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.
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
[March 2023] I have been nominated for the IT Faculty Pedagogical Prize 2023. Wow! I’m super glad and honored by the nomination.
[March 2023] I’m hiring a PhD student in Software Engineering for Human-Centric Autonomous Systems. You can find more information and apply until April 14 here. Please spread the word!
[March 2023] Our EASE'23 paper “Investigating Software Engineering Artifacts in DevOps Through the Lens of Boundary Objects” was accepted. It is joined work with Christoph Matthies and Robert Heinrich.
[January 2023] The course that I redesigned and taught last semester got a really good course evaluation. You can find some of the students’ comments here. It was a BSc-level course on software processes.
[November 2022] Javier Cámara, Bradley Schmerl, David Garlan, and I got a paper accepted to the Journal of Systems and Software (JSS). It is called “ExTrA: Explaining Architectural Design Tradeoff Spaces via Dimensionality Reduction”.
Current interests
I am interested in human-on-the-loop autonomous systems. These self-adaptive 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:
since 2017
Activities in the Research Community
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