“Software development is a human activity: understanding software requires understanding humans that create it”

Alexander Serebrenik is a Full Professor of Social Software Engineering at the Software Engineering and Technology cluster of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).

Alexander’s 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-authored a book “Evolving Software Systems” (Springer Verlag, 2014), and more than 100 scientific papers and articles. He is actively involved in organisation of scientific conferences as member and chair of steering committees, general chair, program committee chair, track chair and program committee member. He has won multiple best paper and distinguished reviewer awards, and is member of the editorial board of several journals.

Alexander is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM.

Alexander Serebrenik obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and an MSc in Computer Science from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. In addition to his work at TU/e, till 2017 Alexander was also a part-time visiting researcher at the Software Analysis and Transformation group of CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica), the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands.  In 2012, he took a sabbatical at the Software Engineering lab of University of Mons; in 2018 - at the Collaborative Development Group of University of Bari.

Alexander has also held positions at LaQuSo (Laboratory for Qualitative Software) at Eindhoven University of Technology (assistant professor), the Sémantique, preuve et interprétation abstraite (Semantics, Proof and Abstract Interpretation) group at Ecole Polytechnique, France (postdoc researcher) and the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence group at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (postdoc).

• Senior member of IEEE and IEEE Computer Society