Nicolas Sebastian Schuler
PhD student at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
I study how software systems can adapt to changing conditions while remaining dependable. My doctoral research treats the points where learned components hand results to planners, monitors, and policies as architectural seams: specified, checked at runtime, and able to evolve.
Research questions
Software needs to respond when its environment changes or something goes wrong. I explore how to make those responses useful, understandable, and checkable.
- Doctoral research
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When a learned model passes a prediction, label, or text to a rule-based component, which assumptions can that component rely on, and how can that boundary be specified, monitored, and revalidated as both sides change?
- Reasoning in software
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Whether language models preserve how strongly a stakeholder meant a requirement. Submitted to the Journal of Systems and Software
How an image explanation can become logical facts that formal reasoning can check. AISoLA 2025
- Further studies
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Which crash evidence helps a language model repair a program. ISSRE 2026 and ASE 2026
Evaluating explanations of federated models. Preprint, submitted to Information Fusion
Each question has a paper behind it; see my selected papers. For software and supporting material, explore my projects; for thesis and project enquiries, see teaching and supervision.
News
- Best Paper Award at the ECSA 2026 Doctoral Symposium (Bolzano) for “Architecting Self-Adaptive Systems with Learned and Symbolic Components”
- TraceGate tool paper accepted at ASE 2026 Tools and Datasets
- TraceGate accepted at the ISSRE 2026 Research Track
- Preprint: Metric-Guided Attribution Fusion in Explainable Federated Learning (submitted to Information Fusion)
- “Bridging Explanations and Logics” accepted at AISoLA 2025
Away from research
Outside of work, I’m learning 🇯🇵 Japanese and enjoy riding my 🏍️ motorcycle. Coffee and pizza are usually welcome, too.
If you’d like to talk about research, software, or a shared interest, get in touch.
Best regards,
Nicolas