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Mehrdad (Mike) Sabetzadeh, Ph.D., P.Eng.

Professor, Co-director of Sedna Lab
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of Ottawa
800 King Edward Avenue
Ottawa ON K1N 6N5, Canada

Email:
Office: STE 5110

I am a Full Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of Ottawa, where I am also Co-director of the Sedna Research Lab. Previously, I worked as a senior research scientist at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (Luxembourg), a permanent member of the research staff at Simula Research Laboratory (Norway), and as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at University College London (UK).





Prospective Students

I am always on the lookout for highly motivated PhD and MSc candidates interested in software engineering, model-driven engineering, requirements engineering, applied artificial intelligence, and legal compliance. Please feel free to contact me with your CV and transcripts, or alternatively include my name as a potential supervisor when you submit your official application so that it comes to my attention. Please understand that I receive a large volume of inquiries related to graduate admissions. I do my best to answer as many as I can, but it is not always possible to respond to all inquiries. Rest assured, all inquiries will be carefully considered.


Research Interests

My primary research area is software engineering, with particular interests in model-based development, requirements engineering, legal compliance, and the Internet of Things. A central focus of my work is applying artificial intelligence techniques, such as natural language processing, machine learning, and metaheuristic search, to address software engineering challenges. I am currently serving as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) and Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE). I am also actively engaged in the software engineering research community through program committee and organizational roles at leading international conferences, including ICSE, FSE, ASE, MODELS and RE.

My research emphasizes building stronger connections between academia and industry, and much of my research has been carried out in collaboration with industry partners. Over the past 15 years, I have worked with more than 30 organizations across several sectors, including government, finance, legal services, supply chain, telecommunications, maritime, energy, railways, and automotive. During this time, I have served as Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI on industry-focused research projects with a combined value exceeding C$9 million.


Teaching

ITI1121. Introduction to Computing II (Undergraduate)

Java programming. Object orientation. Abstraction principles: information hiding and encapsulation. Linked lists, stacks, queues, binary search trees. Iterative and recursive processing of data structures.

Winter 2025 (next offering: Winter 2026)

CSI5187. Applications of NLP and ML in Software Engineering (Graduate)

NLP pipeline. Conceptual modelling of the content and semantics of software engineering artifacts. Information extraction and classification. Clustering. Supervised ML. Deep learning. Large language models. Empirical evaluation of NLP and ML techniques. Prompt engineering.

Fall 2025

Publications

My DBLP entry and Google Scholar profile have a fairly complete list of my published papers.


Tools


Events

Here are some exciting upcoming events that I am involved with: