My name is Manuel Benz and I am a second year Ph.D. candidate at Paderborn University, Germany. My main research interests are static and dynamic program analysis and, foremost, how we can combine them to mitigate the drawbacks of each other. Thereby, I focus on detecting Android security vulnerabilities and malicious program behavior. My current research addresses precise, automated Android UI test case generation to reach specific code locations, which can be used to showcase statically detected security vulnerabilities during execution.

I am also the chief maintainer of the Soot static program analysis framework which, I suppose, is well known to the ISSTA community. Prof. Dr. Eric Bodden and l will be part of this year’s Panathon - static analysis hackathon, organized by Karim Ali. There, we will implement an interpreter for Soot’s Java intermediate representation Jimple. I am very much looking forward to this event and I am curious about what we can achieve and who I will meet from the static analysis community there.

My attendance at ISSTA is sponsored by the ISSTA/ECCOP committee which I am very grateful for! Also, I will be a student volunteer this year as well as an attendee to the summer school. I especially hope to widen my knowledge about symbolic execution and compiler verification during the summer school lectures.