Speaker
Samuel Kounev
Dr. Samuel Kounev received a MSc degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Sofia (Bulgaria) in 2000 and a PhD (Dr.-Ing. summa cum laude) in computer science from TU Darmstadt (Germany) in 2005. He was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge (2006-2008) and Visiting Professor at UPC Barcelona (summer 2006 and 2007). In 2009, Samuel received the DFG Emmy-Noether-Career-Award (1M€) for excellent young scientists, establishing his research group “Descartes” at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Since 2014, Samuel Kounev is a Full Professor holding the Chair of Software Engineering at the University of Würzburg, where he has served in various roles including Dean (2019-2021) and Vice Dean (2017-2019) of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Managing Director of the Institute of Computer Science (2016-2017), and Member of the Faculty Board (2015-2021).
His research interests include developing novel methods, techniques, and tools for the engineering of software for building dependable, efficient, and secure distributed systems, including cloud-based systems, cyber-physical systems, and scientific computing applications. He has recently coauthored the first textbook on Systems Benchmarking (New York, NY, USA: Springer, 2020). In the area of benchmarking, he founded the SPEC Research Group, a consortium within the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, providing a platform for collaborative research efforts in the area of quantitative system evaluation and analysis. Samuel is co-founder of several conferences in the field, including the ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) and the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS), for which he has also been serving on the Steering Committees. His research has lead to over 300 publications and multiple scientific and industrial awards, including 7 Best Paper Awards, SPEC Presidential Award for “Excellence in Research“, Google Research Award, ABB Research Award, and VMware Academic Research Award.