My name is Valerio Giuffrida (vaˈlɛrio dʒuf’frida) and I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Vision at The University of Nottingham. I obtained my Ph.D. from IMT School For Advanced Studies Lucca (supervisor Prof Sotirios A Tsaftaris) based at the University of Edinburgh. I have published several papers on machine learning and plant phenotyping. Specifically, my first work presented a learning algorithm to count leaves in rosette plants. Then, I matured my research interests on neural networks, particularly on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs). In the 2016, I participate at the enrichment program of The Alan Turing Institute. Besides my scientific skills, I am an excellent programmer, boasting knowledge in several programming languages. In fact, I am the lead developer of the Phenotiki Analysis Software, which bundles computer vision and machine learning algorithms to analyse rosette plants. During my master, I had the possibility to participate at different scientific summer schools, such as the International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS) and the Medical Imaging Summer School (MISS), which have been of great motivations towards my scientific career.

Dr. Alexandros-Apostolos A. Boulogeorgos (Senior Member, IEEE) was born in Trikala, Greece, in 1988. He received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Ph.D. degree in wireless communications from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) in 2012 and 2016, respectively. From 2022, he is an Assistant Professor at the Department Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Western Macedonia, Greece. From 2017 to 2022, he served as a Senior Researcher at the Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, where he conducted research in the area of wireless communications. From October 2012 to September 2016, he was a Teaching Assistant with the Department of ECE, AUTh, and from February 2017 to September 2022, he served as an Adjunct Professor with the Department of ECE, University of Western Macedonia, and as an Visiting Lecturer with the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Thessaly. He has worked in a number of EU and national projects.

Dr Boulogeorgos has (co-)authored more than 140 technical papers, which were published in scientific journals and presented at prestigious international conferences. Furthermore, he is the holder of 2 (1 national and 1 European) patents, while he has filled other 3 patents. He is listed in World’s Top 2% Scientists for the Year 2022 which is published by Stanford University and Elsevier. His current research interests spans in the area of wireless communications and networks with emphasis in high frequency communications, intelligent communication systems with emphasis to semantic communications, optical wireless communications, and signal processing and communications for biomedical applications.

Dr. Minhaz F. Zibran is an Associate Professor of Computer Science (CS) at the Idaho State University (ISU), USA. He earned PhD in CS in 2014 from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
His funded research in software engineering and cybersecurity fights software bugs and security vulnerabilities using program code analysis and manipulation while also taking into account the human factors that affect software quality. Minhaz has co-authored many scholarly articles (including a keynote paper) published in ACM and IEEE sponsored international conferences and reputed journals. His conference/workshop publications resulted several best paper awards and journal invitations.
Minhaz also has experience of working in software industry in Canada and Bangladesh. Before joining ISU, he taught in several universities in the US, Canada, and Bangladesh.
Minhaz served in NSF grant review panel. He has been actively involved in organizing international conferences (e.g., MSR, ICDF2C, IWSC, SEMotion, AffectRE, ICPC, ICSM, SCAM) and in reviewing manuscripts submitted to reputed journals (e.g., IEEE Software, IEEE Security & Privacy, TOSEM, EMSE, JSS, IST, SQJ).

Talk Title:From Source to Sentiment: A Holistic Approach for Secure and Reliable Software Systems

Technology today rarely exists without a software component or interface as more and more systems are being software operated. But incidents of software failures and vulnerabilities repeatedly make news headlines since the emergence of software to date. In 2017 alone, almost $1.7 trillion in assets, and 3.7 billion people were affected by software failures.
In this seminar, Minhaz Zibran will present part of his research for software assurance – secure and reliable software systems. Minhaz’s research proactively fights software bugs and security vulnerabilities using program code analysis and manipulation while also taking into account the human factors that affect software quality.
In his talk, Minhaz will first demonstrate with an example, how static code analysis and manipulation can be applied to extract interesting aspects of source code. In the second part of his talk, Minhaz will demonstrate the application of static code analysis in detecting patterns of buggy code. Because a vast majority of the software bugs and vulnerabilities are the results of human mistakes in different stages of software development, the third part of Minhaz’s talk will introduce his research for incorporating human aspects in software engineering.

Dr. Tala Talaei Khoei is a professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based at the Roux Institute. Prior to joining Khoury College in 2024, she received her doctorate in Electrical Engineering from the University of North Dakota, where she also worked as a graduate teaching and research assistant. She also got her Master of Information Technology from Southern New Hampshire University.
Her research interests encompass inclusivity in computer science, integrating computational thinking and data science education, data science and mining, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. Dr. Khoei enjoys working on projects associated with data quality, visualization, and interpreting data in different networks. Notably, she has a track record of publications in top-tier journals and high-ranked conferences and was awarded Best Paper Presenter at the 13th IEEE UEMCON. She also served in several IEEE conferences, such as SmartNet, ICMI and several others.