In the tradition of our conference series, BPM 2023 features three excellent keynotes with different perspectives on business process management.

Marc Kaptein: Process Optimization Saves Lives!

Marc Kaptein, who currently is a Medical Director at Pfizer, combines his former experience as a practicing physician with deep knowledge of research and development of innovative drugs and vaccines to ensure these innovations ultimately reach patients in need.

Marc studied medicine at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. After graduating he practiced in the field of gynecology and obstetrics in Haarlem and Utrecht. He started his career in the innovative pharmaceutical sector with Organon, a women’s health focused company, where he fulfilled various medical and marketing roles in the Netherlands and the United States.

After his return in 2007 he joined Eli Lilly and start-up MyTomorrows with ever growing responsibilities. He started his current position as Medical Director at Pfizer in 2016. Pfizer is a US based pharmaceutical company with 88.000 employees worldwide solely focused on developing innovative drugs and vaccines. Pfizer strives to bring breakthroughs to patients in the field of rare diseases, oncology, infectious diseases, auto-immune disease & inflammation, cardiovascular and metabolic disease and pain.

During the corona crisis he played an instrumental role in the roll-out of Pfizer/BioNTech’s corona vaccine. In his capacity as senior medical voice of the company he aimed to reduce vaccination hesitancy by being a transparent source of knowledge about the development of the vaccine, itssafety, efficacy and manufacturing. Next to his job Marc serves on the board of biotech association HollandBIO, is a member of the Zorgambassade, and adviser to the board of EV Biotech and is someone who applies his LSS Black Belt experience to solve everyday problems.

In his keynote, entitled “Process Optimization Saves Lives!”, Marc will explain how Pfizer was able to manufacture billions of vaccines in record time.

Marta Kwiatkowska: Formal methods and robust machine learning in BPM

Marta Kwiatkowska, currently a Professor of Computing Systems and Fellow at Trinity College, University of Oxford, has an extensive background in academia, having previously held positions as a Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, a Lecturer position at the University of Leicester, and an Assistant Professorship at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. Her area of expertise lies in probabilistic and quantitative verification techniques and the synthesis of correct-by-construction systems from quantitative specifications. Recently, she has focused on safety and trust in the fields of robotics and Artificial Intelligence, with an emphasis on safety and robustness guarantees for machine learning. Marta has been the recipient of two ERC Advanced Grants and an honorary doctorate from KTH Institute of Technology, and was the first female winner of the Royal Society Milner Medal. She is a Fellow of the ACM, a Member of Academia Europea, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

During her keynote, Marta will delve into the ways in which formal methods and robust machine learning can be applied in the context of BPM.

Matthias Weidlich: Database systems and BPM

Matthias Weidlich is a professor with the Department of Computer Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, where he holds the Chair on Databases and Information Systems. His research interests span the fields of process mining and automation, event stream processing, and exploratory data analysis; and his results have been published in leading journals (IEEE TKDE, Information Systems, IEEE TSE, ACM TOSEM) and the proceedings of the premier conferences in the field. He is co-author of the textbook Conformance Checking, serves as Co-Editor in Chief for the Information Systems journal, and is a member of the steering committees of the ACM DEBS conference series and the BPM conference series.

Matthias keynote will focus on the link between database systems and BPM. The execution of business processes is often driven by data; continuously changes data stored in external systems; and generates meta-data that is useful for process analysis. This creates manifold opportunities to leverage process insights to improve data management, as well as to adopt concepts of database systems for improved process automation and analysis. In this talk, Matthias will illustrate these opportunities by means of existing work at the intersection of database systems and BPM, before outlining directions for future research.