The third edition of the International Conference on Process Mining 2021 is starting in less than a month in the beautiful city of Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

The road to this conference is best described by the Dutch verb ‘zwabberen’, for which no real translation to English exists. ‘Zwabberen’ is a word used to describe the typical sway of people who have had a few too many drinks, but during the past year it is more commonly used to describe the way the Dutch government is handling the Covid-19 crisis. When we started the organization of ICPM2021, we expected that November 2021 would be the moment where people from all over the world could meet in person again. Unfortunately, because of ‘zwabberen’ we had to adapt our plans a few times and, at the time of writing, the government has announced that the Covid-19 measures will again change around November 1.

Against this background, the various chairs have been able to put together a great program. I’m very thankful for all the efforts put in by the organizing committee, but also the broader process mining community. Your efforts to submit papers, demo’s and case studies has led to a packed program from Sunday to Thursday. While the sheer volume of high-quality work posed some scheduling challenges, it shows that our community is an ever growing one with a very positive attitude.

One of the novelties for ICPM this year is the organization of sessions in short presentations and panel discussions. As process mining is a relatively focused research area, we felt that the audience, both online and live, would benefit from shorter talks with engaged discussions between the audience and experts. As an upside, there’s more room for catching up over coffee as many of us haven’t seen each other live in a while.

The commitment of our sponsors also shows the value they attribute to process mining research and the close relation between practitioners, scientists and vendors. The contributions of our Platinum sponsors, EY, ABBYY and Celonis, Gold sponsors Minit, Software AG, Tibco and Signavio and all the other sponsors are highly appreciated. Their continued involvement with ICPM shows the relevance of our research discipline in practice.

A special thanks to the local organizing committee, Ine, Inge and Lucienne. Without them, it would have been impossible to keep track of the e-mails, the sponsor requests and all other matters. They too have shown great flexibility in handling the constant changes of the environment. If we would be able to capture a log of their work, we would probably see constant concept drift in otherwise smoothly organized processes.

Fortunately, at the time of writing this message, travel bans have been lifted for most of the world and the TU/e campus is exempt from almost all Covid-19 measures. People are again welcomed into The Netherlands without mandatory quarantines and you will hardly notice that there is a global health crisis when walking around our campus. I am very grateful for the commitment of many of you to travel to Eindhoven and I hope that you enjoy the conference, the social program and possibly the city. Our city offers plenty of opportunities for ‘zwabberen’ in the literal sense and especially the GLOW festival is highly recommended for those of you staying a bit longer in Eindhoven.

Interested in participating in the 3rd International Conference on Process Mining? Register via the dedicated page. For further information on the conference, please visit icpmconference.org/2021/ or contact info@icpmconference.org.