Students, faculty and staff want Professor Bernd Finkbeiner to stay

Professor Finkbeiner (front right) with students and staff of the Saarland Informatics Campus of Saarland University

Students, faculty and staff of the Saarland Informatics Campus of Saarland University organized a torchlight procession in honor of Professor Bernd Finkbeiner, Ph.D. Despite a light drizzle, about 100 participants walked with torches and a fire extinguisher across the campus of Saarland University.

Professor Finkbeiner has been researching and teaching at Saarland University since 2002, initially as one of the first junior professors of computer science in Germany and since 2006 as a full professor. At the end of 2019, he received a professorship offer by the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich. With the torchlight procession, students and colleagues expressed their appreciation for the teaching and research of the renowned computer scientist. They want to convince him to stay at Saarbrücken. In 2006 Finkbeiner already received an offer of a professorship by the Technical University of Darmstadt, which was successfully rejected.

In 2015 he was the first professor at Saarland University to be awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant of the European Union for his work on automatic program synthesis. The research, funded with 2 million euros, aims to automatically generate computer programs so that no human programmers are involved in the creation process. The software created in this way meet the highest safety and quality standards.

This research is used in the development of so-called “embedded systems”. These are mini-computers without keyboard and mouse, which are often used in safety-critical and vital systems — such as aircraft controls and autonomous cars, or in pacemakers and insulin pumps. The analysis of the correctness, safety and perspicuousness of these embedded systems is an important part of Finkbeiner’s research.

Finkbeiner is also involved in the transregional Collaborative Research Centre „Foundations of Perspicuous Software Systems” and conducts research at CISPA – Helmholtz Centre for Information Security.

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:

800 scientists and 2000 students from 81 nations make the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) one of the leading locations for computer science in Germany and Europe. Six world-renowned research institutes, namely the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics, the Cluster for Multimodal Computing and Interaction, and the CISPA – Helmholtz Centre for Information Security, as well as three networked departments and 18 study programmes cover the entire spectrum of computer science topics.

Redaktion:
Philipp Zapf-Schramm
Kompetenzzentrum Informatik Saarland
Saarland Informatics Campus
Telefon: +49 681 302-70741
E-Mail: pzapf@mmci.uni-saarland.de