Supervised Graduate Students
	-------- Bruce Matichuk (PhD student (Since September 2022): Neurosymbolic Response Generation) [Co supervised with Dr. R. Goebel] Chenyang Huang (PhD student (Since September 2019): Non-Autoregressive Models for Response Generation) Fahim Hassan (PhD student (Since November 2019): Public health) [Co supervised with Dr. C. Nykiforuk] Amir Salimi (PhD student (Since August 2021): Signal Processing and Machine Learning:) [Co supervised with Dr. A. Hindle] Sheila Schoepp (PhD student (Since January 2021): Reinforcement Learning for adaptive machines) -------- Parnian Yousefi (MSc student (Since March 2018): Explainable Machine Learning for Health application) Yang Guo (MSc student (Since September 2025) : Policy library in reinforcement learning for fast adaptation Iain Smith (MSc student (Since September 2023): Explainable AI with Counter Factual Reasoning) Ali Rafiei (MSc student (Since September 2023): Deep Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy Mahvash Siavashpour (MSc student (Since September 2023): NLP for Precision Health) Kiana Aghakasiri (MSc student (Since September 2023): LLM based de-identification of medical data) [Co-supervised with Dr. R. Mitchell] Alex Lamb Foster (MSc student (Since September 2023): Fenced LLMs for Resource Retrieval) Masoud Jafaripour (MSc student (Since May 2024): Automatic Machine Adaptation)
Previous Visiting Scholars
	Kartik Vishal Deshpande From September 2023 to April 2025 (Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellowship, IIT Roorkee, India -Indian Science and Engineering Research Board) Peng Cao From August 2011 to August 2013 (Visiting from Northeastern University, Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China) Kejia Zhang From September 2008 to August 2009 (Visiting from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China) Mnawer Nulahmat From July 2002 to June 2003 (Visiting from Xinjiang University, Urumqi, Xinjiang, China) Sílvio Cazella, From November 2003 to July 2004 (Visiting from University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil)

Former PDFs

Shadan Golestan (Postdoctoral Fellow: Adaptive Machines, Reinforcement Learning) [2024]

Matthew Reeson (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Chatbot development) [2023]

Jasmine Noble (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Chatbot development) [2021-2023]

Tyler Marshall (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Chatbot development) [2023-2023]

Johannes Günther (Post-Doctoral Fellow: RL and Machine adaptation) [2018-2023]

Juliano Rabelo (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Natural Language processing) [2018-2021][With Randy Goebel]

Amine Trabelsi (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Natural Language processing) [2019-2020]

Colin Bellinger (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Machine Learning) [2016-2018]

Mi-Young Kim (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Information Extraction from Natural Language Text) [2010-2015][With Randy Goebel]

Nathaniel Rossol (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Multimedia) [2015]

Sajib Barua (Post-Doctoral Fellow: Spatial Data Mining) [2014]

Former Supervised Students

• 
  Moriom Chowdhury Kumu (MSc.) January 2026)
  Thesis Title: Explaining Black-Box AI Models with BARBiE: An Associative Rule-Based Interactive Framework

• 
  Hadi Sheikhi Mohammadabadi (MSc.) December 2025
  Thesis Title: Large language Models and Their Ability to Utilize Knowledge Graphs for Dialogue Generation

• 
  Afraz Khan (Undergraduate Student Internship - Summer and Fall 2025)
  Title: Reward function reshaping with LLMs

• 
  Yang Guo (Undergraduate Student Internship - Summer 2025)
  Title: Policy library for reinforcement learning

• 
  Tahsin Mostafa (MSc. Course-based) April 2025
  Essay Title: Developing Scalable Kingfisher
• 
  Varshini Prakash (MSc.): July 2024
  Thesis Title: Integrating Conversational Pathways with a Chatbot Builder Platform

• 
  Ashima Anand (MSc. Course-based) June 2024
  Essay Title: Enhancing Kingfisher algorithm for high-dimensional associative classification in retail data

