Marlon Dumas elected as Professor of Information Systems

University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science opens a new position in autumn – the professorship of information systems. The new position will be held by current Professor of Software Engineering Marlon Dumas, who is ranked among the world’s top 1% of most cited researchers in the area of computer science.

The objective of the professorships of information systems and software engineering is to support and supplement one another. The division of software engineering into two was caused by the faculty’s need to cover both software development processes and methods as well as the architecture and application areas of information systems. With these changes, the Chair of Software Engineering is able to better respond to the expectations of the industry. The new professorship of information systems will concentrate on identifying IT systems needed by organisations at certain moments of time, while the focus of software engineering is directed to effective creation of such systems and their compliance with the users’ needs.

“Establishing the new professorship was necessary because of the rapid growth in the number of our students in recent years. People’s workload has also increased due to the addition of new cross-faculty modules. The new full-time professorships are covered with permanent contracts, i.e. they correspond to high-level tenure,” said Head of the Institute of Computer Science Jaak Vilo.

According to Marlon Dumas, his aim as a Professor of Information Systems is to build strong contacts with local and European software industry, especially in the area of predictive and cognitive information systems. “This spring we already started two such projects, one in cooperation with Swedbank to supplement their services by means of predictive analytics. In the second project with GoSwift, we want to develop predictive tracking methods to develop effective queuing systems,” Dumas explained. Naturally, work also continues in the field of process mining, with the focus on creating open-source projects and practical applications. As a new project, Professor Dumas and his workgroup plan to work on chat interfaces and other applications of artificial intellect in companies’ information systems.

Dietmar Pfahl, who takes over the professorship of software engineering, plans to focus on data-based approaches, which help to improve the software industry development processes. “Specific research directions are related to data analytics in the development of energy-efficient software products, automated approach to open innovation, and reducing technical deficiencies in software industry,” said Pfahl, who currently works as Associate Professor of Software Engineering.

Both professors start work on 1 September 2017.

Additional information:

Marlon Dumas, Professor of Software Engineering, 737 5473, marlon.dumas@ut.ee  

Dietmar Pfahl, Associate Professor of Software Engineering, 737 5432, dietmar.pfahl@ut.ee