Harald Gall - Biography#

Harald Gall is Dean of the Faculty of Business, Economics, and Informatics at the University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland. He is professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Informatics at UZH. Prior to that, he was associate professor at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, in the Distributed Systems Group (TUV), where he also received his PhD (Dr. techn.) and master's degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in Informatics. He held visiting positions at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA, and University of Washington in Seattle, USA.

Harald Gall’s research is in software engineering with focus on software evolution, software quality, mining ultra-large software repositories, machine learning in software engineering, and cloud-based software engineering.

He is probably best known for his work on software evolution analysis and mining software archives. Since 1997 he has worked on devising ways in which mining these repositories can help to better understand software development, to devise predictions about quality attributes, and to exploit this knowledge in software analysis tools such as Evolizer, ChangeDistiller, or SOFAS. He is a shaper of the research area on Mining Software Repositories since 2004 and has contributed to establish it as a major area in software engineering research.

His research has been highly acclaimed with a Most Influential Paper Award, two Test of Time Award, and several Best Paper Awards in the top Software Engineering Outlets.

He is an Associate Editor of the Journal on Empirical Software Engineering (since 2015), IEEE Software (since 2015), and the Computing Journal(since 2011). He was Associate Editor of IEEE's Transactions on Software Engineering(2010-14).

He is a board member of Informatics Europe, the premier academic community for Informatics in Europe. He was an executive committee member of ACM SIGSOFT and the ACM SIGSOFT awards chair. He was president of CHOOSE, the Swiss SIG for Object-Oriented Systems and Environments.