Andreas Zeller is faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University. His research on automated debugging, mining software archives, specification mining, and security testing has proven highly influential. Zeller is one of the few researchers to have received two ERC Advanced Grants, most recently for his S3 project. Zeller is an ACM Fellow and holds an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.
Mail: office-zeller@cispa.de
Phone: +49 681 87083-1001
Mastodon: @AndreasZeller@mastodon.social
Twitter: @AndreasZeller
GitHub: andreas-zeller
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If you are a student of Saarland University and have fun with automated program analysis, testing, and debugging, you should do a thesis with us. Here are the details on how this works.
Due to capacity constraints, we can only accept a minimal number of students. If you bring outstanding skills in
and/or
then we’d love to hear from you.
If you want to do a thesis in our group, please send me a letter of motivation and your most recent transcript of records. Your motivation letter should also indicate how you satisfy the above requirements. I will then set up an appointment with you to discuss possible topics.
Topics will typically be related to our recent research interests. Have a look at our all-new ERC “Semantics of Software Systems” (S3) project (notably the research proposal) to get some inspiration. You will do actual research, and some students even had a chance to publish and present their 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 Ph.D. student or PostDoc who you will closely work with. They 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 regularly. Details will be sent to you by the seminar organization.
Your advisor will give you literature to read and make you build a prototype or perform some preliminary experiments. This is important to help you understand your topic. You conduct this significant part of the seminar primarily 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 completing 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 on 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 you can start working on your thesis is right after you hand in your thesis proposal and give a talk at the seminar. As soon as you get the certificate for the seminar, you have to register your thesis in the same semester or the semester after you got the certificate.
After registering your thesis, you have to submit the thesis within the deadline set in the registration. For BSc students, this will typically be three months; for MSc students, this will be six months.
Successful completion of a thesis consists of the following steps:
Once you finish the steps described above, you will get a certificate (Schein) for the thesis. Congratulations!