Franz Wotawa received a M.Sc. in Computer Science (1994) and a PhD in 1996 both from the Vienna University of Technology. He is currently professor of software engineering at the Graz University of Technology. Since the founding of the Institute for Software Technology in 2003 to the year 2009 Franz Wotawa had been the head of the institute. His research interests include model-based and qualitative reasoning, theorem proving, mobile robots, verification and validation, and software testing and debugging. Beside theoretical foundations he has always been interested in closing the gap between research and practice. For this purposes he founded Softnet Austria in 2006, which is a nonprofit organization carrying out applied research projects together with companies. During his career FranzWotawa has written more than 310 papers for journals, books, conferences, and workshops. He supervised 79 master and 30 PhD students. For his work on diagnosis he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Intl. Diagnosis Community in 2016. Franz Wotawa has been member of a various number of program committees and organized several workshops and special issues of journals. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, the Austrian Computer Society (OCG), and the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence and a Senior Member of the AAAI.