• 
  Zahin Sufiyan (MSc. ): January 2024
  Thesis Title: A Study of the Efficacy of generative Flow Networks for Robotics and machine Fault-Adaptation

• 
  Yashar Talebirad (MSc. ): January 2024
  Thesis Title: Towards Community search in Uncertain Graphs

• 
  Mohamad Ali Gharaat (MSc. ): December 2023
  Thesis Title: Finding reliable resources and Chatting with Mira while considering emotions when the scenario is unscripted

• 
  Md Tanvir Alam Anik (MSc. ): June 2023
  Thesis Title: Using Associative Classifiers as a Surrogate for Explainablility in text Categorization

• 
  Maliha Sultana (MSc. ): April 2023
  Thesis Title: An Exploration of Dialog Act Classification in Open-domain Conversational Agents and the Applicability of Text Data Augmentation

• 
  Seeratpal Jaura (MSc. Course-based): April 2023
  Essay Title: Study on the Performance of Associative Classifiers

• 
  Shraddha Mukesh Makwana (MSc. Course-based): April 2023
  Essay Title: Community Topic: Uncovering Flat and Hierarchical Topics Across Languages with Word Co-occurrence Network

• 
  Chirag Daryani (MSc. Course-based): April 2023
  Essay Title: Data Acquisition Model for Women in Leadership Study

• 
  Nawshad Farruque (PhD) - February 2023 [Co supervised with Dr. R. Goeble]
  Thesis Title:Towards Natural language Modelling of Clinical Depression

• 
  Md Rayhan Kabir (MSc.): January 2023
  : Thesis Title: On Ensemble Models for Associative Classification

• 
  Nouha Dziri (PhD) - December 2022
  Thesis Title: Towards Building Coherent and Faithful Conversational Models

• 
  Rohan Verma (MSc. Course-based): December 2022
  Essay Title: Emotionally Intelligent Chatbot in Punjabi

• 
  Michael Strobl (PhD) - December 2022
  Thesis Title: Knowledge Graph Population from Conversations

• 
  Abhishek Dhankar (MSc.) - September 2022 Thesis Title: Towards Checking Veracity of medical Claims

• 
  Mehran Taghian (MSc.) - September 2022
  Thesis Title: Representation Analysis of Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms in Robotic Environments

• 
  Paritosh Goyal (MSc.) - September 2022
  Thesis Title: Exploring Preferential Label Smoothing for Neural Network based classifiers

• 
  Ali Zamani (MSc.) - September 2022
  Thesis Title: Developing a Mental Health Virtual Assistance (Chatbot) for Healthcare Workers and their Families

• 
  Eric Austin (MSc.) - September 2022
  Thesis Title: Topic Modelling via Community Mining of Term Co-occurrence Networks

• 
  Tanvir Sajeb (MSc.) - October 2021
  Thesis Title: Building an expert-system based conversational agent to provide personalised resources about neurological disorders

• 
  Sheila Schoepp (MSc.) - January 2021
  Thesis Title: Reinforcement Learning Algorithmic Adaptation to Machine Hardware Faults

• 
  Andy Wong (MSc.) - December 2020
  Thesis Title: Intelligent Machine Reliability with General Value Functions

• 
  Hamman Samuel (PhD) - December 2020
  Thesis Title: On Trust, Privacy, and Misinformation in Health Social Media

• 
  Mohammad Motallebi (MSc.) - September 2020
  Thesis Title: Explaining Decisions of Black-box Models using Association Rules

• 
  Mohammadmahdi Zafarmand (MSc.) - September 2020 [with Christine Largeron- Saint Etienne, France]
  Thesis Title: Community Detection and Discovery in Deterministic and Uncertain Networks

• 
  Anandh Perumal Konar (MSc.) - June 2020
  Thesis Title: Conversational agent with common-sense: Responding to nonsensical statements

• 
  Nitakshi Sood (MSc.) - June 2020
  Thesis Title: Building a Competitive Associative Classification Model

• 
  Esha (MSc.) - November 2019
  Thesis Title: Harnessing tweets to get the Pulse of a City

