Welcome

I am an Assistant Professor (Temporary) in the School of Computing, at Utah State University. I am also an Adjunct Assistant Professor (status only) at the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department (AI and Information Engineering Group) at the University of Toronto, where I collabroate with Professor Mark Fox in the Urban Data Research Centre.

Research Interests

  • Distributed Decision Support Systems
  • Ontology Engineering
  • Software Engineering
  • Knowledge Graph Databases

Applications

  • Evaluating of complex social systems
  • Support sustainable communities
  • Smart Cities
  • Social Services

My research integrates artificial intelligence, computational social sciences, and knowledge representation, with a focus on modelling, simulating, and evaluating complex social systems to support sustainable communities and smart cities. I serve as the director of the SeMantIc roLe Extraction (SMILE) project, advancing explainable natural language understanding for impact modelling and lead development of tools such as PARLANCE for knowledge graph integration. I am a co-author on numerous publications, as well as several data modelling standards focusing on urban datasets and impact measurements and plays a key role in interdisciplinary initiatives, such as chairing the Ontologies for Services and Social Good Workshop. My work, supported by fellowships, awards, and over $500,000 in research funding, spans distributed decision support systems, focusing on AI-driven planning algorithms, ontology matching, and natural language understanding, with the long-term goal of enabling data-driven decision-making for healthier and more resilient communities.

See a list of my research projects ⇣ and publications ⇣.

Research

CUDC - Canadian Urban Data Catalogue

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The mission of the Canadian Urban Data Catalogue (CUDC) is to provide awareness of the vast array of urban and non-urban Canadian data by providing an open ...

CIDS - Common Impact Data Standard

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The Common Impact Data Standard is a standardized way to represent a social purpose organization’s (SPO) impact model (i.e. their theory of change, logic mo...

SMILE - SEmantIc roLe Extraction

less than 1 minute read

The research question this proposal addresses is: Is it possible to create a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) system that can extract the components ...

PARLANCE - Data Integration Pipeline

less than 1 minute read

The PARLANCE project is a pipeline that involves developing data translation and consolidation logic, enabling the merging of diverse data sources into a si...

OSSN - Ontology for Social Service Needs

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The Ontology of Social Service Needs (OSSN) represents service provisioning from the perspective of a cognitive, goal-driven client to evaluate services bas...

Service Ontology

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“What is a service?” The notion of “services” is inherently well understood by people, but it is difficult to define explicitly. The area of “service scienc...

Publications