Research team

Ladan Tahvildari is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She founded the Software Technologies Applied Research (STAR) Group at the University of Waterloo in 2004. Since then, Professor Tahvildari has worked on decision-making approaches for self-adaptive software systems including adaptive security, analyzing architectures to manage cloud applications, and scalable similarity search over big data.

Her research interests range from engineering highly scalable automated solutions to real world applications in areas such as software security and adaptive software systems.

Majid Dashtbani is a dedicated PhD student under the supervision of Professor Ladan Tahvildari in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Majid's academic journey began with the successful completion of his Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Electrical Engineering from Razi University of Kermanshah, where he focused on Heterogeneous Cloud Computing. His enthusiasm for cutting-edge technology and research took him to the role of a technical professional at Iran National Turin Cloud Computing at IPM post-M.Sc. Additionally, Majid gathered valuable industry experience as a developer at Cynorix before embarking on his doctoral journey.

Majid's research interests are deeply rooted in the ever-evolving field of software engineering. His expertise and curiosity encompass the areas of: cloud computing, DevSecOps, self-adaptive software, big data processing, and machine learning.

Shizhe Lin is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering under the supervision of Professor Ladan Tahvildari.

Shizhe completed his MASc in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo (also under the supervision of Professor Tahvildari). His master's thesis focused on the issue of flaky test and applied machine learning to achieve efficient flakiness categorization. Additionally, he also explored the optimization of distributed computing in ad-hoc environments. Currently, Shizhe is continuing his research in the field of machine learning and expanding his area of interest to cyber security, control theory and self-adaptive software.

Ryan Zheng He Liu is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo working in the STAR Lab under the supervision of Professor Ladan Tahvildari.

Ryan obtained his BASc from the University of British Columbia in Software Engineering. During his MEng (in Computer Engineering) at the University of Waterloo, he had the opportunity to work as a research assistant with Professor Tahvildari on a state-of-the-art graduate course and gained experience designing and building self-adaptive software systems. He is passionate about developing robust, maintainable software. At the STAR LAB, Ryan is focused on applying reinforcement learning to develop uncertainty-aware and cost-aware strategies for Moving Target Defense (MTD) to enhance self-protection of software systems.

Mingyang Xu is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering under the supervision of Professor Ladan Tahvildari.

Mingyang completed a bachelor's degree at the University of Western Ontario and a master's degree at the University of Waterloo. Before starting his doctoral studies, Mingyang worked in industry where he focused on large microservices software system optimization and automatic fault identification.

Mingyang is currently working on research in software self-adaptivity, machine learning and security.