My research in process mining

 When I rejoined the BPM team at QUT in 2014, many changes had taken place. The team had been relocated to the newly built P-Block. Arthur was still the leader of the team, but Marcello had been promoted to become QUT's youngest professor in computer science, managing a large group of human resources. Research within the team had switched its focus from process automation to process mining—a discipline created by Professor Wil van der Aalst, whom I have always respected as a mentor, friend, and rival. Moe was my direct supervisor, but frankly, I did not appreciate her research that much.

"Why do you want to return to BPM?" Arthur asked me during the job interview.

"I want to do open-source projects," I replied. "The SAIVT group where I worked previously does not allow me to share source code with others, which negatively impacts the promotion of my research outputs. Everything I did at SAIVT was sound, accurate, and objective; there is nothing I wish to hide. I want people to understand my publications fully. I admire your effort to host open-source projects and create websites for each small research area."

At the end of the interview, Arthur welcomed my return warmly. He mentioned that he had not received any notifications of bugs in C-YAWL, indicating it was developed to a very high quality. I was pleased to learn that YAWL had been installed on the Tianhe-II supercomputer in China.

Process mining is a research area that investigates event logs from information systems using AI techniques. In control flow, I view it as a machine learning area that focuses on data with timestamps as attributes. Within control flow, the core task is to automatically generate a workflow model from transactional logs stored in the databases of information systems. Typically, this workflow is represented as a Petri net.

Wil's team in the Netherlands operates a large open-source project called ProM. It uses a highly innovative method to incorporate new algorithms in this area as plug-ins, a strategy I consider to be very advanced. Wil's contributions to this field are by no doubt the largest in the world. However, at the beginning, I did not think he was exceptionally brilliant because, in my view, all the technical foundations were based on a single model: the Petri net. Later, I reflected on this and realized that in speech recognition, the primary model used was always the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and its variations. We should not expect every model to be applied across a number of domains of applications. Artem, a young but excellent researcher from Ukraine, told me he heard Wil worked 12 hours a day. Then if that is the case, Wil is still very common! I thought to myself, though I did not dare to speak this out publicly.

The first time I felt Wil was truly unusual was during the writing of a paper on 3D visualization. I wrote the literature review section, and Arthur praised me extensively, saying it was exactly the correct style for a literature review, though he provided a few suggestions. While I agreed with him, I also thought his suggestions were merely theoretical, as I had never read a paper written in that manner. Wil later rewrote the final version. Ah! I fully admitted that Wil's version was much better. This made my own contribution to the paper feel minor.

However, Arthur suggested that I should be the first author, and he noted that Erik had agreed with this arrangement. I kept silent, and from then on I understood why the authorship of the C-YAWL paper would have problems. Then, Moe snatched the first author position. Arthur was confused and asked me why I did not compete for it.

"It's Erik's business," I told him. "Only he is qualified to compete for first authorship."

One day, Moe instructed me to draft the evaluation session for a paper on resource queueing, stating that we needed to finish it that same day. I worked incredibly hard but still could not finish it on time. I ultimately submitted the paper to them the next day.

Soon after, the annual performance review arrived just before the Christmas holidays. Moe blamed me for not finishing the paper on time.

"But I only delayed for a day," I argued.

"You delayed for a day, but Wil went on holiday immediately after," Arthur said. "Your one-day delay pushed back the submission of the paper by at least two months."

After the New Year, the paper underwent a few revisions before final submission. When Wil read the paper, he sent us an email saying that he liked it a lot, especially the evaluation section. Consequently, my draft remained unchanged in the final published version.

I was deeply grateful for Wil's confirmation. From then on, I believed Wil was truly a better leader than Arthur, even though I remained unsatisfied with how the C-YAWL paper was handled.