On November 11, 2010 Chen Li successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled

”Mining Process Model Variants: Challenges, Techniques, Examples”

at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. The DBIS team is pleased to congratulate Chen on his successful defense and wishes him all the best for the future. Chen Li’s PhD thesis was endorsed the ”cum laude” honour. In the Netherlands, the “cum laude” award typically marks exceptional achievements and is extremely hard to attain (less than 5-10 % of all submitted PhD theses receive it depending on the university).

In his thesis, Chen Li deals with two of the most challenging topics in the field of business process management – process flexibility and process mining. Chen’s work substantially advanced the scientific knowledge in these two areas. In particular, he makes an outstanding scientific contribution to both fields by developing a family of algorithms that allow for learning from past process model changes; i.e., Chen extended process mining in a previously unexplored area and enables new applications for flexible processes. In this context he also dealt with some of the hard problems in the field (e.g., avoidance of Spaghetti-like mining results and handling of missing change logs). Chen’s work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in the context of the MinAdept project.

Chen’s Ph.D. adviser (promotor) was Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert (University of Ulm). Prof. Dr. Roel J. Wieringa (University of Twente) acted as co-adviser and Dr. Andreas Wombacher (University of Twente) as assistant adviser. Manfred Reichert started his supervision of Chen at the University of Twente in 2007, and continued it after he moved to the University of Ulm. The successful PhD defense demonstrates the fruitful collaboration going on between the DBIS Institute and the Information Systems Group from the University of Twente.

Members of the PhD committee:

Chairman and Secretary
Prof.dr.ir. J. van Amerongen, University of Twente, The Netherlands

PhD advisors
Prof. Dr. M. Reichert University of Ulm, Germany
Prof. Dr. R. J. Wieringa University of Twente, The Netherlands

Assistant advisor
Dr. A. Wombacher University of Twente, The Netherlands

Members
Prof. Dr. Ir. W. M. P. van der Aalst Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Prof. Dr. P. M. G. Apers University of Twente, The Netherlands
Prof. Dr. Ir. J. P. Katoen University of Twente, the Netherlands
Prof. Dr. M. Weske University of Potsdam, Germany
Prof. Dr. D. R. Ferreira Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

PhD Committee (from left to right): P.M.G. Apers, W.M.P. van der Aalst, A. Wombacher, J. van Amerongen, R. Wieringa, C. Li, J.P. Katoen, Chen‘s wife, M. Weske, M. Reichert, D.R. Ferreira