Emeritus Faculty

Zehnder und Wirth — Carl August Zehnder and Niklaus Wirth with the computer *Lilith*. Photo: Christian Beutler / NZZ

Since ETH Zurich introduced its own computer science curriculum in 1981, numerous faculty members have shaped computer science research and passed on their skills to a younger generation. Without their outstanding work and contributions to the department, D-INFK would not be the same today. We thank all of them for their work, their valuable teaching, and their innovative research contributions.

Browse the list below of all our former professors and read about how they formed our department.

Click here for more information about the history of the department.

Juraj Hromkovic
Faculty member from 2004 to 2024

Juraj Hromkovic is a Professor of Computer Science and was a faculty member at ETH Zurich from January 2004 to January 2024.

Next to active research in various fields of theoretical computer science, the main focus of his work and his publications has always been on education for teachers of Computer Science and the illustration of the basics of computer science to non-professionals.

Born in Bratislava in 1958, Juraj Hromkovic studied computer science at Comenius University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1986 and his habilitation in 1989. From 1990 to 1994, he was a visiting professor at the University of Paderborn, and in 1994, he received a professorship at the Institute of Informatics at the University of Kiel. From 1997 to 2003, he led the Chair of Computer Science 1 at RWTH Aachen. Since 2004, he has been a professor at ETH Zurich for Information Technology and Education.

Juraj Hromkovic’s research and teaching interests focus on informatics education, algorithmics for hard problems, complexity theory with special emphasis on the relationship between determinism, randomness, and non-determinism. One of his main activities is writing textbooks that make complex recent discoveries and methods accessible for students and practitioners, and so contributing to the speed up of the transformation of new paradigmatic research results into educational folklore. To introduce the subject of informatics to school education, Hromkovic founded the Centre for Computer Science Education (ABZ) in 2005. Throughout his whole life, Juraj Hromkovic was always very devoted to the education of computer science teachers.

In 2001, Juraj Hromkovic was elected member of the Slovak Academic Society. Since 2010, he is also a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2015, he was honored by the Slovak state award Goodwill Envoy and in 2017, he received the Pribina Cross of the first order from the President of the Slovak Republic.

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Cary D. Kornfeld
Faculty member from 2004 to 2008

Cary D. Kornfeld was a researcher, teacher, and inventor in the field of computer science. Kornfeld joined ETH in early 2004 to head a small research group on stereoscopic imaging and became Full Adjunct Professor in 2008 but went on medical leave shortly thereafter. He passed away on May 15, 2016, in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 69 years.

In 1969, Cary D. Kornfeld graduated with a Bachelor's degree in chemistry from UCLA. His studies were funded by an NSF Undergraduate Research Fellowship. He then found his way north to Silicon Valley where he worked on several software projects. He later returned to academia and joined the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. When Xerox PARC allowed graduate students to use their VLSI facilities, he moved there and built a hardware prototype of a flat panel display that was an early version of ePaper. In 1985, he graduated with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford (advised by Michael Flynn). For the next 15 years, he worked at several research laboratories (AT&T Bell Laboratories, NEC Research Institute, Interval Research) and was quite productive. He built an optically programmed neuro-computer, a low-cost autostereoscopic television system, and the Responsive Workbench, a large stereoscopic bench intended to integrate virtual objects into real-world settings. A common theme in his work was to use software (and programmable processors) to replace expensive (physical) hardware (e.g., expensive fixtures to calibrate stereoscopic cameras). At the Stanford Medical School, he built a digital stereoscopic video educational facility for teaching anatomy and surgery that won the first prize at the Hackers Conference.

At Princeton University, Professor Kornfeld taught computer architecture and operating systems. At ETH Zurich, he developed a class on stereoscopic imaging that was offered for several years and was extremely popular with the students. Cary Kornfeld had realized early on that programs could cheaply solve many problems that used to require expensive hardware solutions (hardware as found in a hardware store, i.e., rods, tripods, optical benches, not processors and PCs, of which he used many). But Cary Kornfeld did not just teach software design and engineering, his class also covered visual perception, human biology and chemistry. To obtain credit, students programmed cameras and display systems and each team produced a stereoscopic movie. Several of the movies were shown at various film festivals in Switzerland and abroad.

