Manfred Nagl Prize 2025: Double award for scientific excellence and entrepreneurial spirit

DSA and the DSA Schäfer-Schulz Foundation once again presented the Manfred Nagl Award at the graduation ceremony of the Computer Science Department at RWTH Aachen University. This year's award went to Dr Daniel Schuster for his dissertation “Incremental Process Discovery.”

The winning work addresses the incremental, interactive discovery of business processes using so-called process trees. Its focus is on the Cortado tool, which provides innovative methods for modelling, analysing, and visualizing processes – including new approaches to selecting, displaying, and incrementally composing process flows. The dissertation was written at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT and also laid the foundation for the founding of a start-up company.

The Manfred Nagl Award honours outstanding scientific achievements and promotes their transfer into practice. The prize money is divided into two parts: one for scientific achievement and, upon evidence of founding, one for the transition to entrepreneurial implementation. This year, both requirements had already been met. The start-up company P. I. S., founded by Dr Schuster, develops solutions for data-driven process analysis and optimization using advanced AI, data analysis, and process mining technologies. Dr Schuster thus embodies the bridge between research and practical application in the best possible way and received the award for both his scientific work and for founding a company.

We congratulate him on his double award and wish Dr Schuster continued success in implementing his ideas in research and entrepreneurship.