Short Bio

Dr. Masud Rahman is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science/Software Engineering from the University of Saskatchewan and was advised by Prof. Dr. Chanchal Roy. He completed his Postdoc at the Polytechnique Montreal and was advised by Prof. Dr. Foutse Khomh.

Masud leads the RAISE Lab at Dalhousie University. He is interested in the intelligent automation of software maintenance and evolution. Once a software product is released, it enters into the maintenance phase and goes through various major or minor changes. These changes are often triggered either by critical post-release bugs or by the requests for new features. To keep the software operational, the developers must resolve these bugs as quickly as possible. Similarly, to stay competitive in the market, they must add interesting features to their software on a regular interval. Unfortunately, these maintenance activities have never been easy despite 40+ years of extensive research! Software maintenance activities claim up to 50% of the developers' time and cost the global economy billions of dollars every year. With the rise of popular but highly complex computing frameworks such as Deep Learning, Cloud Computing, and Mobile Computing, software maintenance has become even more challenging and costlier.

Masud's research focuses on (1) a better understanding of software maintenance challenges with a particular focus on software debugging, code search, and code reviews, and (2) designing intelligent, automated, and cost-effective solutions to overcome these challenges and thus to make the developers' lives easier. He uses a blend of Software Engineering, Machine/Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Mining Software Repositories, Natural Language Processing and Big Data Analytics in his work. His research interests have been significantly shaped by his three years of experience as a professional developer in the software industry. Please check here for more details.

To date, Masud has published 39 research papers, and his works got accepted in several major venues of Software Engineering including ICSE (A*), ESEC/FSE (A*), ASE (A*), EMSE (A), ICSME (A) and MSR (A). Dr. Rahman received multiple prestigious awards such as Governor General's Gold Medal 2019, U of S Doctoral Thesis Award 2019, 2019 Best PhD Thesis Award (Computer Science), Dr Keith Geddes Award 2017, Dalhousie Belong Research Fellowship 2020, and the prestigious President Gold Medal 2010 (Bangladesh) for his research excellence and outstanding academics. To date, Masud's work received $500K+ in competitive research funding from various sources including NSERC Discovery Grant, Mitacs Accelerate International, NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship, NSERC Industry Engage Grant, and Dalhousie Startup Fund.

Message to Prospective Students: RAISE Lab has upcoming openings for two positions: one PhD and one MCS. Please see more details here.

Masud's Courses: Check out the syllabus of CSCI 3130: Software Engineering and CSCI 6308: Software Maintenance and Evolution. More details.

Masud got featured at the (1) Dalhousie News, the (2) Department of Computer Science, the (3) University of Saskatchewan and the (4) Stack Overflow Blog

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