Graduate Student Award Recipients

Research Excellence Awards are given to a Ph.D. and M.Sc. student who have recently defended and have shown outstanding research performance at the Ph.D. and M.Sc. Level.  

The recipient of the Ph.D. Research Excellence Award is Amit Kumar Mondal. Amit's dissertation is titled "Software Design Change Artifacts Generation through Software Architectural Change Detection and Categorisation" and was completed under supervision of Dr. Chanchal Roy, with co-supervisors Drs. Kevin Schneider and Banani Roy.

Amit's work investigates the challenges of automating the architectural change information extraction and document generation that could potentially assist the development and maintenance teams, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents. He proposes lightweight and intelligent techniques to detect architectural changes leveraging textual+codebase properties, to categorize them considering intelligent perspectives and to generate design change documents by exploiting precise contexts of software components’ relations and change purposes which were previously unexplored.

These techniques are readily applicable to develop intelligent tools for software change traceability, requirements and design component mapping, decision making on release activities, software developer’s profile buildup, code review, change summary, design versioning and document updating, release notes generation, change analysis, etc.

Amit credits his work for the Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre as the most interesting part of his academic life at USask. The real-world experience gain in analyzing and developing complex software systems led to several lessons on the problems and challenges of working with complex software systems. "It was these lessons that motivated me in my Ph.D. program to develop automated techniques and tools for assisting software development and maintenance teams which was an exciting journey." Amit said.

The recipient of the M.Sc. Research Excellence Award is Mehrnoosh Azizi. Mehrnoosh completed her M.Sc. entitled A Comparison of Machine Learning Techniques to Classify Tweets Relevant to People Impacted by Dementia and COVID-19 under the supervision of Dr. Raymond J. Spiteri. 

Mehrnoosh's research investigates how modern technologies including social media can help psychologists analyze people experiences with dementia and COVID-19 and take necessary measures.

The study compares eleven ML algorithms from traditional ML to transfer learning models to classify tweets relevant to dementia and COVID-19 to help psychologists and social scientists examine the COVID-19 impacts on people living with dementia.

Before completing her M.Sc. in Computing Science at USask, Mehrnoosh received a B.Sc. in Materials Science and an M.Sc. in Information Technology. 

The Ph.D. and M.Sc. Citizenship Award are given to current Ph.D. and M.Sc. students who have actively participated/volunteered in activities and events on campus, or whose actions and contributions have added to the quality and reputation of our department.

This year's Ph.D. Citizenship Award recipient is Sristy Sumana Nath. Sristy is working on her Ph.D. entitled Humanizing Release Notes Generation Process under Dr. Banani Roy. 

The objective of her thesis is to enhance the usability of release notes during the software system maintenance phase for various stakeholders, including developers, testers, and end-users, utilizing Software Analytics. The primary aim of the research is to introduce a technique that combines human-centric and AI-based approaches for generating release notes, with a focus on improving the evaluation process.

Sristy currently holds the position of VP Academic and Student Affairs at the Graduate Students' Association (GSA), where she is responsible for advocating on behalf of Usask graduate students regarding both academic and non-academic matters. She is also serving as a publicity co-chair for the upcoming International Workshop on Software Clones (IWSC) in 2023.

Sristy has won several awards during his time at USask, including the 2022 Ph.D. Geddes awards presented by the Department of Computer Science, the Women in Computer Science Award at the 6th Symposium on Innovations in Computer Science and Applied Computing (ICSAC) in 2022, and the Best Presentation Award at the Software Analytics Research (SOAR) Annual Symposium in 2021.

This year's M.Sc. Citizenship Award recipient is Maryam Samadi. Maryam is completing her M.Sc. under the supervision of Dr. Madison Klarkowski and Dr. Cody Phillips.

Her research centers around video game design and its impact on player experience and psychological states. Specifically, she is investigating the relationship between player self-efficacy and perceived game difficulty.

Maryam is currently one of the VP Socials for the Computer Science Graduate Council. 

The Geddes Awards are given to a Ph.D. and M.Sc. student currently in their graduate program. This award is based on high academic standing and research productivity.

 

This year's Ph.D. Geddes Award recipient is Saikat Mondal. Saikat is working on his Ph.D. under Dr. Chanchal Roy. 

