Prof. Viktor Leis from TUM will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Towards Sanity in Query Languages” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 08th May 2025.

Abstract

The relational model has stood the test of time and is the foundation of most database systems. But let’s be honest — its success is not because of SQL, but in spite of it. SQL’s syntax is arcane, inconsistent, and bears little resemblance to the actual execution semantics of queries. Worse yet, SQL is not even a true standard — every system implements its own incompatible dialect, creating a fractured ecosystem where portability and interoperability are afterthoughts. This lack of standardization slows down innovation, forcing database developers to reinvent the wheel instead of pushing the field forward.

In this talk, we argue that we need a formally defined Sane Intermediate Representation (SaneIR) — a well-specified, interoperable abstraction for relational query execution. SaneIR would serve as a lingua franca between database systems, enabling compatibility, portability, and accelerated progress in the database world. It’s time to stop treating SQL as the immovable foundation of relational databases and start designing a future where database systems can truly evolve.

Philip Schäfer from QPLIX will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Putting Wealth Into Perspective – Understanding global wealth dynamics and opportunities in wealth management” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 15th May 2025.

Abstract

What is wealth, and how is it shaping the world? This talk takes you on a journey through the global wealth game — who owns what, how fortunes grow, and what’s changing. We’ll explore how the wealthy invest their money and uncover the different types of players managing money. What challenges do they face? What trends are reshaping the industry? Finally, we’ll look at how technology is transforming wealth management, with real-world examples from QPLIX. If you’re curious about finance, business, and the future of money, this talk will give you a fresh perspective on the world of  wealth.

Biography

Philip Schäfer is Director Client Solutions at QPLIX a graduate of the elite program Software Engineering.

The application period for the winter intake 2025 has started. For instructions on how to apply, please visit our application web-site.

Marian Lingsch-Rosenfeld from LMU will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Software Verification Witnesses” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 21st January 2025.

Abstract

Ensuring that software meets desired quality standards is a crucial aspect of the development process. A wide variety of approaches and tools exist for this purpose, with four important paradigms: Testing, Automatic Verification, Deductive Verification, and Interactive Theorem Provers. Each paradigm has unique strengths and limitations with notable tools including, but not limited to, AFL++ for Testing, Dafny and Frama-C for Deductive Verification, CPAchecker and UAutomizer for Automatic Verification, and KIV and Coq for Interactive Theorem Proving, between many others. Different tools differ not only in their underlying formalisms, which influence how they present proofs or counterexamples, but also in their preferred methods of interacting with users.

In this talk I will present an idea which has emerged in the last decade to aid in tool interoperability and user interaction: Software Verification Witnesses. Witnesses are a machine-readable data format that allows tools to encode information about their verification process as invariants for correctness arguments or paths through a program leading to an error.

Biography

Marian Lingsch-Rosenfeld is a graduate of the elite program Software Engineering and does his Ph.D. at LMU’s SoSy-Lab.

Dr. Andreas Angerer und Michael Brunner from XITASO will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Agile Entwicklung und langlebige Architekturen – wie passt das zusammen?” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 5th December 2024.

Abstract

In der agilen Softwareentwicklung ist iterativ-inkrementelles Vorgehen sowie kontinuierliches Refactoring auf allen Ebenen elementarer Bestandteil. Softwarearchitektur wird als Mittel zum Zweck – der Wertschöpfung – gesehen und ist kontinuierlich im Fluss. Was aber nun, wenn agile Softwareentwicklung auf sehr langlebige Produktionsmaschinen und deren eigene Architekturen trifft? Wie man in diesem Spannungsfeld navigieren, technische Schulden abbauen und regelmäßig Mehrwert durch Software liefern kann, stellen wir anhand von Erfahrungen aus langjährigen Entwicklungszusammenarbeiten mit Kunden aus dem Maschinen- und Anlagenbau vor.

Henrik Wachowitz from LMU will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Usability and Infrastructure: Challenges in Software Verification” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 28th November 2024.

Abstract

In this talk, I explore the field of automatic software verification and address a central question: why hasn’t formal verification gained wider adoption? My research emphasizes usability, seeking to make software verification more intuitive and accessible for developers.

