I am a tenure-track assistant professor of Software Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at St.Cloud State University. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2023, and my M.S. degree in Scientific Computing from Birzeit University-Palestine. Before joining UAB in 2019, I worked in the industry for eight years building a cloud-based platform for supply chain management. My research interests include geospatial data management, graph mining, and transportation simulation.

Grants and Awards

  • ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2022 Travel Grant
  • Innovation Bowl 2022-2023 Winner ($25,000) Link

Conference Review:

  • AAAI 2024, 2025
  • CIKM 2022, 2023, 2024
  • ACM SIGMOD ARI 2023
  • LSGDA 2024
  • IEEE BigData 2024
  • BIOKDD 2024
  • AIGC 2023

Journal Review:

  • The Journal of Supercomputing
  • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

Conference External Review:

  • SIGMOD 2021
  • SIGKDD 2021, 2022
  • ICDE 2021, 2023
  • International Workshop on Big Data Tools, Methods, and Use Cases for Innovative Scientific Discovery (BTSD) 2020, 2021 with IEEE BigData
  • IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI) 2020, 2021
  • CIKM 2021
  • International Workshop on Data Mining in Bioinformatics (BIOKDD) 2020

Journal External Review:

  • The VLDB Journal 2021

Internships

  • Engineering Intern (June 2022 - Aug. 2022)
    Shipt
    Search and Recommendation Team
    • Worked on a spelling correction project using Python.
    • Worked on a query understanding project using Go language.
    • Read papers about E-commerce product search and recommendations.
    • Hands-on tools and technologies such as Kafka, Docker, Snowflake, and others.

Experience

  • Cloud Engineer (2013 - 2018)
    Logitude
    Responsible for cloud infrastructure and deployments
    • Deploy the weekly hotfixes and monthly releases
    • Manage pre-production and test versions
    • Manage and monitor SQL database backups, alerts, indexes, and performance
    • Manage the releases workflow with quality assurance and customer care teams
    • Backup tools for Azure storage and databases
    • Create tools to automate repetitive tasks, evaluate implementations, and provide feedback for tool improvements
    • Troubleshoot and identify performance, connectivity and other issues for the applications hosted on the Azure platform
  • Software Engineer (2009 - 2013)
    Logitude
    As a startup, I have worked on the first prototypes to create Logitude Platform using C#, Silverlight, SQL, .Net, Microsoft Azure and more
    Some solo projects using C#:
    • XML to Silverlight conversion tool
    • SQL Azure database backup
    • Azure storage backup

How to Read a Research Paper

Posted on April 27, 2025

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If you’re wondering how to approach reading research papers effectively, I highly recommend checking out a great article by that breaks down the process in a clear and thoughtful way. [Read More]

Replacing Research Papers with Videos: A New Era of Scholarly Communication?

Posted on March 4, 2025

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The Historical Foundation of Research Papers For centuries, writing has been the primary means of transferring knowledge across generations and geographies. From ancient manuscripts to modern scientific journals, the written word has played an instrumental role in preserving and disseminating human understanding. Before the advent of printing, knowledge was transmitted... [Read More]