My name is Andrea Delgado. I am an Associate Professor (Grade 4) at the Instituto de Computación (Computer Science Institute, InCo) in the Facultad de Ingeniería (Faculty of Engineering, FING) at the Universidad de la República (University of the Republic, UdelaR) in Montevideo, Uruguay. I am the chair of the COAL research group, a small but highly motivated group that has grown over the past five years with young assistants, PhD and Master’s students, and collaborators from national, Latin American, and international universities. UdelaR is the first and largest public university in Uruguay, with more than 150,000 students enrolled in 2022, across its sixteen faculties and schools, covering all areas and careers, highly recognized in the country and Latin America. I genuinely enjoy being part of a university that is fully aware of its context and collaborates as much as possible with other institutions, industry, and society. InCo’s waterfront location is a bonus, being a must-see of the day to watch the sunset over the water. During my first years at the university, I also worked as a software professional at the Montevideo Municipality in the metropolitan transport system (STM), providing me with a practical view of development and research application.

During my undergraduate degree in UdelaR, and my master’s degree in the PEDECIBA postgraduate academic program from UdelaR, I got mainly involved in software engineering topics such as software methodologies and processes, service design, model-driven development, and measurement. Thereafter, I moved to Ciudad Real (Spain) in 2008 with a European scholarship, changing my beloved sea for the Quixote lands, to pursue my PhD in the Alarcos research group at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). There, I began working on topics related to Business Process Management (BPM), with a special focus on business process systems modeling with services and model-driven development, execution measurement, and process improvement. I met Barbara Weber at the International Summer School on Business Process Management (BP&SE), organized by Alarcos in July 2008, and we immediately connected, also exchanging insights on BPM topics and collaboration opportunities. Later, I had the opportunity to visit her in Innsbruck for a research stay, where we worked on measuring business process execution and learned a lot under her guidance. I continue to maintain a fruitful collaboration with both her and the Alarcos group, having worked in recent years on BPMN 2.0 business process families and variability with a model-driven approach.

When I returned to Uruguay in 2012, I began organizing the BPMuy event to promote these topics in Uruguay among professionals from public organizations and the software industry, as well as among teachers and graduate and postgraduate students. I invited several researchers from the BPM and process mining community to collaborate with us and teach graduate and professional training courses on BPM and process mining topics, alongside my semester-long BPM course. Over the last few years, Barbara Weber, Hajo Reijers, Marlon Dumas, Claudio di Ciccio, Henrik Leopold, Jorge Munoz-Gama, Marcos Sepúlveda, and Félix García have visited us for the BPMuy event and, more recently, for the Latin American schools we organized on process mining, process families and variability, and collaborative processes-topics I have been researching for the past eight years. Recently, I have also included object-centric event logs and business processes, process mining sustainability, evaluating the energy consumption of process mining discovery algorithms, and the application of generative AI and machine learning to improve process modeling and process mining. The focus of my work on BPM and process mining has been mostly from the engineering perspective, towards methodologies, techniques, and tools for building systems to support organizations and their operation and improvement, and collaborating with different organizations.

Regarding process mining, I am particularly interested in collaborative processes, proposing and leading several research projects focused on these types of processes. Like distributed systems, they pose various challenges for their modeling, execution, and analysis using process mining techniques. I focus on distributed processes where different parts of the process run in different organizations, with heterogeneous infrastructures, system support, and data models (including relational and NoSQL approaches). In these cases, the process mining sources are heterogeneous, and various challenges arise for the collection and building of collaborative event logs, as well as for the discovery of collaborative business process models. Since the event logs of each participant are distributed and recorded within each organization, challenges such as event correlation (i.e., assigning events to collaborative process instances), privacy-related data management, and data sharing restrictions arise, among others.

I have worked on such challenges with my team in a research project focused on collaborative processes, with an approach to discover BPMN 2.0 collaborative processes based on an extended XES event log with information enhancements, including the following: for each event, the corresponding event type is given (e.g., messages, activities, services) and the corresponding participant performing the event is indicated; for messages, also the participants who sent or received the message are provided; and for choreographies, only the sender and the receiver of the message are included. While there are a few approaches for collaborative process discovery in BPMN 2.0 (like the work by Lorenzo Rossi’s group, which has different premises for messages), the discovery of choreographies in BPMN 2.0 is yet to be analyzed, with our approach being the first to include the discovery of such choreography models. I think this is very helpful for cooperating parties to confirm the defined collaboration. Specifically, we work with e-Government scenarios in partnership with the National Agency for Digital Services (AGESIC) of Uruguay, whose processes are predominantly collaborative. In this context, I have also worked on regulatory compliance for collaborative processes with a compliance model of generic rules and measures that can be instantiated with specific values to the process in question and verified post-mortem by processing event log data. Recently, I have also been interested in predictive monitoring of collaborative processes, with a particular emphasis on predicting participants involved or messages exchanged (publication in progress). Since ICPM 2023, I have been involved in the International Workshop on Collaborative Mining for Distributed Systems (COMINDS), invited by Lorenzo Rossi.

