Wil van der Aalst, Local Organizing Chair, BPM 2014
Welcome to Eindhoven! We are proud to be able to host the BPM conference in Eindhoven for the second time, but would have preferred to do this under different circumstances. We were looking forward to coming to Haifa with BPM this year. Unfortunately, the continuous uncertainty in Southern Israel and Gaza made this impossible. Therefore, after some encouragements, we offered to organize the conference here at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The Architecture of Information Systems (AIS) group and the Data Science Center Eindhoven (DSC/e) host the conference.
The first BPM conference (BPM 2003) took place at TU/e. TU/e has a long tradition in Computer Science, for example Edsger Dijkstra worked at TU/e from 1962 until 1984. Brainport, with Eindhoven at its heart, is one of the leading high-tech regions in the world. Companies like Philips, ASML, NXP, FEI, TomTom, DAF, and VDL are located here and collaborate with TU/e. In 2011, Brainport was selected as the smartest region of the world, attracting talent from all over the globe. We hope that you will be able to taste the spirit of our region, next to enjoying the scientific program.
We would like to thank the program, workshop, and demo chairs for compiling an exciting program. We also thank the team in Haifa that had to work under extremely difficult circumstances. Pnina Soffer, Avigdor Gal, Mor Peleg, Nilly Schnapp, Tsvika Kuflik, and many others did a really great job in preparing the conference! I'm also grateful to the AIS team in Eindhoven: Alfredo Bolt, Joos Buijs, Riet van Buul, Boudewijn van Dongen, Maikel van Eck, Dirk Fahland, Shengnan Guo, Anna Kalenkova, Sander Leemans, Massimiliano de Leoni, Ine van der Ligt, Eduardo González Lopéz, Xixi Lu, Felix Mannhardt, Ronny Mans, Elham Ramezani, Hajo Reijers, Anne Rozinat, Dennis Schunselaar, Shiva Shabaninejad, Eric Verbeek, Bas van Zelst, and others. In particular, Ine van der Ligt did an amazing job! Under incredible time pressure, she had to handle an endless stream of issues, but managed to keep her spirits high. Also a special thanks to Boudewijn van Dongen for editing this wonderful booklet. I'm sure I'm forgetting to thank people in this welcome message. Forgive me: organizing a conference is definitely a Spaghetti process!!
Next to listening to presentations, please use this opportunity to socialize and exchange novel ideas. To facilitate interaction, we organized several social events. There will be a workshop dinner on Monday, a reception on Tuesday, a conference dinner on Wednesday (at the DAF museum), and the WS-FM dinner on Thursday.
On behalf of the entire AIS team, I would like to wish you a wonderful conference. I hope you will enjoy great talks, meet old friends, and make new friends. Get inspired for another year of breath-taking BPM research!
Wil van der Aalst, chair of AIS and scientific director of DSC/e