Programme Coordinators

Esteban Zimányi is a full professor and the director of the Department of Computer & Decision Engineering (CoDE) at ULB. He started his studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Centro América, Costa Rica. He received a B.Sc. (1988) and a doctorate (1992) in computer science from the Faculty of Sciences at the ULB. During 1997, he was a visiting researcher at the Database Laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. He co-authored and co-edited 16 books, 18 book chapters, 19 articles in international journals, and 82 papers in international conferences. He is coordinator of the BDMA and IT4BI-DC Erasmus Mundus programmes. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on Data Semantics published by Springer. His current research interests include data warehouses, spatio-temporal databases, geographic information systems, and semantic web.

Dimitris Sacharidis is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer & Decision Engineering (CoDE) at ULB. Prior to that he was an assistant professor at the Technical University of Vienna, and a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellow at the “Athena” Research Center and at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He finished his PhD and undergraduate studies on Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, while in between he obtained an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He has served as a PC member and has been involved in the organization of top data science related conferences, and has acted as a reviewer and editorial member of associated journals. His research interests include databases, data mining, and recommender systems.

Oscar Romero has an MSc and a PhD in computing from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Currently, he is a tenure-track 1 lecturer at the Barcelona School of Informatics. He is also a member of the MPI research group at the same university, specialized in software engineering, databases and information systems. His research interests are data warehousing, OLAP tools, multidimensional modeling, the semantic web and ontologies. He is the author of articles and papers presented and published in national and international conferences and journals on these subjects.

Boudewijn van Dongen is an Associate Professor and chair of the Analytics for Information Systems group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The research group distinguishes itself in the Information Systems discipline by its fundamental focus on modeling, understanding, analyzing, and improving processes. Boudewijn’s research focuses on conformance checking: anything where observed behavior needs to be related to previously modeled behavior. Conformance checking is embedded in the larger contexts of Business Process Management and Process Mining. Boudewijn aims to develop techniques and tools to analyze databases and logs of large-scale information systems for the purpose of detecting, isolating, diagnosing and predicting misconformance in the business processes supported by these systems. The notion of alignments play a seminal role in conformance checking and the AIS group is world-leading in the definition of alignments for various types of observed behavior and for various modelling languages. Next to the theoretical foundations, he also develops the tools to actually measure conformance. These tools are typically implemented in Java in the open-source framework ProM.

Nacéra Seghouani Bennacer is a full Professor at Computer Science Department of CentraleSupélec, member of LahDAK team of LRI laboratory (Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique). She is the coordinator of Decision Support and Business Intelligence Master International track program of Paris-Saclay University. Her research topics are related to information extraction from massive, real time, ambiguous, multilingual text data and graph data for different purposes such as building user profiles from social networks, discovering user interests for recommandation systems, analyzing hidden dimensions revealing some personality traits of users, with a strong focus on how to represent, store, integrate, evolve and query such massive data using flexible and NoSQL Datastores and the underlying technologies.

Massimiliano is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Padua, Italy. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at SAPIENZA – University of Rome on a thesis on Business Process Flexibility and Adaptation. Previously he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology. His teaching experiences are in the area of Database, Distributed Systems, Business Process Intelligence, Process Mining, and Business Information Systems. He was Demo Chair and Industry chair at the Business Process Management conference in 2018 and 2021, respectively, He also acted as a General Chair of the International Conference in Process Mining for 2020 (ICPM 2020). His research is in the Data-Science area with special emphasis on Business Process Management and Analytics. To this date, his h index is 35.