Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

Overview
In our second academic year with Bernhard Rumpe as Chair of the Software Engineering
Group, we had been able to professionalize and systematize the organisational issues, such
that much smoother, yet still lean processes could be established. On the one hand we where
focussing on a good quality of our lessons, exercises and practicals. The Software
Engineering Group has now established a number of lessons, such as Introduction to Software
Engineering (undergraduate), Generative Software Engineering, Model Based Software
Development, Software Architectures (Prof. Nagl), Programming-Language Ads 95 (Prof.
Nagl) as well as some courses from our industrial partners, like Processes and Methods for
Testing (Dr. Stefan Kriebel, BMW), which together with Software Engineering courses from
our colleagues form a good body of knowledge for software development. Several related
practicals and seminars with topics from Cloud Computing and Global Software Engineering
complement these lessons.
On the organisational side, we are currently in the process of managing the “Tag der
Informatik 2010” for the Informatics Department. Furthermore, we are involved in the newly
started Commission for Teaching (“KfL”) that deals with strategic issues for the computer
Science curricula and the Commission for Service Teaching (“KfSL”) that deals with lessons
exported to other curricula. Both have the duty to ensure a good quality of the relatively new
Bachelor/Masters programs, we are dealing with. Finally, because Prof. Spaniol resigned, we
were elected to take over the speaker’s position for the Forum Informatik. On the industrial
side, we have started a working group on Cloud Computing within REGINA and had already
some fruitful meetings.
As our research can be divided into four major sections
• Modelling, model-based development,
• Energy management and monitoring in buildings,
• Automotive (Development Methods, Autonomy, Robotics), and
• Cloud Computing Services,
We have structured ourselves in the above groups. Four group leaders, Ingo Weisemöller,
Claas Pinkernell, Tim Gülke and Dr. Anne-Therese Körtgen are managing these groups under
the supervision of Anne-Therese Körtgen, who also manages the organisational and scientific
routes of our Chair.
Our Software Engineering Laboratory (SE Lab) has started several projects, partly in
combination with industry, partly on our own projects, to deliver industrial strength software.
As a side effect of this effectiveness, our energy management group has started a company,
called Synavision, together with energy experts from Braunschweig, to promote the use of an
expert system for energy monitoring in buildings.
We also had quite a number of Ph.D.s being finished. Namely Christian Berger, Ibrahim
Armaç, Hans Grönniger, Daniel Retkowitz, René Wörzberger and Holger Krahn finished
their work and found good positions at Volkswagen Financial Services, Audi, HDI
insurances, Nuance Communications Aachen, Generali Deutschland Informatik Services and
Cirquent. We thank them, hope they have learned and explored the right things and wish
them good luck. The Ph.D. theses are available under the newly created book series
“Aachener Informatik-Berichte, Software Engineering” by Shaker publishing, Aachen.
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