Acting Prof. Dr. Mersedeh Sadeghi
Research Fields and Interests
- Machine learning for software engineering — requirements, issues, design models
- Software engineering for AI-enabled systems
- Requirements engineering
- Empirical software engineering; human–AI interaction in software development
- Explainable software systems and explainable cyber-physical systems
- Smart environments as a research testbed — the SHiNE and V-SHiNE labs for reproducible explainability and human-factors studies
- LLM-based and agentic systems
- Model-driven engineering and software modelling
Earlier work: semantic interoperability, systems of systems, Internet of Things.
✎ Teaching
◈ Writing Your Thesis Projects With Us
☊ SHINE LAB
Selected Publications
Sadeghi M, Scholz S, Psoch-Bajraktari A (2026), “Formalism-Aware Rewards: Turning Model Analysis into Training Feedback for Sketch-to-Model Generation”,MODELS '26: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 29th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems [DOI] |
Sadeghi M , Scholz S, Trapp A, Unterbusch M , Vogelsang A (2026), “Explanation strategies in smart environments: Effects on usability, system understanding, and task performance”, In The Journal of Systems and Software, 112827, Elsevier. [DOI] |
Sadeghi M , Scholz S, Unterbusch M , Vogelsang A (2026), “V-SHiNE: A Virtual Smart Home Framework for Explainability Evaluation”, Demo Track, 2026 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), ✪ Best Demo Paper Award [DOI] |
Sadeghi M, Carenini A, Corcho O, Rossi M, Santoro R and Vogelsang A (2024), “Interoperability of heterogeneous Systems of Systems: from requirements to a reference architecture”, In The Journal of Supercomputing, 80(7), pp. 8954–8987. Springer. [DOI] |
Pöttgen D, Sadeghi M, Unterbusch M, Vogelsang A (2024), “From Issues to Insights: RAG-based Explanation Generation from Software Engineering Artifacts”, In NLBSE ’26. workshop at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 26), ✪ Best Paper Award at NLBSE ’26 [DOI] |
Sadeghi M, Herbold L, Unterbusch M and Vogelsang A (2024), “Smartex: A Framework for Generating User-Centric Explanations in Smart Environments”, In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), pp. 106–113. IEEE. [DOI] |
Sadeghi M, Pöttgen D, Ebel P and Vogelsang A (2024), “Explaining the Unexplainable: The Impact of Misleading Explanations on Trust in Unreliable Predictions for Hardly Assessable Tasks”, In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 36–46. ✪ Best Paper Award at UMAP 2024 [DOI] |
Sadeghi M, Sartor L and Rossi M (2022), “A Semantic-Based Access Control Approach for Systems of Systems”, In ACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review, 21(4), pp. 5–19. ACM, New York, NY, USA. [DOI] |
Sadeghi M, Klös V and Vogelsang A (2021), “Cases for Explainable Software Systems: Characteristics and Examples”, In 2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW), pp. 181–187. IEEE. [DOI] |
More publications:
ORCID
Academic Information
Dr. Mersedeh Sadeghi is Acting Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Cologne. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Politecnico di Milano. She was awarded the Telecom Italia (TIM Group) Ph.D. scholarship, which enabled her to collaborate with the TIM Smart Space Innovation Lab during her doctoral studies. Her research focused on semantic and model-based approaches for context-aware services in smart environments.
Following her Ph.D., she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Politecnico di Milano, contributing to several EU projects (including Shift2Rail , IP4MaaS and SPRINT) on modern software architecture and interoperability in distributed systems. She also served as a teaching assistant and supervised Master's and Ph.D. students.
Her research applies machine learning to software engineering artifacts — requirements, issues and design models — with recent work on generating design models from informal sketches and on retrieval-augmented, evidence-grounded analysis of issue trackers. A second, continuing line treats explainability as a software engineering quality: eliciting explanation needs, generating explanations at runtime in smart environments, and evaluating empirically how they affect understanding, trust and task performance. To support that work she founded the SHiNE Lab and developed V-SHiNE, a virtual smart-home environment for reproducible explainability studies. Her current interest is in bringing the two strands together — engineering and evaluating AI-based development tools as the AI-enabled systems they are, including how engineers judge whether to rely on what those tools produce. She teaches Software Engineering, Requirements Management, Empirical Software Engineering, and Software Engineering for AI.
Teaching
Software Engineering - Graduate Course for Bachelor and Master of Science
Institute of Computer Science, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Requirement Management, Graduate/undergraduate Course
Department of Mathematic and Computer Science, University of Cologne
Project: Advanced (Agile) Software Engineering- Graduate Course for Master of Science
Institute of Computer Science, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Empirical Software Engineering - Graduate Course for Master of Science
Institute of Computer Science, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Seminar: Software Engineering for AI - Graduate Course for Master of Science
Institute of Computer Science, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Software Engineering II, Graduate Course
Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano
Software Methodologies and Architectures for Security
Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano
Other Scientific Activities
Editor
Explainability in Automated Software Engineering (Ex-ASE)
Special Issue at Automated Software Engineering Journal, Springer
Publicity Chair
Conference 52nd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA
2026),
Krakow, Poland
Committee Member
EXTRA (Explainable and Trustworthy Application)
Conference 52nd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA
2026), Krakow, Poland
Organization Committee
1st International Workshop on Explainable Automated Software Engineering (ExASE 2025)
co-located with 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering(ASE 25), Seoul,
South Korea
Organization Committee
Second (2022) and Third (2023) International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Ex-
plainable Systems (RE4ES)
co-located 30th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 22), Melbourne, Australia
co-located 31th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 23), Hannover, Germany
Guest Editor
Semantic Web journal (SWJ)
Track: Special Issue on Transport Data on the Web
Organizing Committee
3rd International Workshop on Semantics for Transport ( Sem4Tra2021 )
co-located with SEMANTiCS, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2021
Chair
Software Architecture Models and Systems session
The 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering SEKE2021, Pittsburgh, USA, 2021
Organizing Committee
2nd International Workshop on Semantics for Transport (Sem4Tra2020)
co-located with 20th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2020), Helsinki, Finland, 2010
Committee Member
W3C Workshop on Data Models for Transportation
hosted by Uber Corporation, California, USA, 2019
Organizing Committee
1st International Workshop on Semantics for Transport ( Sem4Tra2019 )
co-located with SEMANTiCS, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2019