News

We invite you to the CSSE Research Colloquium.

This time, we are happy to announce the talk by Prof. Dr. Alexander Serebrenik from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, on

"Diversity and Inclusion in Software Engineering: The What, the How, and What We Can Do Next".

Date: Tuesday, October 7th, 2025
Time: 9-10 am
Place: Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg - Faculty of Computer Science – Building 29 Room 307

Abstract:

This talk examines recent empirical studies on diversity and inclusion within software engineering teams. Given the sensitivity of the topic, such work requires particular methodological care. We will therefore revisit these studies through a methodological lens, considering the decision points encountered by researchers and the possible alternatives at each stage. In the concluding part of the talk, we will move beyond characterizing the current landscape to discuss a range of interventions that have been proposed to address the persistent challenges of diversity and inclusion in software engineering.
Best wishes

Biography:

Alexander Serebrenik is a full professor of social software engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. His work tends to involve theories and methods both from within computer science (e.g., theory of socio-technical coordination; methods from natural language processing, machine learning) and from outside of computer science (e.g., organisational psychology). The underlying idea of his work is that of empiricism, i.e., that addressing software engineering challenges should be grounded in observation and experimentation and requires a combination of the social and the technical perspectives. Alexander has co-edited two books “Evolving Software Systems” (Springer Verlag, 2014) and “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering: Best Practices and Insights” (APress, 2024) and more than 280 scientific papers, book chapters and articles. He is actively involved in organisation of scientific conferences and is member of the editorial board of several journals, as well as active in supporting more diverse and inclusive scientific communities in the Netherlands and worldwide. He has won multiple best paper and distinguished reviewer awards. Alexander is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM.

Last week, our chair gathered for its annual Klausurtagung. Over several days, members shared their research and exchanged constructive feedback in a lively and supportive atmosphere. Alongside the scientific program, group activities such as hiking and a visit to the museum offered plenty of opportunities to connect outside the lecture hall. The retreat combined inspiration, teamwork, and fun — strengthening both our research and our community.

After 3 years of collaborative research and development, the CSSE, together with multiple partners from academia and industry, has successfully finalized the safe.trAIn project.

During this period, significant advancements were achieved in ensuring the safety and reliability of machine learning models designed for autonomous regional trains. The project specifically focused on establishing robust safety validation methods, developing rigorous testing tools, and creating a secure AI architecture for autonomous rail transport.

Key accomplishments of safe.trAIn include:

• Development and validation of AI-driven object detection systems critical for autonomous operation.

• Establishment of virtual testing environments to rigorously evaluate safety performance.

• Contributions to standardization activities, setting foundations for future safety guidelines in autonomous regional transport.

Throughout the project, our research team has published multiple scientific papers, significantly contributing to the knowledge base and practical methodologies for safe AI deployment in rail transportation.

We look forward to applying these results to further support sustainable, safe, and efficient mobility.

The Chair of Software and Systems Engineering contributed to the development of DIN SPEC 99002, which has now been released.

The document standardizes terminology for AI applications in railway systems. Developed as part of the SafeTrAIn project and in collaboration with leading industry partners and research institutions, this specification addresses the need for a common language to facilitate clear communication among manufacturers, operators, and regulatory bodies. By contributing their expertise, OVGU’s representatives, including Konstantin Kirchheim, have helped ensure that emerging AI technologies—such as those used in driverless train operations and predictive maintenance—are described consistently, which is crucial for both innovation and safety in rail transport.

The CSSE is excited to announce the release of kkirchheim/german-gpt2-medium, a GPT-2-style language model pre-trained on German text, offering improved capabilities for natural language processing in the German language. Existing German-only models often fall short in terms of context window size and parameter count. Our model bridges this gap, making it better equipped for tasks requiring larger context understanding and more efficient language modeling at modest parameter-count. Running the quantized model requires less than 1GB of VRAM. Explore technical details here.

Key Features

• 358M Parameters: Over twice the size of existing German-only GPT-2 models.
• Extended Context Length: A context window of 2048 tokens, double the standard 1024 tokens in similar models.
• High-Quality Dataset: Trained on 300GB of high-quality German text, leveraging the German Colossal, Cleaned Common Crawl Corpus (GC4).

Tim Gonschorek and Konstantin Kirchheim presented their research contributions at this year's SafeComp conference, held in Florence, Italy.

Tim Gonschorek presented his work on "Validating Design-Intent System Specification Models with State-of-the-art Large Language Models," which explores innovative methods for validating system specifications using advanced language models.

Meanwhile, Konstantin Kirchheim received the Best Paper Award at the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Safety Engineering (WAISE), co-located with SafeComp, for his paper "Language Models as Reasoners for Out-of-Distribution Detection." His work offers new insights into leveraging language models for improving safety-critical systems.

We proudly congratulate both Tim and Konstantin for their achievements.

Use of collaborative robots, that allow shared workspace with human workers, integration of intelligent sensors enabling minor robot path corrections are already widely used in the industry. But although these advances are certainly great milestones, what still remained mostly unchanged and inadvertently hinders better integration, is the approach to robotic programming itself. In most cases the human coworker is treated more like a hindrance and a potential collision object that the robot needs to avoid, instead of an active cooperator for performing a common task.

The new project “Human-centered production through human-robot teaming” aims to address this problem and enable a completely new type of automation, by developing a technology that allows humans and robots to work together flexibly and efficiently.

Marco Filax successfully defended his PhD with the title "Fine-Grained Open-World Recognition: Identifying Retail Products in Supermarkets". Congratulations on the excellent work!

The Chair of Software and Systems Engineering recently hosted a meeting for the Safetrain project consortium in Magdeburg. Over two days, our partners from Siemens, the Fraunhofer Institute, Bridgefield, and others, engaged in focused discussions. The agenda included detailed presentations and workshops, primarily centered on reviewing the project's current progress.

We extend our thanks to all attendees for their participation and contributions. Your presence in Magdeburg was greatly valued. We look forward to the possibility of welcoming you again in the near future.