I also contributed to the definition of a methodology and metamodel that considers the integration of process and organizational data, in which on the one hand, the process and organizational models (i.e., the static elements of the process definition) are defined, and on the other hand, the process and organizational execution elements (i.e., cases and instances of entities or objects). We extended the XES event log format to include a list of entities with their corresponding attributes in events where data objects were also manipulated (i.e., insert or update in the organizational database), as well as the list of related variables manipulated in the event to correlate them with the objects. The object-centric approach was being discussed in the community in the working group for the definition of the Object-Centric Event Data (OCED) standard, which I had the opportunity to join. It was a great experience meeting and exchanging with people from the community and contributing to the OCED standard proposal with a metamodel and the implementation of the OpenOCED library provided in Python and Java. I was also interested in detecting and addressing data quality issues on the integrated data, as there is little work on guidelines and measures, except for traditional event logs. I worked with colleagues on a specific data quality model for assessing the quality of integrated process and organizational data, which defines specific dimensions, factors, and metrics to be applied.

I cooperated with several public organizations from different domains, such as telecommunications, water, banking, and e-Government, as well as with software companies. Our collaborations mostly revolved around BPM topics, such as evaluating BPMS selected characteristics, or modeling and executing business processes. We applied process mining in different projects. In a project about e-Government processes, we worked with AGESIC to discover selected processes. Our stakeholders were interested in analyzing data, identifying improvement opportunities, and detecting problems from their execution data. We also worked on another project to answer several municipalities’ questions about urban mobility, using open data from the metropolitan transport system (STM) published in Uruguay’s open data catalog. We contributed QGIS scripts to integrate performance models into Montevideo city maps to visually detect zones in the city where bus lines presented bottlenecks and performance issues, mapping events to stops and transitions between stops to actual trips. We aimed to allow experts on urban mobility to understand better the process over the city map, a visualization ground they are acquainted with. You can find more information about this work in the Disco café, in which we participated last year.

Although the discipline has matured in recent years, and several tools now exist to support most of the techniques and analyses that practitioners apply in organizations, I believe there is significant room for improvement to impact how organizations think about, understand, analyze, and improve their operational processes. It is necessary to focus on the methodological side of applying process mining, as well as on data quality issues and root cause analysis for improvement. Furthermore, the interconnection with process automation in a continuous cycle of data analysis and systems improvement, the identification and use of agents, the integration of generative AI and prompt engineering for various process mining tasks and within automation systems, as well as machine learning, including aspects such as interpretability and explainability, are key challenging topics that will continue growing for research and development of proposals and solutions for the coming years.

Related to this, the sustainability dimension of process execution and process mining (such as algorithms, energy consumption, and other sources of sustainability issues in business processes) should also be prioritized in process analysis and improvement. Regarding event logs, the object-centric paradigm will also facilitate a more comprehensive analysis of processes from the perspective of the data involved. However, more techniques need to be developed to work with this approach, as well as supporting tools and more event logs with real data. Finally, given that collaborative processes have gained relevance in recent years, adding complexity to event logs and posing interesting problems for research, techniques are needed to address these types of challenges, with the availability of collaborative logs being an issue. I will keep working on this topic and hope to continue contributing to collaborative process mining (including a collaborative process mining manifesto we are working on following the COMINDS workshop), sustainability, and process automation.

Last but not least, I am delighted and honored to welcome you to Montevideo, Uruguay, for this year’s edition of the International Conference on Process Mining, ICPM 2025. For the first time, it will take place in Latin America! I can count on the support of a great organizing committee and local team. I am very grateful to all of them, particularly to Hajo Reijers, Jorge Munoz-Gama, and Boudewijn van Dongen, who supported us from the beginning. Lately, attending ICPM 2023 in Rome and ICPM 2024 in Copenhagen was truly inspiring and motivating. We are also preparing a great ICPM 2025 with inspiring activities and keynotes on highly relevant topics, of which I can mention the one by Claudia Bauzer Medeiros of UNICAMP (Brazil) on open science. We have several workshops that delve into specific and very relevant topics, as well as demos, doctoral consortium, the best PhD dissertation award, and the Process Discovery Contest. Registration is already open, and a preliminary program has been published, as well as information on the venue, hotels, and tourism in Montevideo and Uruguay. I invite you to follow the posts on the LinkedIn group and event, on Twitter, and consult the conference website to stay up to date with ICPM 2025.

Feel free to follow and reach me on LinkedIn and Twitter, or contact me at the address on my institutional website.