Yannic Noller

Professor for Computer Science, Ruhr University Bochum (RUB)

prof_pic.jpg

Yannic (CV) is a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) and leads the Software Quality group. His research focuses on how software quality can be maintained and improved with automated testing and repair technologies. His general research goal is to shape the future of software development by contributing to the domain of automated software engineering and providing the means to develop reliable, trustworthy, and secure software systems. In particular, he works in the following areas:

  1. Automated Program Repair: developing novel repair techniques to aid developers in fixing program bugs
  2. Machine Learning Analysis: automated analysis, testing, and repairing of machine learning models
  3. Software Testing: exploring and designing (hybrid) testing techniques to systematically generate test inputs that expose incorrect program behavior
  4. Intelligent Tutoring Systems: how to help CS students learn programming by applying concepts from automated testing and repair to guide the students toward the right solution
  5. Human Factors in SE: studying developer needs and requirements for successful deployment of testing and repair techniques in development practice

Before joining RUB in July 2024, Yannic was an Assistant Professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He pursued his Ph.D. in Computer Science in the Software Engineering group (advised by Prof. Lars Grunske) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. His Ph.D. research focused on differential software testing, in particular, by combining fuzzing and symbolic execution in the context of regression analysis, algorithmic complexity analysis, side-channel analysis, and robustness analysis of neural networks.

news

Jul 10, 2025 Had a great time at the Summer School on Security Testing and Verification 2025 organized by the KU Leuven and VUB! It was great to engage with the participants and present our research in fuzzing :) For more info check, the website or this LinkedIn post!

Jun 29, 2025 Enjoyed the FUZZING’25 workshop with great participants and keynote speakers! Miryung Kim (UCLA and Amazon Web Services) talked about here research on constraining fuzzing and Will Wilson (Antithesis) provided interesting insights into career paths in fuzzing outside academia. Checkout our program and watch the keynote recordings!
Jun 03, 2025 I have been invited to serve as the Artifact Evaluation Chair for FASE 2026! Looking forward to many great research artifacts :-)
May 21, 2025 I have been invited to talk about my (postdoctoral) research experience in Singapore as part of the workshop and networking event “Doing research in (Greater) China” for STEM early career researchers organized by the China Competence Network Ruhr Niederrhein (C NET RNR). You find my slides here!
May 09, 2025 I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee for FSE 2026! Looking forward to many great submissions!!!

selected publications

  1. CSEE&T’25
    Software Engineering Educational Experience in Building an Intelligent Tutoring System
    Zhiyu Fan , Yannic Noller, Ashish Dandekar , and Abhik Roychoudhury
    In 37th IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T 2025), co-located with ICSE 2025. , 2025
  2. TOSEM’25
    Vulnerability Repair via Concolic Execution and Code Mutations
    Ridwan Shariffdeen , Christopher Timperley , Yannic Noller, Claire Le Goues , and Abhik Roychoudhury
    ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2025
  3. ICST’24
    Evolutionary Testing for Program Repair
    Haifeng Ruan , Hoang Lam Nguyen , Ridwan Shariffdeen , Yannic Noller, and Abhik Roychoudhury
    In 2024 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) , 2024
  4. ICSE’22
    Trust Enhancement Issues in Program Repair
    Yannic Noller, Ridwan Shariffdeen , Xiang Gao , and Abhik Roychoudhury
    In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering , Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2022
  5. PLDI’21
    Concolic Program Repair
    Ridwan Shariffdeen , Yannic Noller, Lars Grunske , and Abhik Roychoudhury
    In Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation , Virtual, Canada, 2021
  6. ICSE’20
    HyDiff: Hybrid Differential Software Analysis
    Yannic Noller, Corina S. Păsăreanu , Marcel Böhme , Youcheng Sun , Hoang Lam Nguyen , and Lars Grunske
    In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering , Seoul, South Korea, 2020
  7. ICSE’19
    DifFuzz: Differential Fuzzing for Side-channel Analysis
    Shirin Nilizadeh , Yannic Noller, and Corina S. Păsăreanu
    In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering , Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2019