Professor  Walid Maalej

Walid Maalej is an award-winning software & requirements researcher, passionate educator, and handicraft enthusiast. As Professor of Informatics at the University of Hamburg, he teaches software development basics to up to 700 students in a single course, using fun activities and pair-programming. His advanced software engineering courses address real challenges from industry and society by combining cutting-edge technology with a large portion of empiricism and communication skills. As head of informatics department, he successfully navigated the department through turbulent pandemic times including an exceptional budget cut. 

Prof. Maalej’s research interests include AI engineering, user involvement and feedback mining, sustainability in software, as well as knowledge creation and sharing in software projects. His work on these topics has been cited thousands of times and received a.o. the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, IEEE RE Best Paper Award, MSR Most Influential Paper Award, as well as awards by Google and Microsoft. In 2014 Prof. Maalej was named “The Early Stage Scientist of the Year” by academics and the German Association of University Professors (DHV) across all disciplines. He currently serves as Steering Committee Chair of the Requirements Engineering conference series. Prof. Maalej has worked as developer and consultant with and for multiple companies and organizations including Siemens, Tata Consultancy Services, Rohde und Schwarz, and Telekom. He received his doctoral degree in informatics from TU Munich with distinction and is also a proud alumni of the Center for Digital Technology and Management.

• AI Engineering - How can Software & Requirements Engineering Help Solving the "AI Dilemma"
  AI and Software Engineering have co-evolved and profited from each other since their beginnings. During the last decade, Software Engineering has particularly profited from advances in...
• User Feedback Intelligence for Requirements Engineering, UX, and Software Evolution
  The monitorable, “klick-and-go” deployment of software that emerged together with the app stores as well as the wide spread of social media and its commenting culture have...
• Modern Requirements Engineering
  This lecture will discuss modern requirements engineering (RE) which is often not called so. It will first quickly review the field and its evolution with two persistent, often misleading...
• (Tech-) Transfer: Patterns and Lessons Learned from the "German Model"
  Universities around the world are extending their main purpose from Research and Education to a third pillar often called Knowledge/Tech Transfer or simply Transfer. This lecture aims at...
• Rethinking Mining Software Repositories: On the Importance of Manual Analysis for Automation
  Mining Software Repositories (MSR) represents not only a vivid community within the field of Software Engineering but also a research methodology, which has become very popular among...