Jiří Matoušek
Faculty member from 2012 to 2015

Jiří Matoušek was a brilliant and outstanding mathematician and computer scientist. He was a Full Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich from 2012 until his death, in 2015.

Matoušek studied at Charles University in Prague, where he also took his doctorate and became first an Assistant Professor and then, from 2000, Professor of Computer Science. From 1996 onwards, he spent three or four months of every year at ETH Zurich as a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science, carrying out research and also becoming increasingly involved in education. Loyalty to his home university in Prague meant that, for a long time, he was reluctant to take up an offer of regular employment at ETH Zurich. Finally, however, he was persuaded to accept a professorship in computer science with reduced hours at ETH Zurich, a job which he performed with great commitment, pleasure, and passion from 2012 until his death.

Although his research focused on combinatorics, discrete geometry, and algorithmics, his interests ranged well beyond these areas. He was a recognised expert in fields including algorithmic geometry, topological methods, discrepancy theory, and linear programming. Time and again, he ventured boldly into new territory, linked different disciplines together and was soon able to share his findings in lectures and in books that were of major significance and widely read internationally. Being involved in this work was a huge privilege for his students and colleagues here at ETH Zurich.

Anyone who knew him could sense the depth in his approach, and not only in his scientific work. He was supremely capable of concentrating on the essentials while at the same time always remaining open to other people’s questions. He set high standards for himself but was tolerant and warm-hearted towards others, while his dry sense of humour was inimitable and unforgettable. Jiří Matoušek died on 9 March 2015, a day before his 52nd birthday. The members of ETH Zurich, his former students, and colleagues will all retain fond memories of him.

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Bertrand Meyer
Faculty member from 2001 to 2016

Bertrand Meyer was a Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich from 2001 until 2016 and Chairman of the Department of Computer Science from 2004 to 2006. In 1985, he founded Eiffel Software, a technology company which he headed until 2001 and of which he remains Chief Architect.

Professor Meyer was born in France in 1950. He received his Master's degree in engineering from the École Polytechnique in Paris, a second Master's degree from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from the Université de Nancy, France. He had a technical and managerial career for nine years at Électricité de France, and for three years he was a member of the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2001, he started his position at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich.

His work covers 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". 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, and 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. Further, he has devoted particular attention to techniques of teaching programming, especially at the introductory level.

In 2006, Meyer received the Software System Award of the ACM for "impact on software quality" in recognition of the design of Eiffel. He is a 2008 Fellow of the ACM as well as a recipient of the 2009 Harlan Mills Award of the IEEE Computer Society.

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Hans-Jörg Schek
Faculty member from 1988 to 2005

Hans-Jörg Schek is a Professor of Computer Science and was a faculty member at ETH Zurich from 1988 to 2005, where he headed the Institute of Information Systems. He retired end of March 2005.

Professor Schek was born in 1940 in Hanover, Germany. He studied mathematics at the University of Stuttgart and earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering in 1972, also from the University of Stuttgart. During this time he developed – together with his dissertation advisor, Professor Linkwitz – a new method for the computation of prestressed cable-net roofs and applied this method to the analysis of roofs at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. In 1972, he joined the IBM Scientific Centre in Heidelberg as a research member and became a project manager in 1978. There, he investigated end-user-oriented interfaces and transferred them increasingly into database system research with special emphasis on integration with information retrieval systems. During this period he also completed his habilitation on computer methods for network computation and was given venia legendi for Mathematical Methods in Cicil Engineering and Geodesy from the University of Stuttgart in 1978. From 1983 to 1988, he was a Full Professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt. The DASDBS database project that he established there is known for its contributions to data modeling (NF2 model), to multi-level transactions, and to extensible spatial databases. He became a Full Professor at ETH Zurich in 1988, where he has directed the database research group which at the beginning consisted of the Darmstadt team joining him with the move to Zürich.

His research interests included data models, interoperability of databases and cooperation with application systems, generic, extensible object managers, and transaction management. At ETH together with his team, he continued working in the directions above and later moved more genererally into the the administration of information spaces with special emphasis on digital libraries, multimedia databases and coordination of services.
Professor Schek was a founder and editor-in-chief of the VLDB Journal. His awards include ACM Fellow (2001) and the ACM Sigmod Contribution Award (2007).

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