Saba Alimadadi
Saba Alimadadi, a UBC Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) PhD graduate, has been awarded an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship to help support her work in analysis of asynchronous behaviour of modern applications. She ranked first in the CS division of the competition.
According to NSERC Canada, “the Postdoctoral Fellowships (PDF) Program provides support to a core of the most promising researchers at a pivotal time in their careers. The fellowships are also intended to secure a supply of highly qualified Canadians with leading edge scientific and research skills for Canadian industry, government and universities.”
During her time at UBC, Saba was supervised by Dr. Ali Mesbah and Dr. Karthik Pattabiraman and was member of SALT Lab. In her dissertation, Saba proposed automated techniques for facilitating comprehension, helping developers understand the dynamic behaviour and motifs of program execution. Results showed that her methods significantly improve the performance of developers in their everyday tasks.
Program comprehension is crucial in software engineering; a necessary step for performing many tasks. However, the implicit and intricate relations between program entities hinder comprehension of program behaviour and change. It is particularly a difficult endeavour to understand dynamic and modern programming languages such as JavaScript, which has grown to be among the most popular languages.
She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University, working on an analysis of asynchronous behaviours of modern applications. Saba is determined to continue her academic career, and the prestigious NSERC PDF is a great help and encouragement for achieving her goals.
Congratulations Saba!