Prof. Armin Biere

Since August 2021 Professor Armin Biere is leading the Chair of Computer Architecture at the University Freiburg in Germany after 17 years as head of the Institute for Formal Models and Verification at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria.

Between 2000 and 2004 he held a position as Assistant Professor within the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. In 1999 Biere was working for a start-up company in electronic design automation after one year as Post-Doc with Edmund Clarke at CMU, Pittsburgh, USA. In 1997 Biere received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

His primary research interests are applied formal methods, more specifically formal verification of hardware and software, using model checking and related techniques with the focus on developing efficient SAT and SMT solvers. He is the author and co-author of more than 279 papers and served on the program committee of more than 206 international conferences and workshops. His most influential work is his contribution to Bounded Model Checking.

Decision procedures for SAT, QBF and SMT, developed by him or under his guidance rank at the top many international competitions and were awarded 107 medals including 60 gold medals. He is a recipient of an IBM faculty award in 2012, received the TACAS most influential paper in the first 20 years of TACAS award in 2014, the HVC’15 award on the most influential work in the last five years in formal verification, simulation, and testing, the ETAPS 2017 Test of Time Award, the CAV Award in 2018, the IJCAI-JAIR 2019 Award, the 1990s Most Influential Paper Award at DAC’23, and the Herbrand Award at IJCAR’24.

Besides organizing several workshops Armin Biere was co-chair of SAT’06, and FMCAD’09, was PC co-chair of HVC’12, co-chair of CAV’14, acted as co-chair of TACAS’20. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Automated Reasoning (JAR) (2011 to 2021) and the journal for Formal Methods in System Design (FMSD) (2012 – 2021). From 2019 to 2023 he filled the role of Associate Editor on the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and continues to serve on the editorial board of Journal on Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation (JSAT) since its inception in 2004, and since summer 2023 as editor in chief.

He is an editor of the Handbook of Satisfiability, for the first edition in 2009 and the second edition in 2021, and initiated and organizes the Hardware Model Checking Competition (HWMCC) from 2007-2024. From 2011-2017 he served as (first) chair and from 2017 to 2020 as vice-chair, now as counselor to the board of the SAT Association. Since 2012 he is a member of the steering committee of FMCAD. In 2006 Armin Biere co-founded NextOp Software Inc. which was acquired by Atrenta Inc. in 2012.

From 2014 to 2021 until he moved to Freiburg Prof. Armin Biere acted as chair of student affairs (Präses) for computer science, helping to organize the PhD program in computer science at JKU. During the same time until May 2015 he also acted as head of the commission of the curriculum committee (Studienkommissionsvorsitzender) for the bachelor and master program in computer science and thus was as well responsible for admission and credit transfer, for both the bachelor and master program in computer science.

Since October 2023 he acts as director of the Informatics Institute Freiburg (IIF), the department of computer science at the University of Freiburg.