Computer science professor and CISPA researcher Andreas Zeller has now become the first German to receive an ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award. Zeller receives the award for “significant contributions and important innovations in automated software engineering education.” Andreas Zeller’s research on software security topics is highly influential internationally.
Andreas Zeller’s teaching approaches are as innovative as his research. His innovative drive is evident in his teaching, for example, in his textbooks The Fuzzing Book and The Debugging Book, which he continually updates. In both interactive online books, he combines traditional textbook content with large pieces of executable code that students can use and experiment with. Both books also contain numerous video sequences in which they can watch Zeller programming and follow his train of thought. With these textbooks, Zeller has also transformed his own university teaching: His lectures have increasingly become an interactive forum, where he discusses all the questions and challenges that arise while his students work on their own software projects.
The ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award has been presented annually since 2009 to outstanding university educators who have made a significant contribution to the field of software development, whether as teachers, mentors, authors, or researchers. Andreas Zeller says of his award: “I am very proud to be the first German to receive this international prize. Current research cannot only take place in the laboratory. We must also bring it to people, be they students or practitioners, and ideally in a form where they can experiment with the approaches themselves and even use them for their own projects. This award motivates me to continue pursuing innovative approaches to university teaching.” The award ceremony took place as part of the ICSE – IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, which will be held in Ottawa from April 27 to May 3.
About Andreas Zeller
Prof. Dr. Andreas Zeller is a faculty member at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and a professor of software engineering at Saarland University. His research focuses on automated debugging, software archive mining, specification development, and security testing. The techniques developed in Zeller’s research group are of great everyday relevance. They are used, for example, to secure web browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. The long-term international impact of his research is demonstrated by a total of nine Test of Time Awards. Zeller is one of the few researchers to have received two ERC Advanced Grants from the European Research Council. He is an ACM Fellow, the recipient of an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award, and a member of the Academia Europaea.
Press release of the University of Saarland: uni-saarland.de/aktuell/acm-sigsoft-influential-educator-award-fuer-andreas-zeller-37199.html
