Prof Dr Chih-Hong Cheng has been appointed to the professorship for Safety and Explainability of Learning Systems at the Department of Computing Science. Previously, he held an associate professorship in Software Engineering and Interaction Design at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he continues to be active as a visiting researcher. 

Cheng studied at National Taiwan University, where he earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2008. In 2012, he received his doctorate in computer science from the Technical University of Munich. This was followed by positions in government and industrial research, including at the Research Institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software-intensive Systems (fortiss). At the same time, he took on interim professorships in Munich and Hildesheim before accepting the call to Gothenburg in 2024. 

Cheng’s research focuses on the development of safe, machine learning-supported autonomous systems. To this end, he designs processes, algorithms and tools to detect errors at an early state and ensure correct execution. In addition, Cheng has developed the open-source-tool ComOpT for testing autonomous driving systems. For this, he was awarded first place in the AI testing competition organised by the renowned Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).