Chair of Software Engineering

Bertrand Meyer

 General

Formerly Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich, head of the Chair of Software Engineering. This page remains my main personal page.
Chief Technology Officer, Eiffel Software.
Provost and Professor of Software Engineering at Schaffhausen Institute of Technology; associated positions at Politecnico di Milano and University of Toulouse. Blogger on software engineering & other topics. Director of annual LASER software engineering summer school, since 2004, Elba Island, Italy, see the school's page (the school will restart in 2021).

Latest book: Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly (Amazon page), a presentation and unabashed critique of agile methods. Some previous books: Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well, Using Objects & Contracts (derived from the introductory programming course at ETH, we have also produced several MOOCs on its basis, in particular one for EdX ;Object-Oriented Software Construction second edition.

Maintainer of gallery of computer scientists.


 

 Research

See the chair's research pages, and personal annotated list of publications: by date or by kind.

Our work covers most areas of software engineering, with Eiffel and Design by Contract as the unifying thread. Main topics:

    +Concurrent programming: building concurrent applications simply & safely through the SCOOP extension to Eiffel. Our concurrency research is supported by an Advanced Investigator Grant of the ERC (2.5 M Euros, 2012-2017).

    + Program verification:on the basis of Eiffel's Design by Contract and the EiffelStudio IDE, buiding an environment allowing "Verification As a Matter Of Course".

    + Tool & method support for distributed development (CloudStudio project).

    + Programming education: novel pedagogical approaches.

    + Languages & methodology: new programming language constructs, software process, agile methods.

    + Empirical software engineering.

    + O-O persistence.

    + Software engineering for robotics.

PhD theses supervised:24 completed since 2004.

 

 Teaching

The ETH introductory programming course, taught in English 2003-2009, in German 2010-2015, and at Innopolis University 2015-2018, uses an inverted curriculum approach supported by the Touch of Class textbook and a MOOC (open online version).

The course project in the Distributed Software Engineering Laboratory brings together students from ETH and universities around the world, who build a system collaboratively. We welcome universities interested in joining.

Multidisciplinary Robotics Programming Laboratory, open to CS, EE & ME students.

Other graduate & undergraduate courses: Software Verification; Concepts of Concurrent Computation; programming language courses (Eiffel in Depth, Java & C# in Depth); Software Architecture; Open-Source EiffelStudio Laboratory; independent-research courses. See course page.

 

 Personal

Education:École Polytechnique, Paris; Stanford (MS in CS); ENST Paris; DEA Univ. P & M Curie (Paris VI); MA in Russian from Sorbonne (Paris IV); Dr. Sc. from Univ. of Nancy.

CV: Électricité de France 1974-1983; Univ. of California Santa Barbara 1983-1985; Eiffel Software, Santa Barbara since 1985 (president until 2001, then CTO); ETH Zurich since Oct. 2001 (department chair 2004-2006).

Other positions: CEO of Société des Outils du Logiciel 1986-1990; adjunct professor, Monash Univ., Melbourne 1998-2003; chairman of TOOLS conferences 1988-2012. (After 50 conferences we declared The Triumph of Objects and closed the series — until asked to start it again as TOOLS 50+1 at Innopolis, and further sessions forthcoming). Professor (adjunct) & head of Software Engineering Laboratory at ITMO University, Saint Petersburg, 2011-2014 and Innopolis University, Kazan, 2014-2019.

Awards:honorary doctorates from University of York (UK) and ITMO (Russia);Jolt Award (for Object-Oriented Software Construction); Dahl-Nygaard prize;ACM Software System Award; ACM Fellow; IEEE Harlan D. Mills Award; SIGSOFT Outstanding (software engineering) Educator Award; IFIP Silver Core award; ERC Advanced Investigator Grant.
Trivia:Citeseer lists Object-Oriented Software Construction as the 65th most cited publication in computer science;Reusability: The Case for Object-Oriented Design appears in the list of the most influential papers published by IEEE Software in 25 years.

Memberships: Académie des Technologies, Academia Europaea, IFIP WG2.3,ACM Europe Council, IEEE Mills prize (committee chair since 2014), ACM Fellows Committee.Earlier: IFIP TC2 (Switzerland representative 2004-2011, committee chair 2009-2011); board of IMAG, Grenoble 2005-2008; scientific board of U. Paris VI (P & M Curie) 2008-2012; IEEE 60th Anniversary Award committee; ACM nominating committee 2007-2008. Played important role in creation of: Colloque de Génie Logiciel (French software engineering conference); European Software Engineering Conference (first steering committee chair 1987-1990, general chair of ESEC/FSE 2013); TSI (Technology and Science of Informatics, first editor-in-chief); Journal of Object Technology (founding publisher 2002-2010, currently on steering board); Informatics Europe (first president 2006-2011, board member 2006-2013, chair of nominating committee 2014-2016).
 

 Contact

Mailing address

Prof. Dr. Bertrand Meyer
Chair of Software EngineeringCAB E88CH-8092 ETH-Zentrum
Zürich, Switzerland		 

Physical address

CAB-Gebäude, Raum E88
Universitaetstrasse 6
Zürich (Kreis 6)		 

Other

Phone: +41/44-632-0410
Fax: +41/44-632-1435
Email: click here
 

Secretary

Claudia Günthart
CAB H31.1
Phone +41/44-632-8346		 
Winter views from our floor (click for full views):
City and lake, dawnCity and ÜtlibergGray momentSunset on Ütliberg
DawnCity & ÜtlibergGray momentSunset on Ütliberg

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