The first Summer School on Process Mining, organized by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining, took place in the first week of July 2022. Over 130 participants and 20 speakers from all over the world gathered in Aachen. Most of the participants were PhD students specializing in the topic. However, also postdocs, professors, and practitioners participated in this unique event. The course was given by the leading experts in the field, covering the different subdisciplines of process mining (e.g., process discovery, conformance checking, and predictive analytics). Also, applications in healthcare, auditing, and robotic process automation were covered extensively in the lectures. Visit www.process-mining-summer-school.org for the program and information about the lecturers. The full-week summer school also included social events such as a hike to the Drieländereck, i.e., the highest point of the Netherlands (but shared with Germany and Belgium).

The summer school was organized by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and the Process and Data Science (PADS) group at RWTH Aachen University. The summer school was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Celonis, the RWTH Center of Artificial Intelligence, and the Cluster of Excellence Internet of Production. The location of the summer school was the Super C building, one of the most representative buildings of RWTH Aachen University, with beautiful views over the historic old town center with its Cathedral (the first UNESCO World Heritage site in Germany).

It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime event and a landmark in the development of process mining. The summer school provided a unique opportunity for the participants to meet many of the pioneers that shaped the field personally. If you missed the summer school, take a look at the open-access Process Mining Handbook published by Springer (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08848-3). The recordings of the lectures will also be made available later this year (via the school website).

There were many more applications than the number of participants we could accommodate, so we had to decline many applications. This shows the interest in the topic and the need for such a summer school. Therefore, the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining plans to organize this at a lower frequency (e.g., every 2-4 years). If you cannot wait, start reading the handbook and watching the lectures.