Andreas Zeller’s approach to teaching is as innovative as his research. His drive for innovation in education is evidenced in his two online textbooks, The Fuzzing Book and The Debugging Book, which he continuously updates. In these interactive books, he combines traditional textbook elements with large chunks of executable code that students can use and experiment with. Both books also feature many instructive video sequences that allow students to watch Andreas programing and to listen to his train of thought as he does so. With these textbooks, Andreas has also transformed his own university teaching: His lectures have increasingly become an interactive forum where he discusses the questions and challenges that arise as his students work on their own software projects.
Since 2009, the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award has been presented annually to outstanding university educators who have made significant contributions to the field of software engineering, whether as teachers, mentors, authors, or researchers. About his award, Zeller says: "I am very proud to be the first German to receive this international award. Current research mustn't only take place in the laboratory. We need to bring it to the people, be they students or practitioners, and ideally in a form that allows them to experiment with the approaches themselves and even to use them for their own projects. This award motivates me to keep pursuing innovative approaches to university teaching."
About Andreas Zeller
Professor Dr. Andreas Zeller is a tenured Faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and professor of Software Engineering at Saarland University. His research focuses on automated debugging, mining software archives, specification mining, and security testing. The techniques developed in Zeller's research group are highly relevant to everyday life. For example, they are employed to secure web browsers such as Chrome, Edge or Firefox. The sustained international significance of Zeller’s research is evidenced by a total of nine Test of Time Awards. He is also one of the few researchers to have received two ERC Advanced Grants from the European Research Council. Zeller holds an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award, is an ACM Fellow and a member of the Academia Europaea.
