Robert Hirschfeld is a Professor of Computer Science at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany. There he founded and leads the Software Architecture Group which is concerned with fundamental elements and structures of software. Methods and tools are developed for improving the comprehension and design of complex and interesting systems.

Robert is interested in programming experiences and small system kernels. With his group he is working on dynamic programming languages, development tools, and runtime environments to make interactive programming more approachable. His preferred environment for exploring ideas is Squeak/Smalltalk.

He served as a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (東京工業大学) and The University of Tokyo (東京大学), Japan.

Robert was a senior researcher with DoCoMo Euro-Labs, the European research facility of NTT DoCoMo Japan, where he worked on infrastructure components for next generation mobile communication systems with a focus on dynamic service adaptation and context-oriented programming.

Prior to joining DoCoMo Euro-Labs, he was a principal engineer at Windward Solutions in Sunnyvale, California, where he designed and implemented distributed object systems, consulted in the area of object database technologies, and developed innovative software products and applications.

Robert received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany.