When your children were small, how did you explain to them what your work is about?
I told them something like: “Look, I have this machine here and I teach it what it should do. Sometimes, it doesn’t do what it should and then I build new machines that help to fix this machine.”
That is a lovely explanation.
“I have a computer and it does what I want” [rhymes in German]. That’s from a children’s book by Janosch.
The first lie children are told.
Yes. I always added: “And sometimes it doesn’t do what I want and then I build a second computer that fixes the first one. And then I build a third computer…”
For how long does this chain have to go on until things finally work properly?
That thought occurred to my children too. They had so much fun imagining all the computers that were fixing each other. They let that chain go on and on.
Where did it end?
With me. I fixed the fourth computer (laughs).
Not only are you a very prolific scientist, you are also a very active communicator. You use Twitter, run your own blog, and as a professor at Saarland University, you reach hundreds of Computer Science students each semester.
Yes, that's my hobbyhorse. Looking for ways to achieve the broadest and greatest possible impact matters to me. With every new research topic I turn to, I immediately start to think about ways of presenting the work I've done in as concise a form as possible.
Given the complexity of your research, I would imagine that it can be very difficult at times to stay focused on your main goals and the actual problems that need to be solved.
That’s right. You have to keep your ultimate goal in mind. At the end of the day, you don't want to be sitting in some niche, making your progress there, and then having to provide a whole lot of context every single time you’re asked to explain what you’re doing. That could be a long, long story. Instead, I try to do things that are comprehensible independent of specific contexts. This also means that I can maximize the impact of my research.
Does this work for every research topic?
No, it doesn't always work. But my scientific training, my scientific approach, is to always try to find the easiest access. That also means that you have to identify what is essential. I want to be able to express matters in a few words and, let's say, in a headline-like manner. I have great fun coming up with shorter titles than other researchers in academic publications.
Are your titles always to the point or at times a little more creative?
I have done both. My titles are either simple and concise, making a very general claim, or they tell a story. One of my most important papers, for example, is called „Yesterday my program worked. Today it does not. Why?“. It got a lot of attention at the conference back then, but my supervisor chided me for it. He thought the title was too journalistic. But this is where the goals of journalism meet those of science – in science communication.
How does it benefit you when you communicate your research results not only to the research community but also to the general public?
Honestly? Fame and glory. If I can express the things I do in a few short sentences, or in only one sentence even, and especially if those things didn’t exist before, then people will associate them with my name. This is marketing, in a way. And as researchers, we also fulfill a role in society. That’s why it matters to me, explaining to society at large what my work is about. I have to do this in a way that allows the public and politicians to understand why this research is so super cool. I could of course explain my work in such a convoluted way that nobody would understand it. Then everybody would say: “Oh, Andreas is the bee’s knees, he does things nobody else can get their head around.” But then of course I would have to argue why I am doing it and to what avail. What good is it if only ten people in the world can understand it? All the others must hope that somebody sometime will be able to explain to them why it is important. I choose to go a different way. I want to reach out to the cab driver too. And if they like it, then maybe they will tell other people about it.
I would like to talk about two examples of successful science communication: Your "Fuzzing Book" and its successor "Debugging Book". How did you come up with the idea of presenting your knowledge in this fashion? That looks like a lot of work.
I'm killing several birds with one stone. First and foremost, these books are learning materials, they are interactive, digital textbooks. I really wanted to make the effort to get them right. Also, they were created in times of Covid, so it was important that they could be accessed remotely. Then I recorded videos to go with them so that everything came together in one place. This comes in handy today. I can lean back a little in my teaching and point people to the books. This way, we can use the lectures sometimes to discuss other topics. I enjoy that. I believe that multimedia books like these are the future of teaching. They are practical, available online and always up to date if they are properly maintained.
The books are available to everybody, not only to students. Why?
They serve as an advertisement for our research topics. I keep adding new chapters and thus I also make sure that our research is accessible. And I make a name for myself as a lecturer. The books have actually begun attracting students to Saarland University who have seen my tutorials online and like them.
Why is it so important to you to recruit young talent?
We need more people in cybersecurity degree programs. And we need more students in Saarbruecken in general. Partly because we are growing so quickly at CISPA. At the moment we are very successful at attracting leading researchers to the center. They are all going to have PhD and postdoc positions to fill. That’s why all of us have to work at making CISPA as well as Saarbruecken attractive to young talent.
Dear Andreas, thank you very much for your time and for this interview.
