Prof. Dr. Bernhard Steffen

Bernhard Steffen
Chairholder of Programming Systems at TU Dortmund University.

Department: Computer Science
Office: Room 102 (Otto-Hahn-Str. 14)
Address: TU Dortmund, 44221 Dortmund, Germany
Phone: +49 (231) 755-5800
Email: bernhard.steffen@tu-dortmund.de
ORCiD: 0000-0001-9619-1558

Google
Scholar
dblp
TU
Dortmund
Wikipedia

Research 🔗

Currently, my research focuses on the interplay of methods and tools capturing various meta-levels:

  1. At the Language Workbench-level, the design of Domain-specific languages for supporting low code development as well as languages that are designed for, e.g., verifiability, testability, learnability, explainability. The point here is to guarantee properties via meta-level reasoning.

  2. At the IDE-level, property-preserving transformation approaches to support, e.g., correctness by construction, where the full semantics needs to be preserved, systematic (verification) Benchmark generation, where the satisfaction of, e.g., pre/post conditions or LTL formulas is maintained, or aspect- specific view generation for diagnosis. The latter may even provide so-called model explanations or outcome explanations for computational structures like Random Forests.

  3. At runtime, behaviour/observation-based inference of models and computational structures comprising automata learning, but also other machine learning techniques providing, e.g., Random forests and Neutral Networks. This inference may be active, i.e., explicitly querying the artefact to be analysed, as typical for automata learning, or passive, relying an provided data sets, as typical, e.g., in most Neural Network scenarios.

Teaching 🔗

I have taught Formal Methods in System Design (and related subjects) for 30 years as a professor. I introduced game-based learning for teaching strategy planning using Connect 4 and wrote an introductory book Foundations of Advanced Informatics and the German version Grundlagen der höheren Informatik.

Positions 🔗

Education 🔗

Scientific Meetings, Journals & Community Activities 🔗

I have served on more than 150 Program Committees and over 30 times as chair, on numerous Steering Committees and in Editorial Boards.

I am (co-)founder of the

I am an editorial board member of Springer’s Innovations in Software and Systems Engineering: A NASA Journal, and have been a member of the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Kluwer’s / Springer’s Formal Methods in System Design, and Springer’s Software-Concepts and Tools.

I am the longest serving editor of the LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), the leading proceedings series in computer science, for the sub-libraries Theoretical Computer Science, Programming Techniques and Software Engineering and Advanced Research in Computing and Software Science, and I am member of the GI, the ACM and EASST.

Supervision of Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows 🔗

I (co-)supervise(d) over 40 PhD students of which 30 already completed their PhD studies successfully. 13 became associate/full professors:

Fellowships and Awards 🔗

Institutional Responsibilities 🔗