Dr. Felix Härer is a lecturer and researcher at the Digital Trust Competence Center at FHNW in Basel and externally at the University of Fribourg, focusing on Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies such as AI and Blockchain, in addition to topics in Software Engineering, Cloud Computing and other forms of Distributed Systems, Data Science, and Systems and Software Modeling.

Profile

• Lecturer and researcher at the Digital Trust Competence Center at FHNW and externally at the University of Fribourg
• Background in IT Security, Computer Science and Information Systems
• Professional experience in education and industry projects at the University of Bamberg (Germany), University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and FHNW (Switzerland), industry work for Siemens Healthineers in Software Engineering and Testing (Forchheim, Germany), in addition to consulting and research work
• Expert roles: Member of the IEEE Blockchain Group, Switzerland Section (technical program committee head, https://ieee.ch/blockchain/) and the UN/CEFACT “team of specialists” on e-commerce and supply chain data standards
• Current talks: keynote “Computational Trust” at COCOLE 2024 and keynote “Blockchain Interoperability” at BC4IS 2023
• Workshop (co-)organization: B4ISE 2025, B4TDS 2023-2024, DESRIST 2023 (conference track), Blockchain Forum 2023
• PhD committee, external member: Victor Amaral de Sousa, PhD (05/2024)
• Program committee member and reviewer for journals and conferences such as IEEE Transactions, IEEE Access, WWW, BISE, EM, EMISAJ, ICBC, CAiSE, CCGrid

Areas of expertise and research interests

• Digital Trust, Cybersecurity, Emerging Technologies such as Cloud, Blockchain, AI-based tools, Authentication and Encryption, Architectures such as Zero Trust, Software Security, Network Security, Data Protection
• Software Engineering, including development, requirements engineering, project management using Hermes 5, Scrum, Lean and Kanban, technical experience with various languages and frameworks (frontend, backend, web, mobile), DevOps and CI/CD with virtual infrastructures
• Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, Networks, including applications for cloud platforms, architectures for scalability, security, serverless computing, data and compute infrastructures, blockchain (platforms, applications, tokens, CBDC, smart contracts, attestation and auditability)
• Data Science and Data Management, including statistics and business intelligence tools, databases, ETL tools, data analytics using statistics and AI methods
• Modeling of Systems and Software for business processes (BPMN), enterprise architectures and IT (ArchiMate), conceptual modeling and software modeling
• AI and Knowledge-based Systems, including data analytics and natural language processing with LLMs and Chatbots, embeddings and RAG, supervised and unsupervised methods such as for machine learning, clustering, topic modeling, knowledge graphs (ontologies, semantic data, linked data), software and frameworks such as statistics tools, data mining tools and python frameworks

Teaching – current courses

• Bachelor Business Information Technology: IT-Security
• Bachelor Wirtschaftsinformatik: IT-Security
• Master Business Information Systems: Cyber Security and Resilience

- Supervision of student projects, bachelor and master theses
- Projects in Digital Trust and other areas of expertise (see profile)

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