I am an assistant professor in Software Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. I am also an adjunct faculty at the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was a postdoctoral researcher during 2020-2022.
I hold a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology and a BSc and MSc in Computer Science from Paderborn University, Germany.
Throughout my PhD, postdoc, and assistant professorship, my research has been partially funded by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP).
I do research in the areas of self-adaptive systems, software architecture, and requirements engineering. You can find a description of my research interests below.
You can reach me at wohlrab@chalmers.se
[September 2023] Awesome news: Andres Diaz-Pace, David Garlan, and I won the Best Paper Award for our ECSA 2023 paper!
[September 2023] I’ve accepted to serve on the program committee for the Artifact Track of SEAMS 2024.
[August 2023] I will be on the program committee for ICSA 2024.
[June 2023] Our ECSA'23 paper was accepted. It is called “Supporting the Exploration of Quality Attribute Tradeoffs in Large Design Spaces” (with Andres Diaz Pace and David Garlan).
[April 2023] I am going to receive the IT Faculty Pedagogical Prize 2023. So grateful for the recognition!
Current interests
I am interested in human-on-the-loop autonomous systems. These systems adapt their behavior or structure in response to changes in their environment. They commonly interact with humans. Self-adaptive systems make a lot of decisions autonomously. It is still desirable to involve humans and help them make decisions that are difficult to automate. Those decisions are often connected to tradeoffs, e.g., when deciding how much to prioritize different competing quality attributes (such as security, performance, and cost). It is often difficult for humans to understand the consequences of decisions and to specify decision criteria. When is it worth it to ramp up security features, although that might compromise performance? Those trade-offs depend on the current context of the system and what is desirable might change over time.
To address these issues, I create techniques to explain self-adaptive systems and to capture people’s (potentially changing) preferences. I also do empirical research to study these problems in large-scale industrial settings.
My research focuses on the following questions:
Activities in the Research Community
SEAMS Artifact Track 2024, PC Member
ICSA 2024, PC Member
SST 2023, PC Member
SEAMS 2023, PC Member
ICSA 2023, PC Member
RE 2023, PC Member
ICSE SEIP 2023, PC Member
SE 2023, PC Member
ICSA 2022, PC Member
ICSSP/ICGSE 2022, PC Member
ICSA 2021, PC Member
ICSSP/ICGSE 2021, PC Member
RE@Next! Track at RE 2021, PC Member
ICSSP/ICGSE Doctoral Symposium 2021, PC Member
ICSSP/ICGSE 2020, PC Member
ICSSP 2019, PC Member
REFSQ'2018, Sub-Reviewer
Information and Software Technology, Reviewer
Communications of the ACM, Reviewer
IEEE Software, Reviewer
Empirical Software Engineering, Reviewer
Journal of Systems & Software, Reviewer