Prof. em. Dr. Bertrand Meyer

Bertrand Meyer has been Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich since October 1, 2001. From 2004 to 2006 he was chairman of the Computer Science Department. He has lived in France and the US (degrees from École Polytechnique, ENS Télécom, Stanford MSc, Sorbonne MA in Russian lit., DEA, Nancy Dr. Sc.) and worked for the R&D department of a large company and for the University of California before founding, in 1985, Eiffel Software in Santa Barbara (www.eiffel.com), a technology company which he headed until 2001 and of which he remains Chief Architect.

His work has covered diverse aspects of software engineering with a special focus on methods, techniques, languages and tools for improving software quality. Many of the results are embodied in Eiffel, a general software development and programming language for building high-quality systems, used by companies in the financial industry, aerospace, defense, health care and other areas for mission-critical application areas.  He introduced widely used software engineering ideas such as "Design by Contract" for building reliable systems and "trusted components".

Besides articles, his publications include ten books on software engineering topics, especially object technology with the two successive editions (1988 and 1997) of "Object-Oriented Software Construction", recipient of the Jolt Award and translated into many languages. In 2009 he published "Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well using Object Technology and Design by Contract" (Springer), an introductory programming textbook using novel pedagogical ideas and based on seven years of teaching the introductory computer science course at ETH.

His work and that of his group revolve around techniques for transforming the process of software production, and bringing a new level of guaranteed quality to software products. This involves object technology; component models; techniques for developing trusted components; automated testing techniques (the AutoTest framework); automated techniques for correcting program bugs (the AutoFix framework); automated proofs and applications of formal methods; concurrency and distribution, through the SCOOP model of concurrent object-oriented computation; techniques for object persistence. He is also interested in topics bordering on politics and economics, such as software patents and the phenomenon of offshore software development. He has devoted particular attention to techniques of teaching programming, especially at the introductory level (se.inf.ethz.ch/touch).

Other activities include: chairman of the TOOLS conference series on object technology (since 1988, now hosted at ETH www.tools.ethz.ch); publisher of the Journal of Object Technology (JOT), published at ETH since 2001 (www.jot.fm); editor of the ISO standard for Eiffel. He is president of Informatics Europe, the association of European computer science departments and research laboratories. He is a member of the (French) Académie des Technologies and chair since 2009 of the TC2 committee (Software) of the International Federation for Information Processing. Awards include: Jolt Award (1998); Dahl-Nygaard award for object technology (2005); ACM Fellow (2009); ACM Software System Award (2008).