The Software Engineering Group, also called Descartes Group, is headed by Prof. Dr. Samuel Kounev and focuses on a range of topics related to the engineering of software for building dependable, efficient, and resilient distributed systems, including cloud-based systems, cyber-physical systems, and scientific computing applications. Our research is inspired by the vision of Self-Aware Computing Systems designed with built-in model learning and reasoning capabilities enabling autonomic and proactive decision making at run-time.
Our research is aimed at novel methods, techniques and tools for the engineering of dependable and efficient computer-based systems, including classical software systems and cyber-physical systems.
Student Theses and Jobs
Current topics for student research projects can be found here and for student research jobs here.
Secure Software Systems is a research group headed by Prof. Dr. Alexandra Dmitrienko. It focuses on a wide range of topics related to the security and privacy of computing platforms and networks, ranging from secure software engineering to security and privacy of mobile, cyber-physical, IoT and decentralized systems. Our research aims to address new security and privacy-related challenges emerging due to ubiquitous digitization, resulting in increasing data collection and fast growing complexity and heterogeneity of systems, as well as technological shifts from centralized to more robust and resilient decentralized solutions.
The paper "Quantifying Data Leakage in Failure Prediction Tasks" by D. Grillmeyer, M. Hadry, V. Lesch, V. Borst, R. Leppich, A. Bauer, and S. Kounev has received the Best Artifact Paper Award at ICPE 2025.
Last week, our team had the privilege of hosting the kick-off meeting for our new DFG-funded research project Serverless Scientific Computing and Engineering for Earth Observation and Sustainability Research (SOS) at the stunning Umweltforschungsstation Schneefernerhaus.