Saikat has been investigating several crucial quality aspects of online programming Q&A websites such as Stack Overflow. These websites curate invaluable programming knowledge or practices and disseminate them among millions of software developers every day. In essence, these online resources have the potential to save millions of dollars in software debugging and technical troubleshooting every year.

Considering the immense importance of the quality of the vast knowledge base, Saikat has been developing intelligent tools and techniques to support (a) these programming Q&A websites to manage their content better and (b) the users to improve the quality of the content and search for relevant, high-quality content effectively. His work not only focuses on the technical aspects but also on various community aspects (e.g., voting, communications) to ensure a high-quality programming knowledge base that promotes equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Saikat has won several awards during his time at USask, including the 2022 Graduate Students' Association Research Excellence in STEM Award, the 2022 Ph.D. Citizenship Award, the 2021 M.Sc. Research Excellence Award, 2021 Graduate Thesis Award (Master's) in the Physical and Engineering Sciences, and the 2020 Geddes Award.

Saikat served as the President of the Computer Science Graduate Council (CSGC). He was the lead organizer of the 6th Symposium on Innovations in Computer Science and Applied Computing (Research Fest 2022). In addition, he worked as the Webmaster, IEEE Canada North Saskatchewan Chapter, GSA representative & Vice President Social of CSGC.

This year's M.Sc. Geddes Award recipient is Nicole Beres. Nicole is currently working on her M.Sc. under the supervision of Dr. Madison Klarkowski. Her research focuses on performance under pressure in competitive esports contexts. In particular, she investigates the underlying mechanisms that contribute to performance failures (i.e., choke) and successes (i.e., clutch) during critical moments of play. This research seeks to identify how researchers, game developers, and esports personnel can support the development and maintenance of optimal performance under pressure.

In October of 2022, Nicole founded the University of Saskatchewan Esports Club (USEC)—amassing over 700 members in less than 7 months—that was established to allow gamers of all skill levels to come together and share their passion for both casual and competitive gaming. The club provides a safe and inclusive environment for gamers to connect, socialize, and participate in various local and online events (e.g., casual game nights, LAN events, and tournaments), as well as compete for scholarships in collegiate leagues and tournaments.

The Carl McCrosky Innovation Scholarship for Graduate Studies in Computer Science recognizes the academic achievement and innovative problem solving of students pursuing a MSc or PhD in Computer Science.

This year's recipient of the Carl McCrosky Innovation Scholarship for Graduate Studies in Computer Science is Debasish Chakroborti. Debasish is completing his Ph.D. on Methodologies to enhance the quality of code and automate the process of code propagation for stable software under supervision of Dr. Chanchal Roy and Dr. Kevin Schneider. 

Debasish’s research is focused on Software Engineering, and his research interest includes Software Maintenance, Empirical Software Engineering, Repository Mining, and Software Quality. Currently, he is investigating strategies and challenges in backporting in Social Coding Environment (e.g., GitHub). The main goal of this research is to assist developers and integrators in maintaining multiple versions reliably, consistently, and automatically with reused code. He published more than 10 international peer-reviewed articles.

He presented his research work at several reputed conferences such as Big Data (Seatle), ICPC (Pittsburgh), BIDMA (Calgary), EICS (Eindhoven), and ICSE (Australia). Professionally, Debasish worked as a Software Engineer in Divine IT, Nascenia  IT and as a lecturer at Khulna University.

Debasish has been actively participating in various community services. He was the Vice President – Social of the Computer Science Graduate Council (CSGC) and a member of Research Fest 2021’s Executive Committee. He was also serving as the Vice President of Events (2021-2022) and Admin (2022-2023) at the Bangladeshi Students’ Association, University of Saskatchewan (BSAUS). Currently, he is the President of the Computer Science Graduate Council (CSGC). He was a Volunteer Lead in Digitized Summer Camp, organized by the Department of Computer Science, a Volunteer Lead at SSPP, a Volunteer at Global Village and a Volunteer at Folk-fest.

Debaish has previously received several awards, including the Saskatchewan Innovation and Opportunity Scholarship, Departmental Scholarship - Usask, Innovation Award - Khulana, and Deans Merit Scholarship - Khulna University, 3 Best Poster awards at SOAR, CSGC, and SEMLA symposiums and The GSA Mark Kroeker Exceptional Student Leadership Award.