, formal and technological foundations of business process automation. This research has led to the well-known workflow patterns and the development of the open source workflow management system YAWL, but also e.g. to conceptual foundations of service description (work that culminated in the PhD thesis of Justin O'Sullivan), service interaction patterns, and work on configurable reference models. My current general areas of interest are in process automation and process mining. In the past few years I have, among others, been concerned with comparative performance analysis, process risk analysis, visualisation, and business process automation in the cloud. Recent areas of interest that have emerged are data quality, crowdsourcing, and robotic process automation,
I have over 250 publications, of which over 90 are international journal publications and over 90 international conference articles. These publications have been published in journals such as ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology, Computer Journal, Decision Support Systems, Formal Aspects of Computing, Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, and Acta Informatica. I have been or am a chief investigator in three large ARC SPIRT grants, involving Mincom, GBST, and JustWin Technologies (this grant was administered through UNSW), two ARC Linkage grants (with SWS and Suncorp) and six ARC Discovery grants (and one more recent one from which I withdrew after it was awarded). I acted as a chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industies and Innocation (led by QUT's Faculty of Creative Industries), where I was involved in the application of BPM technology to the area of screen business. This work resulted in the YAWL4film initiative.
I have also been involved in a small capacity in two research centres, the Smart Services CRC (2010-2013) and the Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre (2010-2012), as well as in NICTA (2011-2015) in the general area of business process management.
I maintain close working relations with researchers at a number of universities in the world, e.g. Prof Wil van der Aalst (RWTH Aachen, Germany), Prof Hajo Reijers (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), and Prof Marlon Dumas (University of Tartu, Estonia).
From 2010 to 2018, next to my professorial position at QUT, I was a part-time professor at the Information Systems Group of Eindhoven University of Technology in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. In 2010 and 2011 I was a Senior Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. In May 2010 I was a visiting professor at University of Rome 'La Sapienza' where I taught a unit on Business Process Automation (from the 'YAWL book') and worked with Dr Massimo Mecella and Prof Umberto Nanni. In the years 2013-2015 I co-taught a unit on Business Process Automation at Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou, China). I have been a visiting professor at Sun Yat-sen University since 2016 where my main contact is Professor Yang Yu.