Acting Prof. Dr. Mersedeh Sadeghi

Selected Publications

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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]

Pöttgen D, Sadeghi M, Unterbusch M, 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]

Sadeghi M, Carenini A, Corcho O, Rossi M, Santoro R and 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]

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More publications:
ORCID 

Academic Information

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Dr. Mersedeh Sadeghi is Acting Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Cologne. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science under the supervision  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 current research focuses on explainable software systems, with interests in automated explanation generation, interactive explainability in cyber-physical systems, and decision support systems. She teaches courses on Requirement Management and Software Engineering.

Teaching

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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

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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