Problem: Reviewers did not read the paper. Solution: Write a detailed rebuttal and point to all the places in the paper that answer their questions. New problem: Reviewers did not read the rebuttal.

🎓 Interested in a research-oriented, fully funded PhD position in computer science, supervised by world-renowned researchers? Then apply for IMPRS-TRUST, the joint #graduateprogram of MPI-INF, MPI-SWS, @uni-saarland.de and @rptu.bsky.social 🗓️ Application deadline: December 31st ↪️ sic.link/imprs

Happy and honored: I have been selected to become an IEEE Fellow for "contributions to analyzing software and its development process". Thanks a lot to all of you who endorsed and supported me – especially @cispa.de + @saarland-informatics-campus.de, who always encouraged such long-term impact.

🏆 Congrats to Professor Reinhard Wilhelm for being awarded the 2025 ACM SIGBED Technical Achievement Award! His work in WCET analysis has shaped safe embedded, real-time, and cyber-physical systems used worldwide, from aircraft control to medical devices. 🔗 Read more: sic.link/profwilhelmacm

🤖 Using AI while coding? Think again. 🖥️ A study conducted by Prof. Dr @svenapel.bsky.social and his team shows that, compared to human partners, developers working with AI assistants approach code less critically and experience less knowledge transfer. 🔗 Read more: sic.link/software

How has our field’s understanding of validity in empirical SE research changed over the past decade? 🤔 Our paper on this topic, with @janetsiegmund.bsky.social, @svenapel.bsky.social, and @norbertsiegmund.bsky.social was accepted at ICSE 2026. Preprint: sws.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/wp-content/u...

The first deadline for the research track @variabilityconf.bsky.social 2026 conference is Dec. 4 ! It covers all variability areas including software reuse, product lines, and configuration. It merges the 3 previous conferences in the domain (ICSR,SPLC, VaMoS). conf.researchr.org/home/variabi...

📰 This week at #SIC: Prof. Dr. Sven Apel, Chair of Software Engineering, and Dr. Marvin Wyrich, software engineering researcher at Saarland University, highlight the importance of science communication in November’s CACM issue! 📰 Read: sic.link/silentscientist 📺 Watch: youtu.be/85Q3gTx_MUs

ACM sent a professional filmmaker to Universität des Saarlandes to interview Sven Apel and me about the topic. It was an exciting experience, and the video is now online! 😁 👉 Article: cacm.acm.org/opinion/the-... 👉 Interview: vimeo.com/1125950450?f...

Marvin Wyrich wrote: Our article "The Silent Scientist," in which we explain the importance of science communication for software engineering, appears in the November issue of Communications of the ACM. But it gets even better...

Many organizations are changing their language and policies surrounding DEI. The ACM has not, we are sticking to our principles. - Yannis Ioannidis, ACM president, today I'm proud to be a member & volunteer for the @acm.org!

German Unity Day celebrates the reunification of East and West Germany. This year, Saarland is hosting the festivities! We will be in Saarbrücken, Mainzerstraße 3, joined by DFKI, MPI-INF, MPI-SWS, and LZI, to celebrate German Unity Day with you! 🥳 🔗 Find our full program here: sic.link/burgerfest

First author Vs. Second author

Director Christian Theobalt joins the new season of the Max Planck podcast “Ach, Mensch!” and talks about his research in Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence. ↪️Link to the episode: sic.link/achmensch 📸MPI-INF

🏅 Saarbrücken receives 2 #ERC Starting Grants in computer science this year, more than any other institution in Germany! Congrats to Dr. Mariya Toneva and Dr. Franziska Boenisch! 💶 Each project will receive €1.5M over 5 years. 🔗 Read more here: ➡️ sic.link/mariya ➡️ sic.link/franziska #AI #SIC

Maintaining and cultivating the traditions of my Alma Mater. Congratulations Dr. Roman!

Congratulations @mtoneva.bsky.social! Great project! I'm looking forward to the results!

📣 The ERC Starting Grant call results are out! Find out which early-career researchers will receive funding this year, what they will be investigating, where they will be based... plus lots of other #ERCStG facts & figures for 2025! ➡️ buff.ly/IsafuFh #FrontierResearch 🇪🇺#EUfunded #HorizonEurope

In 2025, the ERC received 3,329 proposals for Advanced Grant funding — 31% more than last year! The selected projects will likely be announced in the spring of 2026. More facts and figures on #ERCAdG applications 👇 europa.eu/!bm9gPT #FrontierResearch

Have you recently published in ASEJ, IEEE TSE, ACM TOSEM, EMSE, or JSS? Present your work at ASE’25! ✅ Accepted after Jan 1, 2024 ✅ In ASE scope ✅ ≥70% new content ✅ Not presented elsewhere 👉 Full details: conf.researchr.org/track/ase-20... 🗓️ Submission Due: 1st Sep #ASE2025 #SoftwareEngineering

Experiments in SE research often require a contrast condition or baseline (e.g., contrasting reading code with problem solving or reading prose). What is the influence of the choice of baseline on the actual results? See our TOSEM paper for answers: www.se.cs.uni-saarland.de/publications...

