Andreas Zeller is faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University, both in Saarbrücken, Germany. His research on automated debugging, mining software archives, specification mining, and security testing has proven highly influential. Zeller is an ACM Fellow and holds an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.
Mail: office-zeller@cispa.de
Phone: +49 681 87083-1001
Twitter: @AndreasZeller
Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by orderedlist
If you are a student of Saarland University and have fun with automated program analysis, testing, and debugging, you might want to do a thesis with us. Here are the details on how this works.
My group and I are currently at capacity and can not act as advisors for additional theses. We will start advising new theses September 1, 2022.
If you want to do a thesis at our group, please send me a letter of motivation and your most recent transcript of records. I will then set up an appointment with you to discuss possible topics.
Topics will typically be related to our recent research interests. You will do real research, and some students even had a chance to publish and present your work in front of an international audience.
You can suggest topics and express interests of your own. Third-party topics, however, are only acceptable as part of an established research cooperation.
Once we have agreed on a topic, you will be assigned an advisor from my group – a PhD student or PostDoc who you will closely work with. She or he will help you define your thesis proposal as part of the seminar.
In the seminar phase, you are supposed to prepare your thesis. The seminar phase comprises the following steps:
You have to attend the seminar on a regular basis. Details will be sent to you by the seminar organization.
Your advisor will give you literature to read and possibly make you write a prototype or perform some preliminary experiments. This is important to help you understand your topic. This is a major part of the seminar which is mostly done in self-study.
You have to write a thesis proposal that describes the goals of your thesis and the steps required to achieve those goals. See below.
Once the proposal is done, you have to give a talk in the seminar. Upon successful completion of those steps, you get a certificate (Schein) for the seminar. Congratulations!
Your proposal serves as a contract between you and our chair. It describes a well-defined task and its outcome as well as possible risks. This helps you finish your thesis in time and protects you from unexpected changes.
A thesis proposal is usually between 8 to 10 pages long and consists of the following:
A proposal typically undergoes a number of revisions between you and your supervisor; once it officially is handed in, it serves as a blueprint for the thesis. Your proposal will be graded as part of the Seminar.
The earliest point in time when you can start working on your thesis is right after you handed in your thesis proposal and gave a talk in the seminar. As soon as you got the certificate for the seminar, you have to register your thesis in the same semester or in the semester after you got the certificate.
After you have registered your thesis you have to submit the thesis within the deadline set in the registration. For BSc students, this will normally be three months, for MSc students, this will be six months.
Successful completion of a thesis consists of the following steps:
Once you finished the steps described above, you’ll get a certificate (Schein) for the thesis. Congratulations!