26.02.2026

At the SE26,  Larissa Schmid successfully presented her dissertation "Automatic Performance Modeling and Analysis of Configurable Scientific Software and Workflows" and won the dissertation award (Dissertationspreis) of the Software Engineering Division (SWT) of the German Informatics Society (GI).

We congratulate her on this immaculate achievement!

23.02.2026

A part of our team from SDQ had the privilege of attending and presenting at the Software Engineering conference of the Software Engineering Division (SWT) of the German Informatics Society (GI), organised in cooperation with the Swiss Informatics Society (SI) and the Austrian Computer Society (OCG).

At the conference, taking place in the stadium where the wonder of Bern happened in 1954, we had the opportunity to host a workshop about Research Data Management, presented our best papers from 2025, and Larissa Schmid successfully presented her dissertation for the Dissertationspreis.

03.11.2025

The paper titled "HubLink: A Novel Question Answering Retrieval Approach over Knowledge Graphs" by Angelika Kaplan, Jan Keim, Marco Schneider, and Ralf Reussner was praised as exceptional contribution and awarded best paper in the full paper category at the workshop for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Enabled by Knowledge Graphs (RAGE-KG) at the ISWC 2025.

In their paper, the authors introduce HubLink, a schema-agnostic and training-free approach for Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs that uses large language models to improve scholarly search and source-aware inference. Evaluated on the Open Research Knowledge Graph, HubLink outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly for complex scholarly queries.

20.10.2025

We are happy to share that our paper “Same Same But Different: Preventing Refactoring Attacks on Software Plagiarism Detection” by Robin Maisch, Larissa Schmid, Timur Sağlam, and Nils Niehues has been accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2026.

The work addresses a longstanding challenge in academic integrity: the vulnerability of source code plagiarism detection tools to refactoring-based obfuscation. The authors introduce Nocte, an extensible framework that leverages graph transformations on code property graphs to normalize code structure. This approach significantly strengthens the resilience of plagiarism detection systems against structural modifications often used to conceal copied code.

Congratulations to all authors on this excellent achievement!

17.06.2025

Our chair is delighted to announce that our group member Jan Keim has received a Best Paper Award nomination at the 19th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) for the paper “LLMs for Software Architecture Knowledge: A Comparative Analysis among Seven LLMs.”

The work, co-authored by Mohamed Soliman, Elia Ashraf, Kamel M. K. Abdelsalam, and Ashwin Prasad Shivarpatna Venkatesh, explores how large language models can support software architecture knowledge. The nomination recognizes the paper’s innovative contribution to advancing research at the intersection of AI and software engineering.

10.06.2025

Robin Maisch, Nathan Hagel, and Alexander Bartel, professor at Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences, have received the Best Paper award at the 6th European Conference on Software Engineering Education (ECSEE) for their paper “Towards Robust Plagiarism Detection in Programming Education: Introducing Tolerant Token Matching Techniques to Counter Novel Obfuscation Methods“.

In their work, the researchers have developed an approach to incorporate strategies from bioinformatics into state-of-the-art source code plagiarism detection systems in order to enhance the precision of detection while also preventing typical plagiarism obfuscation techniques often encountered in their teaching activities.