• 
  Mansour Saffar Mehrjardi (MSc.) - September 2019
  Thesis Title: Self-Attentional Models Application in Task-Oriented Dialogue Generation Systems

• 
  Chenyang Huang (MSc.) - June 2019
  Thesis Title: Towards Emotion Intelligence in Neural Dialogue Systems

• 
  Vinaykumar Kulkarni (MSc. Course-based) - April 2019
  Essay Title: Analysis of Camera trap Images Using Deep learning for Ecological Study

• 
  Samuel Bushi (MSc.) - March 2019
  Thesis Title: Using Sentiment Analysis for Better Placement of Contextual Advertisements

• 
  Mohammad Riazi (MSc.) - January 2019
  Thesis Title: Detecting the Onset of Machine Failure Using Anomaly Detection Methods

• 
  Chang Liu (MSc.) - January 2019 [with Christine Largeron- Saint Etienne, France]
  Thesis Title: Community Detection in Node Attributed Networks: A Late-fusion Approach

• 
  Nouha Dziri (MSc.) - August 2018
  Thesis Title: Response Generation For An Open-Ended Conversational Agent

• 
  Amine Trabelsi (PhD) - July 2018
  Thesis Title: Unsupervised Mining and Summarization of Polarized Contentious Issues from Online Text

• 
  Shiva Zamani Gharaghooshi (MSc.) - August 2018 [with Christine Largeron- Saint Etienne, France]
  Thesis Title: Community Structure in Complex Networks

• 
  Hayden Barker (MSc. Course-Based) - April 2018
  Essay Title: Data Mining for Cyber Security Education

• 
  Chi Zhang (MSc.) - March 2018
  Thesis Title: Complex Network Analysis with Edge Uncertainty

• 
  Reza Sobhannejad (MSc.) - January 2018
  Thesis Title: Evaluating Image Training Systems for Medical Students

• 
  Amir Hossein Faghih Dinevari (MSc.) - March 2017
  Thesis Title: Towards the Implementation of an Intelligent Software Agent for the Elderly

• 
  Ren Wang (MSc.) - Matrch 2017
  Thesis Title: sequence Based Approaches to Course Recommender Systems

• 
  Sankalp Prabhakar (MSc.) - September 2016
  Thesis Title: Reciprocal Recommendation System and Formation of Learning Groups in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

• 
  Stuart Johnson (MSc.) - September 2016
  Thesis Title: Custom Feedback Selection for Intelligent Tutoring Systems in Ill-Defined Domains

• 
  Mohomed Shazan Mohomed Jabbar (MSc.) - August 2016
  Thesis Title: Discovering Spatial Patterns using Statistically Significant Dependencies

• 
  Farrukh Ahmed (MSc.) - August 2016
  Thesis Title: Advantage of Integration in Big Data: Feature Generation in Multi-Relational Databases for Imbalanced Learning

• 
  Behdad Bakhshinategh (MSc.) - August 2016
  Thesis Title: Design of a Course Recommender System as an Application of Collecting Graduate Attributes

• 
  Koosha Golmohammadi (PhD) - September 2016
  Thesis Title: Time Series Contextual Anomaly Detection for Detecting Stock Market Manipulation

• 
  Reihaneh Rabbany khorasgani (PhD) - September 2016
  Thesis Title: Modular Structure of Complex Networks
  Corrently: Assistant Professor, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

• 
  Wessam Gad El-Rab (PhD) - December 2015
  Thesis Title: Clinical Practice Guideline Formalization: Translating Clinical Practice Guidelines to Computer Interpretable Guidelines

• 
  Mansoureh Takaffoli (PhD) - September 2015
  Thesis Title: Community Identification, Evolution and Prediction in Dynamic Social Networks

• 
  Ameneh Gholipour Shahraki (MSc.) - September 2015
  Thesis Title: Emotion Mining from Text

• 
  Ali Yadollahi (MSc.) - September 2015
  Thesis Title: Polarity Classification of Reviews by Expanding a Preliminary Lexicon

