IFIP has announced the first confirmed keynote speaker for next year’s World Computer Congress in Poznan, Poland, successfully attracting internationally-renowned computer scientist and researcher, Professor Wil van der Aalst to present a plenary session.

An expert in all areas relating to processes and data, Professor van der Aalst writes on business process management, process mining, data science, workflow management, business process intelligence, Petri nets, business process simulation, concurrency theory, process modelling and more.

He is one of the most cited computer scientists in the world, having written or edited 20 books, 65 book chapters, over 200 journal articles and presented more than 450 papers at workshops and conferences.

At WCC 2018, he will discuss the impact of big data on the way we live, work and socialise and its emerging role as the “new oil” which transforms into new kinds of “energy” in the form of insights, diagnostics, predictions and automated decisions.

He will also highlight potential negative impacts that could arise through the use or misuse of data, such as privacy invasions, systematic discrimination based on data, non-transparent life-changing decisions and inaccurate conclusions.

Professor van der Aalst will explore the concept of Responsible Data Science (RDS), also referred to as Green Data Science (GDS), which aims to address challenges related to:

  • Fairness (Data science without prejudice: How to avoid unfair conclusions even if they are true?);
  • Accuracy (Data science without guesswork: How to answer questions with a guaranteed level of accuracy?);
  • Confidentiality (Data science that ensures confidentiality: How to answer questions without revealing secrets?); and
  • Transparency (Data science that provides transparency: How to clarify answers such that they become indisputable?).

 

He will demonstrate powerful process mining techniques that can discover the real processes, detect deviations from normative process models and uncover bottlenecks and waste. Process mining can be used to reveal the dynamic behaviours of workers, customers and others.

In our dynamic world event data is extremely valuable, but can also be used in an irresponsible way. Therefore, concerns related to fairness, accuracy, confidentiality and transparency generate new and interesting challenges that require technological breakthroughs (and not just stricter laws).

Professor van der Aalst is professor of Information Systems at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) and currently a visiting researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento and a member of the Board of Governors of Tilburg University.

He is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities and the Academy of Europe. He was recently awarded with a Humboldt Professorship, Germany’s most valuable research award (five million euros), and will move to RWTH Aachen University at the beginning of 2018.

WCC 2018 will be held at Poznań in Poland from 17-21 September next year with 14 co-located events, including:

  • IIFIP TC-9 Human Choice and Computers Conference
  • IFIP TC-11 Information Security and Privacy Conference
  • IFIP TC-14 Int. Conf. Entertainment Computing
  • IFIP TC-5 Int. Conf. Computer Applications in Technology
  • IFIP DC Conf. on IT in Disaster Risk Reduction
  • IFIP WG 8.1 Conference on Practice of Enterprise Modeling
  • IFIP TC-10 International Embedded Systems Symposium
  • IFIP TC-12 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations
  • IFIP WG 13.2 International Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering
  • IFIP TC-9 HComp Working Group sessions & tracks (History of Computing)
  • Beyond Databases, Architectures and Structures (BDAS)
  • Congress of the Polish Computer Science
  • Information Security Education for a Global Digital Society (WISE)
  • Business to Science – Science to Business (B2S2B)

For more information, visit http://wcc2018.put.poznan.pl