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

Associate 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 an Associate Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) of 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, requirements engineering, applied artificial intelligence, or 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 the application 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 of these inquiries as I can, but it is not always possible to respond to all the inquiries. Rest assured, all the inquiries will be carefully looked into.



Research Interests

My main research area is software engineering with specific interests in requirements engineering, IoT, model-based development, and legal compliance. A key aspect of my research is the application of artificial intelligence techniques, including natural language processing, machine learning and metaheuristic search, to software engineering problems. I am passionate about fostering stronger ties between academia and industry. I have conducted most of my research in close collaboration with industry partners. In the past ten years, I have worked with over 25 partners in various sectors, including government, finance, legal services, telecommunications, maritime, energy, railways, and automotive. During this period, I have been Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI for industry-oriented research projects worth more than C$7 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 2024 (next offering: Winter 2025)

CSI5137C. 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 2024


Publications

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



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