Professor Willem Visser

Software engineering, with a focus on testing and debugging, has been the basis for Professor Willem Visser’s research. He worked on the Java PathFinder (JPF) model checker, the symbolic execution extension called Symbolic PathFinder and most recently on the concolic and fuzzing tool called Coastal. He obtained his BSc, Honours and Master’s degrees from Stellenbosch University and completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He spent a number of years in the private sector as a software engineer as well as academia, lecturing at SU. In addition, he spent more than eight years doing research at the NASA Ames Research Centre in California. He is currently a Senior Principle Applied Scientist for Amazon (AWS), one of only 100s in an organisation with more than a million employees, and a Professor at SU. At AWS He leads a team of 30 Scientist in Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning. Since 2013 he has published 13 articles in journals such as IEEE Computing and the Journal of Informetrics and is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He has supervised 11 Master’s students and two PhD candidates.