Rate My Professor Willem Bester

Willem Hendrik Karel Bester serves as a Junior Lecturer in the Computer Science Division within the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University, a position he has held since 2014, succeeding his appointment as Technical Officer in 2009. Before entering academia, Bester accumulated eight years of professional experience as a software programmer and analyst in the media industry, where he engaged in system programming, web strategy development, and full-text data archiving and retrieval systems. His academic journey at Stellenbosch University commenced in 2003 with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, followed by an Honours degree and an MSc in Computer Science awarded cum laude, under the supervision of Willem Visser and Cornelia Inggs. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD supervised by Brink van der Merwe, with a focus on automata theory, particularly regular expression matching.

Bester's research interests include formal languages and automata theory, formal methods, software engineering principles applied to system programming, web-related technologies, and the efficiency and space requirements of algorithms in system programming libraries. His scholarly contributions include three notable publications: "Formalising Boost POSIX Regular Expression Matching" by Martin Berglund, Willem Bester, and Brink van der Merwe, published in the proceedings of ICTAC 2018 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 11187, pp. 99–115); "DSaaS: A Cloud Service for Persistent Data Structures" by P. B. Le Roux, S. R. Kroon, and W. H. K. Bester, in CLOSER 2016 proceedings (pp. 37–48); and "Test-Case Generation and Bug-Finding through Symbolic Execution" by W. H. K. Bester, C. P. Inggs, and W. C. Visser, which received the best computer science paper award at SAICSIT 2012 (pp. 1–9). In addition to research, Bester has extensive teaching experience, delivering courses such as Computer Science 214, 244, 252; Scientific Computing 272 and 372; and contributing to honours projects. He has supervised a range of postgraduate students, including MSc candidates on topics like static instrumentation of ELF binaries and formalisation of regular expression matching, and numerous BSc Honours students whose projects earned accolades such as best honours project in 2015 and 2016, covering areas from web-based programming submission systems to LLVM backends with obfuscation techniques and automata learning frameworks.