Biography

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. He completed his Postdoc at the Polytechnique Montreal.

Dr. Rahman 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 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 at regular intervals. 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 Large Language Models, Deep Learning, Cloud Computing, and Mobile Computing, software maintenance has become even more challenging and costlier.

Masud's research focuses on (a) a better understanding of software maintenance challenges with a particular focus on software debugging, code search, and code reviews, and (b) designing intelligent, automated, and cost-effective solutions to help developers overcome these challenges. In particular, Dr. Rahman is interested in the maintenance of three types of systems: Deep learning software systems, traditional software systems, and simulation modelling systems. He uses a blend of Software Engineering, Machine/Deep Learning especially Generative AI, Information Retrieval, Mining Software Repositories, and Natural Language Processing 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 the RAISE Lab to learn more about his research.

To date, Masud has published 48 research papers, and his works got accepted in several major venues of Software Engineering including ICSE (A*), ESEC/FSE (A*), ASE (A*), TOSEM (A*), EMSE (A), ICSME (A) and MSR (A). Dr. Rahman received multiple prestigious awards such as the 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 has received $475K+ (PI) and 4M+ (Co-PI, Co-applicant) in competitive research funding from various sources including NSERC Discovery Grant, Mitacs Accelerate International, NSERC Alliance, Climate Action and Awareness Fund, and Dalhousie Startup Fund.