Rebekka Wohlrab

Rebekka Wohlrab

Assistant Professor

Chalmers University of Technology

About me

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

Recent News

All news»

[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!

Research

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:

  • How can we elicit preferences and goals that people deem important in self-adaptive systems? [REFSQ 2021, REJ 2022]
  • How can we improve the quality of self-adaptive systems and ensure that systems meet humans’ needs over time? [SEAMS 2022]
  • How can quality tradeoffs be explained to humans, so that it is easier to understand how self-adaptive systems behave? [JSS 2023 (Wohlrab et al.)]
  • How can systems be monitored to ensure that safety and security constraints are fulfilled, but so that we can reduce energy consumption and required bandwidth? [CNS'22, JSS 2023 (Vierhauser et al.)]
  • How can human engineers in large organizations share knowledge effectively over time? [JSME 2019, ICSA 2019, JSS 2020]

Awards and Honors

Best Paper Award at ECSA'23
Best Paper Award for our paper Supporting the Exploration of Quality Attribute Tradeoffs in Large Design Spaces, co-authored with J. Andres Diaz-Pace and David Garlan
Pedagogical Prize 2023
Pedagogical Prize that rewards pedagogical efforts in the IT Faculty domain. 100,000 SEK.
Repatriation grant for assistant professor position
Funding for two years of my pre-tenure research. Supported by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP)
Wallenberg Foundation and WASP International Postdoctoral Scholarship
Wallenberg Foundation and WASP International Postdoctoral Scholarship at Carnegie Mellon University
Best Paper Award at PROFES'19
Best Paper Award for our paper Challenges of Scaled Agile for Safety-Critical Systems, co-authored with Jan-Philipp Steghöfer, Eric Knauss, and Jennifer Horkoff
Best Paper Award at ICSA'19
Best Paper Award for our paper Improving the Consistency and Usefulness of Architecture Descriptions: Guidelines for Architects, co-authored with Ulf Eliasson, Patrizio Pelliccione, Rogardt Heldal
Best Paper Award at ICSSP'18 (Research Track)
Best Paper Award for our paper Boundary Objects in Agile Practices: Continuous Management of Systems Engineering Artifacts in the Automotive, co-authored with Patrizio Pelliccione, Eric Knauss, and Mats Larsson
SIGSOFT CAPS award
Merit-based travel grant for attending ICSE'17 (1200 USD)

Service

Activities in the Research Community

Program Committee Member and Reviewer

Conference Organization

Publications

(2023). Supporting the Exploration of Quality Attribute Tradeoffs in Large Design Spaces. Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA).

PDF Cite

(2023). AMon: A Domain-Specific Language and Framework for Adaptive Monitoring of Cyber-Physical Systems. Journal of Systems and Software.

PDF Cite

(2023). Explaining Quality Attribute Tradeoffs in Automated Planning for Self-Adaptive Systems. Journal of Systems and Software.

PDF Cite

(2023). Investigating Software Engineering Artifacts in DevOps Through the Lens of Boundary Objects. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE).

Cite

(2023). ExTrA: Explaining architectural design tradeoff spaces via dimensionality reduction. Journal of Systems and Software.

PDF Cite