Nikolas Herbst

Nikolas Herbst is a Professor and Chair of Software Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, University of Würzburg. He leads research in Software Performance Engineering, High-Performance Data Processing, and Autonomic Computing. His work focuses on Cloud and Serverless Computing, Elasticity, and Time Series Analysis. He currently serves as JMU Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and holds leadership roles in SPEC Research Groups and ICPE Steering Committees.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2018)
• Master of Computer Science (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2012)

Research Interests: His lab develops tools like CHAMELEON, TELESCOPE, and BUNGEE for cloud elasticity and performance analysis. He emphasizes benchmarking, resource demand estimation, and self-aware systems. Recent projects include real-time forest monitoring (ROOT) and serverless scientific computing (SOS).

Teaching: Teaches Operating Systems, Performance Engineering & Benchmarking, and Self-Aware Computing at both undergraduate and graduate levels since 2012.

Awards:

• 10 Year Most Impact Paper Award (ACM/SPEC ICPE 2023)
• SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (2019)
• IBM PhD Fellowship (2014)

Grants & Projects: Coordinates DFG-funded projects like bidt-ROOT (2023–2026) and SOS (2025–2029). Leads development of open-source tools for cloud performance analysis, including WCF (Workload Classification & Forecasting).