Chair of Software Engineering

Bertrand Meyer

 General

Professor of Software Engineering (emeritus), ETH Zurich: Chair of Software Engineering.
Chief Technology Officer, Eiffel Software.
Professor at Politecnico di Milano and Innopolis University (head of software engineering lab). Blogger on software engineering & other topics. Director of annual LASER software engineering summer school, since 2004 (next session: the software for blockchains, bitcoin and distributed trust systems, Elba Island, Italy, 2-10 June 2018, see the school's web page).

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.

The Chair of Software Engineering is a fantastic team with 23 PhD theses completed since 2004.

 

 Teaching

The ETH introductory programming course, taught in English 2003-2009, in German 2010-2015, uses an inverted curriculum approach supported by the Touch of Class textbook and a 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). Professor (adjunct) & head of Software Engineering Laboratory at ITMO, Saint Petersburg, 2011-2014.

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 (publisher 2002-2010); Informatics Europe (first president 2006-2011, board member 2006-2013, currently chair of nominating committee).

 

 Contact

Mailing address

Prof. Dr. Bertrand Meyer
Chair of Software Engineering CAB E88 CH-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, dawn City and Ütliberg Gray moment Sunset on Ütliberg
Dawn City & Ütliberg Gray moment Sunset on Ütliberg

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