Congrats to all authors of accepted papers in Cycle 1 of #ICSE2026! Out of 660 submissions, 60 papers were accepted and 107 invited for major revisions. We now invite you to share this post with more details about your paper! We'll see you in Rio! 🇧🇷🌴

📣 Good news: 281 top researchers have just won ERC Advanced Grants! The new funding, worth nearly €721 million, is part of the 🇪🇺 EU’s #HorizonEurope programme. Find out more 👉 europa.eu/!JYKxkD #ERCAdG #FrontierResearch @ec.europa.eu

Am Wochenende durfte ich unsere Forschung auf dem #Kosmos vorstellen. Ich bin begeistert, dass so viele sich für #Programmieren und #Neurodiversität interessieren. Danke an alle vor Ort und die #TUC! @janetsiegmund.bsky.social @svenapel.bsky.social @schanlin.bsky.social @yifan00.bsky.social

⚛️ Quantum software meets Saarbrücken science: new €53M+ research center launched at @uni-saarland.de. With #informatics, #physics, #math & #engineering on board – and @dfki.bsky.social , @mpi-inf.mpg.de & ‪@fz-juelich.de in the mix. 🔗 Read more about the #QuTe initiative here: sic.link/qute

🎉 HUGE NEWS! 🎉 #ASE2025 has received a record-breaking 1,190 submissions – the most EVER for a single-cycle top SE conference! 🤯 Massive thanks to all authors who submitted. Looking forward to what promises to be an unforgettable conference with an incredible program 🔥!

Massive 1.2k submissions to #ASE25 in Korea! 🎉 📈

Occasionally, I get a reviewer complaining, “You don’t compare against any other approach. So how can we know you’re better?” So I found a simple way to still add the "bold number column" that apparently everybody wants these days.

📢 ASE 2025 – Upcoming Deadlines! 🔍 Research Papers: 30 May ✨ NIER: 12 Jul ⚒️ Tool Demonstration: 23 Jul 🧑‍🏫 Doctoral Symposium: 31 Jul 🏢 Industry Showcase: 1 Aug 👩🏻‍💻 Student Research Competition: 12 Aug 📄 Journal First: 1 Sep More info: conf.researchr.org/home/ase-2025

✨️ Now that #ICSE25 is over, it's time to get your papers ready for #ASE25 (30th May)! 📢 Here is what's new: * Major Revision v2.0 * Review criteria for tech. & experience papers * Policy on LLM-assisted Reviews * Auto-bidding (TPMS) * Rapid Response Reliable Reviewers 👇 For more details, read on.

Meet the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners at ECOOP'25: Mira Mezini, TU Darmstadt (Senior Prize) Amir Shaikhha, University of Edinburgh (Junior Prize) Check out their awards-citation: https://2025.ecoop.org/track/ecoop-2025-awards It's also the first time […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A new look! We have created a new version of The Fuzzing Book, based on #JupyterBook, bringing * easier navigation * dark mode * search * mobile layout and lots of other features. Check it out at www.fuzzingbook.org/beta/html/in... Should we continue with this new look? Comments are welcome!

Help Us with Our Software Engineering Research Survey #SEResearch youtu.be/SBolY_AvqK0

Many sites provide incorrect or incomplete BibTeX entries. I therefore just use the provided DOI and a small shell script to create the BibTeX from it from the definitive data retrieved from Crossref.

📢 ASE 2025 – Upcoming Deadlines! 🔍 Research Papers: 30 May ✨ NIER: 12 Jul ⚒️ Tool Demonstration: 23 Jul 🧑‍🏫 Doctoral Symposium: 31 Jul 🏢 Industry Showcase: 1 Aug 👩🏻‍💻 Student Research Competition: 12 Aug 📄 Journal First: 1 Sep #ASE2025 #SoftwareEngineering #CallForPapers

Citation-based metrics are bogus anyway but if anyone wonders why ML people have higher h-indexes, now you know! Data from cspubs.org

Finally a confirmation: PL paper are worth more!

Together with @autreche.bsky.social, Adish Singla, Krishna Gummadi, Goran Radanovic and Nina Grgić-Hlača, we have multiple open positions postdocs in AI, Computing, and Society at the MPI for Software Systems! Apply by May 13 via the new Max Planck Postdoc Program! www.mpg.de/en/max-planc...

What is the essence object-oriented programming? It depends on whom you ask. The long answer is available in the preprint of our recently accepted paper: www.computer.org/csdl/magazin... Marvin Wyrich, Johannes C. Hofmeister, @svenapel.bsky.social , and I dared to go down this rabbit hole.

Cuts to universities aren't just about "woke" and affect Red states too. @sethrockman.bsky.social organized a "teach-in" at the NCAA tourney in Providence. Hear me talk (1 min) about the US gov't as the world's ultimate venture capitalist! @phileil.bsky.social took great notes.

One week left to apply! We'll have so much exciting data for projects: for example, neuropixel data from humans while they listen to sentences courtesy of @shaileejain.bsky.social, Eddie Chang, and his group.

Debugging performance bugs is a maze of complexity! We used VR to uncover how developers reason about performance bugs, revealing structured debugging episodes... To be presented at FSE'25, a preprint is available: www.se.cs.uni-saarland.de/publications...

Quite a cartoon, sure to be unpopular with the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth!

Correct. If the birthdate field contains corrupt or mismatched data, it defaults to 1875-05-20, which serves as a flag. May 20, 1875, is the day the international standards and metrics treaty was signed. Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.

That a great university system can be destroyed quite quickly!

Really excited for this 3 week NeuroAI summer school in Lisbon! We have course faculty from a range of neuro domains (language, vision, decision making, memory), and neuro levels (low level to cognitive). There will also be a project advised by our exciting lineup of course faculty! Come join us!

Interested in organizing @icseconf.bsky.social, the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering in 2029? Make a bid by March 20! For 2029, we solicit bids from outside Europe or North America. See call for letters-of-intent: www.icse-conferences.org/organization...

Understanding the low inter-rater agreement on aggressiveness on the Linux Kernel Mailing List @svenapel.bsky.social is one of the authors #SEResearch www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class. "In English, a double negative is a positive. In some languages, like Russian, a double negative is still a negative. But, there is no language wherein a double positive can be a negative." A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."