Dr.  Sven Apel

Prof. Dr. Sven Apel holds the Chair of Software Engineering at Saarland University & Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany. Prof. Apel received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from the University of Magdeburg. His research interests include the development and evaluation of methods, tools, and theories for the construction and analysis of efficient, reliable, maintainable, and configurable software systems. In this endeavor, he pays special attention to the human factor and interdisciplinary research questions. He is the author or co-author of over two hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications. He was PC co-chair of the 31st International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) and the 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). In 2022, he received an ERC Advanced Grant. His work has been funded further by the esteemed Emmy Noether Program and the Heisenberg Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The Association for Computing Machinery has named him an ACM Fellow in 2025 "for developing theories and methods that empower humans to comprehend, construct, and optimize software systems". His work has received three Most Influential Paper Awards (SPLC'18, ICPC'22, GPCE'23), three Best Paper Awards (SPLC'11, Modularity'15, AOM'18), two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards (ICSE'15, ICSE'21), as well as awards by the Ernst Denert Foundation and the Karin Witte Foundation.

• AI4SE: Adventures in the Promised Land
  AI is about to revolutionize how we develop software. In particular, large language models have shown great promise in assisting programmers in writing and reasoning about source...
• Brains on Code: Towards a Neuroscientific Foundation of Program Comprehension
  Research on program comprehension has a fundamental limitation: program comprehension is a cognitive process that cannot be directly observed, which leaves considerable room for misinterpretation,...
• Software Performance Modelling in Spacetime
  Almost any practical software system today is configurable. A configurable software system provides a set of configuration options to adjust and optimize its functional and non-functional...