• 
  Baoliang Wang (MSc.) - August 2014
  Thesis Title: Automatic Animal Species Identification Based on Camera Trapping Data

• 
  Jundong Li (MSc.) - July 2014
  Thesis Title: Statistically Significant Dependencies for Spatial Co-location Pattern Mining and Classification Association Rule Discovery
  Currently Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, USA

• 
  Afra Abnar (MSc.) - March 2014
  Thesis Title: Structural Role Mining in Social Networks

• 
  Kevin Quinn (MSc.) - March 2014
  Thesis Title: ANA: Automated Nursing Agent - [his graduation]

• 
  Saeed Mohajeri (MSc.) - September 2013 - Co-supervised with Davood Rafiei
  Thesis Title: BubbleNet: An Interactive Interface for Retrieving Documents

• 
  Jing Zhang (MSc.) - September 2012
  Thesis Title: On the Application of Multi-Class Classification in Physical Therapy Recommandation - [his graduation]

• 
  Xiaoxiao Li (MSc.) - September 2012
  Thesis Title: Text Document Topical Recursive Clustering and Automatic Labeling of a Hierarchy of Document Clusters - [her graduation]

• 
  Chaman Thapa (MSc.) - August 2012 - Co-supervised with Davood Rafiei
  Thesis Title: Classifying Websites into Non-Topical Categories

• 
  Aibek Adilmagambetov (MSc.) - August 2012
  Thesis Title: Discovering Co-Location Patterns and Rules in Uncertain Spatial Datasets

• 
  Justin Fagnan (MSc.) - March 2012
  Thesis Title: Community Mining: From Discovery to Evaluation and Visualization

• 
  Hamman Samuel (MSc.) - September 2011
  Thesis Title: Content Management for Online Health Advise Sharing

• 
  Xiaoyu Shi (MSc.) - September 2011- Co-Supervised by Bryan Yu Hu
  Thesis Title: A Fast Circuit Similarity-based Placement Engine for Field Programmable Gate Arrays

• 
  Metanat HooshSadat (MSc.) - September 2011
  Thesis Title: Classification and Sequential Pattern Mining from Uncertain Datasets

• 
  Farzad Sangi (MSc.) - August 2011
  Thesis Title: Ranking Entities in Hetegogeneous Multiple Relation Social Networks Using Random Walks

• 
  Amit Satsangi (MSc.) - January 2011
  Thesis Title: Contrasting the Contrast Sets

• 
  Reihaneh Rabbany khorasgani (MSc.) - September 2010
  Thesis Title: Community mining and its applications in educational environment

• 
  Jiyang Chen (PhD) - March 2010 - co-supervised with Dr. Goebel)
  Thesis Title: Community Mining - Discovering Communities in Social Networks - [his graduation]

• 
  Andrew Foss (PhD) - January 2010
  Thesis Title: High-Dimensional data Mining: Subspace Clustering, Outlier Detection and Applications to Classification

• 
  Deng Kang (MSc) - September 2009
  Thesis Title: Contrasting Sequence groups by emerging sequences

• 
  Mojdeh Jalali-Heravi (MSc) - September 2009
  Thesis Title: A Study on Interestingness Measures for Associative Classifiers

• 
  Seyed-Vahid Jazayeri (MSc) - September 2008
  Thesis Title: Plant Protein Localization Based on Frequent Discriminative Subsequence and Partition-based Subsequences

• 
  Maria-Luiza Antonie (PhD - Defence September 2008)
  Thesis Title: Associative Classifiers: Improvements and Potential
  co-supervised with Dr. Holte
  Currently: Associat Professor, University of Guelf

• 
  Mohammad El-Hajj (PhD - Defence September 27, 2006)
  Thesis Title: Frequent Sets by Leap-Traversal for Sequential and Parallel Paradigms - [his graduation]
  Currently: Associate Professor, MacEwan University, Canada

• 
  Yan Jin (MSc) - August 2006
  Essay Title: Analysis of the State-of-the-Art in Content-Based Video Retrieval

• 
  Yaling Pei (MSc - August 2006)
  Thesis Title: Discovering and Ranking Outliers in Very Large Datasets

• 
  Yi Li (MSc - June 2005)
  Essay Title: Investigating Data Mining Tools

• 
  Stella Luk (Undergraduate Student Internship - Fall 2004, Spring 2005) Title: Scrutinizing Frequent Pattern Discovery Performance.

