Photo of Zach Oster's head

Zachary J. Oster

Associate Professor and Cybersecurity Programs Coordinator
Department of Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

McGraw 108, 150 Hamilton Green Way, Whitewater, WI 53190
Phone: (+1) 262-472-5006
Email: osterz AT uww DOT edu

Recipient of the 2017 University Faculty/Staff Academic Advising Award

Education

Teaching

Fall 2024

On sabbatical: no teaching

Spring 2025

  • COMPSCI 271 Computer Organization and Assembly Programming (2 sections)
  • COMPSCI 424 Operating Systems
  • COMPSCI 776 Advanced Software Engineering

See what courses I have taught previously

Research

Improving the practice of requirements engineering—elicitation, specification, analysis, and verification of software system requirements and design preferences—using both human (listening) and computational (automated preference reasoning) methods.

Download my CV or visit my DBLP page

Current work

  • Developing more efficient techniques for identifying conflicting preferences in a conditional importance network (CI-net). Collaborators: Samik Basu (Iowa State), Ganesh Ram Santhanam (Iowa State).
  • Visualizing software requirement preferences and conflicts as modeled in a conditional importance network (CI-net). Past collaborators: Josh Leinberger (UW-W student), Pablo Martinez (UW-W student). Previously supported in part by UW-Whitewater Strategic Initiative grant (Lopamudra Mukherjee, PI).

Recent publications

  • Improving Requirements Engineering Through Listening Research, 1st International Workshop on Learning from Other Disciplines for Requirements Engineering (D4RE), co-located with RE 2018.
  • Efficient Satisfiability Verification for Conditional Importance Networks, 5th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2017).
  • Scalable Modeling and Analysis of Qualitative Preferences: A Qualitative Approach using CI-Nets: paper with Ganesh Ram Santhanam and Samik Basu, RE:Next! track of RE 2015 (published version at IEEE Xplore, preprint version)

Read more about my research interests

Hobbies

Playing my clarinet, collecting coins, and more.

Find out what I like to do for fun

Links
  • PhD Comics: A Web comic about life in graduate school. Funny and often very true.
  • XKCD: Another Web comic I like.
  • The RISKS Digest: Weekly (or more frequent) summary of computer-related risks to the public, mostly caused by designers and developers (and customers, too) who don't think hard enough about security and safety. Sometimes funny; sometimes rage-inducing. Important reading for those of us who want to see technology used responsibly.
  • Hacker News: Community-moderated news site with news and discussions about technology and anything "that good hackers would find interesting" (where "hacker" means "clever technical problem-solver", not "person who cracks into systems that they're not authorized to access"). The comments are usually as good as, or better than, the posted links. A daily read for me.
  • rachelbythebay : Writing: Stories from an experienced system administrator who has worked in Silicon Valley for many years. Entertaining and informative, especially if you're interested in DevOps, just Ops, or IT work in general. Not much about software development here.
  • The Jargon Lexicon: An extensive dictionary of hacker slang. Useful for understanding tech people's jokes, and as a window into the history of the field.
  • "Subject to Change" (Barbara Fister, Library Babelfish blog): "All of the technology we depend on is fragile. [...] As we go about our digital days, hooked on digital devices, it’s something to think about. What’s our plan B?" (This is why I use Google Maps, but not Google navigation.)
  • College radio stations I like: WSUW "The Edge" (UW-Whitewater), WSUM "The Snake on the Lake" (UW-Madison), KURE (Iowa State)