Bernhard Steffen

Bernhard Steffen is a German computer scientist and professor at the TU Dortmund University, Germany. His research focuses on various facets of formal methods ranging from program analysis and verification, to workflow synthesis, to test-based modeling, and machine learning.
After his PhD at the University of Kiel supervised by Hans Langmaack, Steffen spent two years as a research fellow at the LFCS where he co-developed the Edinburgh Concurrency Workbench and authored one of the earliest papers on how to adequately model probabilistic processes, before joining the University of Aarhus in 1989 in a postdoc position. From 1990 to 1992, he was an associate professor at the RWTH Aachen, before he became full professor at the University of Passau. Since 1997, he has held the chair of programming systems at TU Dortmund University where he was Dean of Computer Science between 2002 and 2006 as well as a member of the Senate in 2006 and 2007. In Dortmund, he developed the concept of active automata learning towards a practical means for model-based testing that does not require any a priori models.