Name:Marcel Böhme

Bio:

Marcel Böhme is a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) in Germany where he leads the Software Security research group. His group has made foundational contributions to automatic software testing, specifically fuzzing which has become one of the most successful techniques for automatic vulnerability discovery at scale: While conventional wisdom has that testing can only show the presence of bugs but never their absence, Marcel has developed the first statistical framework to make statements about a program’s correctness after an error-less testing campaign. While testing is embarrassingly parallel, his probabilistic theory explains how the cost of bug finding is actually exponential in the number of machines, and when even the most effective systematic testing technique is outperformed by a simple, random approach. More recently, his group has been developing the statistical and causal foundations of empirical software security analysis at scale, supported by an ERC grant. To find out more about the research in our group, head over to https://mpi-softsec.github.io

Marcel is an ACM Distinguished Member, a Guest Editor-in-Chief (Registered Reports) and Associate Editor for the ACM TOSEM, the flagship journal in software engineering and a PC Chair of ACM/IEEE ASE’25 and ACM SIGSOFT ISSTA’26, two of the four top conferences in his area. He won a 2024 ERC Consolidator grant, a 2019 ARC DECRA (Australia’s ERC Starting), a 2019 Google Faculty Research Award, and several ACM Distinguished Paper awards, spotlights, and highlights at the premier publication venues for security and software engineering. Marcel received his PhD at the National University of Singapore (NUS) where he was named 2022 NUS Outstanding Young Computing Alumni.

Country:Germany

Affiliation:MPI for Security and Privacy

Research interests:Automated Software Testing, Program Analysis, Statistics