פרופ' אלן הרטמן

Associate Professor (Emeritus) at Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa since 2021.

Previously I spent 31 years with IBM’s Research Division doing research into Services, Data Privacy, Software Engineering, Hardware Verification, Algorithms, Optimization, and Storage Technologies; followed by 5 years as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Haifa

I have worked in IBM Labs in Haifa (Israel), Bangalore (India) and Toronto (Canada), and consulted for Telstra Labs in Melbourne (Australia).

My postdoctoral studies were at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo (Canada).

My formal education is in Pure Mathematics, comprising a B. Sc. (Hons 1) from Monash University (Australia), an M. Sc. from the Technion Israel Institute for Technology, and a Ph. D. from the University of Newcastle (Australia).

I have published extensively in books, journals and conference proceedings. I hold 17 patents. Full details of my publications and citations are available here.

According to the database of standardized citation indicators published in October 2020, I am in the leading 2% of researchers in my field.

I was born and grew up in Melbourne, Australia, moved to Newcastle, Australia for my Ph. D. studies, spent a year in Haifa at the Technion getting my Masters degree, and meeting my wife in a combinatorics class. My postdoctoral studies were at the University of Waterloo in Canada, from where I moved to Israel and began a long career with the Research Division of IBM. I worked for IBM in Haifa mostly, but also in Toronto Canada, and Bangalore, India. I am now a retired academic at the University of Haifa, Department of Information Systems, participating in several research projects, but no longer teaching or supervising students.

I have participated actively in several fields of research for the past 45 years, publishing many papers and patents. My first years of research were in the area of Combinatorial Design Theory where I proved a number of well-known results including the asymptotic existence of resolvable Steiner Quadruple Systems. I completed the proof of the existence of resolvable Steiner Quadruple Systems in 1987, seven years after finishing my doctorate on the subject. I also initiated the study of “Halving the Complete Design” which has become an active area of research and generated some beautiful new results.

Subsequently, I began working in a variety of areas in Computer Science, most notably in the automation of software testing and in the movement for model-based software and systems engineering. My interest in the area grew from a study of formal methods for hardware testing and a desire to adapt these techniques to the world of software engineering. I was involved in the efforts to standardize the UML as a software modeling language and I founded the European Conference on Model Driven Architecture, serving as its Chair and Steering Committee Leader from 2003 till 2009.

In 2008 I began my studies of Service Science in the context of IBM’s IT service delivery systems in Bangalore. I continue to be involved in the study of Service Engineering with emphasis on services for emerging markets, services in the public sector, and mobile services. I also founded and chaired the first international conference on services in emerging markets (ICSEM).