Sevilla, Spain, September 13 - 18, 2020

18th Int. Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2020)

You can access the virtual conference at the Whova Virtual Conference Platform or Download the Whova app and access with your mobile phone.

BPM 2020 is the 18th conference in a series that provides the most prestigious forum for researchers and practitioners in the field of Business Process Management.

Over the past decade, the conference has built its reputation by showcasing leading-edge research of the highest quality together with talks, tutorials and discussions by the most renown thought leaders and innovators in the field. The BPM conference series embraces the diversity and richness of the BPM field and serves as a melting pot for experts from a mix of disciplines including Computer Science, Information Systems Engineering, and Management.

Program highlights

The International Conference on Business Process Management takes place entirely online for the first time in history in the week of 13-18 September 2020. Despite the difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have put together a very exciting program. The highlights are:

The main conference takes place from Tue 15 Sept - Thu 17 Sept 2020, workshops are held on Mon 14 Sept 2020, and Sun 13 Sept opens the conference with the doctoral consortium for PhD studentes.

About the virtual conference

Moving a physical conference to the virtual world is not an easy task. It is difficult to recreate the atmosphere and the spontaneous encounters and collaborations that happen in the hallways of a physical conference. However, we have been working hard to design an exciting and interactive virtual conference. Here you can learn a bit more about some of the things we have planned:

  • Live sessions: Like in a traditional conference, we will have the keynotes, tutorials, demos and paper presentations organized in live sessions. They will have a classical session structure and will include both presentations and Q&A. We will use Zoom as the videoconferencing software.

  • Pre-recorded presentations: Besides live sessions, all papers will have a pre-recorded presentation that will be available in the conference platform before the conference. The goal is to make it easier to watch some of the presentations even if you cannot make it to the live session. Furthermore, each paper will have a specific chat so you can start the discussion with the author in an asynchronous way, opening up new types of interactions that are more difficult to achieve in a physical conference.

  • Coffee with the authors: Each of the authors will have a Zoom room available during one or two coffee breaks of the conference. The goal is to recreate the common pattern in conferences in which people do not ask questions during the session, but they approach the authors during the coffee break to learn or discuss some details of the paper. This also enable a more asynchronous approach that has been successfully used in many virtual conferences this year. Participants can see the pre-recorded presentation on the platform and approach the author during the coffee break or ask questions or comments through the chat.

  • Virtual socials and mentoring: A strong community is central to the success of the BPM conference. Our goal here is to create an opportunity for all participants to meet new people and to share knowledge, best practices, career options, and interests even in the context of a virtual conference. To enable this, inspired and encouraged by the success of similar initiatives in other conferences like ICML, we have launched a call to the community for virtual socials and mentoring sessions. Please check the call and make your proposal before the 3rd of September.

  • Mindfulness sessions: We know that it is hard to stay focused in a virtual conference, so to help you get ready and focused for a new BPM conference day, those of you who are interested, can start each day with a short mindfulness session guided by a mindfulness expert. For those who are not familiar with the term, mindfulness is the psychological process of purposely bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment without judgment, which one develops through the practice of meditation and through other training.

Finally, please stay tuned because we have a few more surprises ready that will be announced in due time.

Organization

BPM 2020, organized by the ISA group of the Universidad de Sevilla, was going to take place in Sevilla, the capital of Andalusia and the fourth-largest city in Spain, but it had to be moved online due to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.