• 
  Stanley Oliveira (PhD - Defence Nov. 29, 2004)
  Thesis Title: Data Transformation For Privacy-Preserving Data Mining - [his graduation]

• 
  Jiyang Chen (MSc - August 2004)
  Thesis Title: An Algebra for Visual Web Mining
  co-supervised with Dr. Goebel

• 
  Yang Wang (MSc - August 2004
  Thesis Title: EPPdb: a Database for Proteomic Analysis of Extracytosolic Plant Proteins
  co-supervised with Dr. Goebel
  Currently: Associate Professor at Concordia University, Canada
• 
  Lisheng Sun (MSc - July 2004
  Thesis Title: FootPath: Web topology and navigation visualization
  co-supervised with Dr. Goebel

• 
  Jia Li (MSc - July 2004
  Thesis Title: Using Distinct Information Channels for a Hybrid Web Recommender System

• 
  Alex Strilets (MSc - June 2003)
  Essay Title: From User Mideling to Reference Feedback: A survey of Information retrieval Techniques for Query Similarities.

• 
  William Cheung (MSc - December 2002)
  Thesis Title: Frequent Pattern Mining Without Candidate Generation or Support Constraint

• 
  Kevin Andrusky (NSERC Undergraduate Summer Scholarship Awardee 2002)
  Title: Educational Software for Micromachines And Related Technologies

• 
  Yaling Pei (NSERC Undergraduate Summer Scholarship Awardee 2002) Currently a graduate student at the University of Alberta.
  Title: Synthetic data generation for clustering analysis .
  
• 
  Andrew Foss (MSc - July 2002)
  Thesis Title: Automatic Categorical Data Clustering and Spatial Data Clustering by Consecutive Resolution Refinement

• 
  Maria-Luiza Antonie (MSc - July 2002)
  Thesis Title: Categorizing Digital Documents by Associating Content Features - [her graduation]
  
• 
  Yue Zhang (MSc - July 2002)
  Thesis Title: On the Use of CBIR in Image Mosaic Generation (Mosaicture)
  co-supervised with Dr. Nascimento
  
• 
  Chi-Hoon Lee (MSc - June 2002)
  Thesis Title: Density-Based Clustering of Spatial Data in the Presence of Physical Constraints

• 
  Dana Mowat (Undergraduate Student Internship - Summer 2002) Title: Implementation of an On-line Faculty Bibliographical Database

• 
  Weinan Wang (MSc - December 2001)
  Essay Title: Experiments with Data Clustering.
  First jobs at CodeBaby and Yotta-Yotta in Edmonton, AB, Canada, then at Amazon.com in Seattle, USA.
• 
  Kevin Andrusky (NSERC Undergraduate Summer Scholarship Awardee 2001).
  Title: Educational Software for Micromachines And Related Technologies (eSMART)
• 
  Ayman Ammoura (MSc - July 2001).
  Thesis Title: Datamining in an Immersed Virtual Environment Over a Network. - [his graduation]
  President and CEO at Driving Force, Edmonton, Canada
• 
  Hang Cui (MSc - June 2001)
  Thesis Title: Search Engine Result Re-Organization With Ontology.
  First positions at IO-Tek in Edmonton, AB, Canada, then at Benefitfocus.com in Charleston SC, USA.

• 
  Jun Luo (MSc - June 2001)
  Thesis Title: Towards a Flexible Interactive Web Usage Mining System.
  First position at Trovix, Mountain View, California, USA

• 
  Yuan Ji (MSc - April 2001).
  Essay Title: Virtual Data Warehouse Design and Implementation.

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