I will introduce FM-Weck, a tool designed to streamline the exploration and integration of community tools by leveraging terminology familiar to software verification researchers. Additionally, I will present the CoVeriTeam GUI, a no-code framework that empowers users to build cooperative verification workflows effortlessly.

As part of the infrastructure challenges, I will present CPA-Daemon, a framework that makes the software verifier CPAchecker accessible via gRPC. This framework enables stateful verification, opening new possibilities for distributed and persistent analysis.

Finally, I will illustrate these themes through two key use cases: large-scale distributed software verification and the international Software Verification Competition (SV-COMP). These examples highlight the ongoing challenges and opportunities in advancing both the usability and infrastructure of software verification tools.

Biography

Henrik Wachowitz is a graduate of the elite program Software Engineering and does his Ph.D. at LMU’s SoSy-Lab.

Johannes Ismair and Daiana Geetan from MaibornWolff will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Web Accessibility 101” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 19th December 2024.

Abstract

Web Accessibility remains a largely overlooked aspect within projects. The journey to understanding it — navigating through ARIA, various user interfaces such as screen readers, and deciphering the official WCAG guidelines — can often feel daunting. However, drawing from my own experience, I’ve discovered that it’s possible to impart 80% of essential Web Accessibility knowledge swiftly and effectively. This talk aims to demystify the process, making Web Accessibility approachable and achievable for everyone.

Prof. Andreas Kipf from UTN will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “What We Learned and What We Will Learn” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 7th November 2024.

Abstract

In this talk, I will provide an overview of my past, ongoing, and future ML for systems research, starting with my postdoc years at MIT, where I worked on benchmarking learned indexes, learning cardinality estimates, and developing SageDB, an instance-optimized Data Analytics System. I will also talk about my experience at Amazon, discussing my contributions to intelligent scaling in Amazon Redshift and Text2SQL translations. I will shine some light on the characteristics of cloud data warehouse workloads, and will emphasize the potential of (sub) query caching. Finally, I will talk about my ongoing and future research at UTN, where we work on simplifying data loading with LLMs, correlation-aware column compression, and optimizing queries by learning from query history.

Biography

Andreas Kipf is a professor of data systems at the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN). Previously, he was an applied scientist at AWS and a postdoc researcher in the MIT Data Systems Group where he worked with Prof. Tim Kraska. His research explores applications of AI to build next-gen data systems that are efficient and easy to use. Andreas earned his PhD at TUM where he worked with Prof. Alfons Kemper and Prof. Thomas Neumann. During his PhD, he interned with Google in Mountain View & Zurich to work on query-driven materialization and lightweight secondary indexing. Andreas won the 2016 SIGMOD Best Demonstration Award and the 2017 SIGMOD Programming Contest.

Dr. Johannes Leupolz will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Qualitative and quantitative analysis of safety-critical systems with S#” and it will take place in room 1055N at 10AM on 4th July 2024.

Abstract

Safety-critical systems are expected to operate safely under regular circumstances as well as in many degraded situations. In the latter case, these systems have to cope with one or more components that are not working as specified, while at the same time they have to avoid (serious) economical or environmental damage, injuries, or even loss of lives. S# provides a modeling language specifically designed to express important safety-related concepts such as faults and the physical environment of a safety-critical system. For safety assessments, model simulations as well as formal safety analyses are supported.

Dr. Harald Störrle from QAware will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Wozu gibt es POs?” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 04 July 2024.

Abstract

In der Industrie werden heute vielfach “agile” Methoden der Softwareentwicklung angewandt. In der akademischen Ausbildung kommen solche Organisationsformen, notwendigerweise, höchstens am Rand vor. Ein besonders obskurer Aspekt dieser Vorgehensweisen ist die Rolle des Product Owners (PO). Gleichzeitig ist diese Rolle, nach meiner Erfahrung, entscheidend für den Erfolg eines Projektteams, und oft auch der entscheidende Faktor für den Erfolg eines Produktes insgesamt.

Ich berichte aus meiner langjährigen Praxis in der industriellen (und akademischen!) Herstellung von Software, insbesondere mit Scrum und SAFe, reflektiere über agile und andere Vorgehensweisen, ihre Stärken und Schwächen, und insbesondere die PO-Rolle: was macht man als PO, wie wird man PO, und was kommt danach?