Bio

Leon Moonen is a Professor and head of the Data-Driven Software Engineering Department (dataSED) at Simula Research Laboratory, Norway. He also holds a visiting professor position at the Department of Data Science and Analytics at BI Norwegian Business School. His research is aimed at the design and development of advanced, data-driven techniques and tools that support software engineers with the assessment, evolution, and operations of complex industrial software systems, with a particular interest in security and resilience in Software Systems, self-healing and self-adaptive technology and, more general, the application of machine learning and AI in Software Engineering. His research covers a wide range of topics, such as software analytics, software reverse engineering, software repository mining, machine learning, program comprehension, and empirical software engineering.

Leon prefers to work in close collaboration with industry, to ensure that his research addresses questions of practical value, and to evaluate candidate solutions in real-life circumstances. Current projects investigate automated identification and repair of software security vulnerabilities, the use of LLMs to support cyber threat intelligence, adaptive bio-inspired techniques for creating autonomously self-healing systems, smart analytics of the vast amounts of logging data produced in continuous engineering, and recommendation systems for smarter evolution and testing of software-intensive systems.

Dr. Moonen has published over 150 scientific papers (over 7700 citations, h-index: 38, i10-index: 73) and serves on steering-, organizing-, and program committees of international conferences on software maintenance (ICSM/ICSME), reverse engineering (WCRE), program understanding (ICPC), and source code analysis (SCAM) and he has (co-)organized various workshops on topics related to these areas. Before moving to Simula, he was assistant professor of Software Engineering at Delft University of Technology where he taught courses on software evolution and software architecture. He is/has been advisor to 14 PhD students (5 ongoing), 10 Post-docs (1 ongoing) and 30 MSc students (3 ongoing). He is co-founder of the Software Improvement Group, a company that specializes in the use of source code analysis to help organizations get control over their software systems. Dr Moonen received his MSc (cum laude, Computer Science, 1996) and PhD (Computer Science, 2002) from the University of Amsterdam. He is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society.

(June 2025)