D-INFK news channel

Computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth died on 1 January 2024, just weeks before his 90th birthday. The long-​serving ETH Professor of Computer Science achieved world fame by developing the Pascal programming language in the 1970s. In 1984, he became the only German-​speaking computer scientist yet to have received the Turing Award, which is regarded as the Nobel Prize for computer science.

Dr Chengyu Zhang has been a postdoc in the Advanced Software Technologies (AST) Lab of Professor Zhendong Su since the beginning of 2022. He joined the group after completing his doctorate at the East China Normal University (ECNU) in 2021. He had come to ETH Zurich before, as a visiting doctoral student in Professor Su’s group in 2018 and 2019.

Ralf Jung joined the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich in November 2022 as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Get to know him in this short interview.

Professor Zhendong Su is awarded the prestigious ICSE Most Influential Paper Award for the paper "On the Naturalness of Software". The paper emerged from a collaboration with former students and colleagues at UC Davis.

Theodoros Theodoridis, doctoral student in the Advanced Software Technologies Lab, has won two awards at the ASPLOS 2022 conference.

In the last part of this video series, Niklaus Wirth tells us what doors the Turing Award opened for him and how he got one step closer to perfection with each programming language.

In this continuing conversation, Niklaus Wirth talks about the hurdles he had to overcome when introducing computer science to Switzerland and why the label "made in the USA" was absolutely necessary at the time.

1970, Prof. em. Niklaus Wirth developed the programming language Pascal and became world famous with it. In this conversation with Prof. em. Friedemann Mattern, Wirth talks about the beginnings of computer science and how he influenced them significantly.

In 1970, Professor emeritus Niklaus Wirth designed the programming language Pascal. It became one of the most popular teaching languages and shaped programming languages to come.

In this interview with the European Research Council, Professor Martin Vechev of the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab talks about his ERC-funded work, AI breakthroughs, and Europe’s future in the field of AI.

A team of researchers around Prof. Martin Vechev has developed Silq, the first high-level programming language for quantum computers.

Professor Juraj Hromkovic explains what language and programming have in common and what makes a good programming language for computer science education.

D-INFK Professor Martin Vechev is automating the computer programming process: he is one of the first researchers ever to teach computers how to write their own software. This makes him one of the founders of a new field of research that is growing rapidly.

Postdoctoral researcher Alex Summers of Prof. Peter Müller's Chair of Programming Methodology has received the junior AITO Dahl-​Nygaard Prize for his work on the verification of object-​oriented programs and type systems. In the interview, he talks about computer science and his passion for it.

'Reaching for the stars' has become a down-​to-earth endeavor: data-​driven, information-​rich and fast-​paced results in information technology are at the very heart of astronomy. Data-​based science is becoming recognized as a stand-​alone research area - ranking with theory and experimentation. Astroinformatics is a new discipline emerging at the intersection of astronomy/astrophysics, applied computer science and advanced statistics.

Software reliability, piracy and tampering are serious and well known threats the world is faced with. Significant attempts have been made to protect software from reverse engineering and tampering. Last week, the Software Reliability Lab at ETH Zurich, headed by Prof. Martin Vechev, released a system called JSNice which makes obfuscated and minified JavaScript code readable again. The system has already been used by more than 34,000 developers in over 140 countries.

Prof. Jürg Gutknecht built up numerous partnerships and ventured into areas such as computer-​aided art. As university professor and head of the Computer Science Department, he was influential in the educational establishment and growth of the department. Today, as an advocate for informatics in schools, Prof. Gutknecht’s main concern is to raise the level of awareness of computer literacy as a skill of the contemporary world.

Niklaus Wirth became internationally renowned for developing the Pascal programming language, allowing a generation of computer scientists to learn to program. This pioneering figure celebrates his 80th birthday – which doesn’t mean he isn’t still busy developing the simplest and most elegant programs possible.

Prof. Niklaus Wirth, one of the great pioneers of computer technology, has been praised as a designer of programming languages, compilers, operating systems and even hardware, and his research is strongly guided by the constant search for simplicity, clarity and efficiency. The following interview sought not only to highlight Niklaus Wirth’s contemporary views on the latest technological developments, but also to capture, to some degree, the personality of the computer scientist through and through.