Graduate Student Supervision

PhD – Completed

  1. Amir Mehrafsa, PhD, 2026 (co-supervised with S. Chester)
    Thesis: Vectorising the nucleus hierarchy: Flat-array primitives for data-parallel dense subgraph discovery
  2. Tengkai Yu, PhD, 2026 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Implicit graph theory: Scaling graph mining with vector arithmetic
  3. Shera Potka, PhD, 2025
    Thesis: Three ethical dimensions of AI: Fairness in social recommenders, bias detection in LLMs, and privacy in NLP
  4. Sowmya Balasubramanian, PhD, 2024
    Thesis: Clinical relevance of ML predictions using health datasets
  5. Yudi Santoso, PhD, 2023 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Mining Small Subgraphs in Massive Graphs
  6. Mahdi Hajiabadi, PhD, 2022 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Efficient Graph Summarization of Large Networks
  7. Aly Ahmed, PhD, 2021
    Thesis: Complex graph algorithms using relational database
  8. Fatemeh Esfahani, PhD, 2021 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Dense subgraph mining in probabilistic graphs
  9. Diana Popova, PhD, 2018
    Thesis: Scalable analytics of massive graphs
  10. Michael Simpson, PhD, 2018 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Scalable algorithms for misinformation prevention in social networks
  11. Elham Sedghi, PhD, 2017 (co-supervised with J. Weber)
    Thesis: A novel stroke prediction model based on clinical natural language processing (NLP) and data mining methods
  12. Tatiana Gutierrez Bunster, PhD, 2014 (co-supervised with U. Stege and J. Taylor)
    Thesis: Towards a better understanding of Protein-Protein Interaction Networks
  13. Sean Chester, PhD, 2013 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan and S. Whitesides)
    Thesis: Representative Subsets for Preference Queries
  14. Bee Fong, PhD, 2013 (co-supervised with J. Weber)
    Thesis: Privacy Preserving Data Mining using Unrealized Data Sets: Scope Expansion and Data Compression
  15. Atousa Pahlevan, PhD, 2012 (co-supervised with H. Muller)
    Thesis: Dynamic Web Service Discovery
  16. Maryam Shoaran, PhD, 2011
    Thesis: Automata methods and techniques for graph-structured data
  17. Marina Barsky, PhD, 2010 (co-supervised with U. Stege and C. Upton)
    Thesis: Suffix trees for very large inputs
  18. Maria Chowdhury, PhD, 2010 (co-supervised with W. Wadge)
    Thesis: Infinitesimal reasoning in information retrieval and trust-based recommendation systems

MSc – Completed

  1. Joyjit Choudhury, MSc, 2026
    Thesis: Evaluating and steering partisan disagreement in multi-agent LLM political debate
  2. Gaganjot Kaur, MSc, 2026 (co-supervised with S. Chester)
    Thesis: Helping coding agents find relevant code: Structure-aware filtering of file reads
  3. Yasaman Zarrinkia, MSc, 2026
    Thesis: The reasoning bottleneck in Graph-RAG: Structured prompting and context compression for multi-hop QA
  4. Ryan Warner, MSc, 2026
    Thesis: Hyperbolic vision-language embeddings and loss functions for multimodal meme classification
  5. Alina Tkachenko, MSc, 2025
    Thesis: Tracking uncertainty in knowledge graphs using Kalman filtering
  6. Sara Asghari, MSc, 2024 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Enhancing fact-checking in large language models: Cost-effective claim verification through first-order logic reformulation
  7. Kazi Tabassum Ferdous, MSc, 2024
    Thesis: Brain network similarity using k-cores
  8. Orestes Papanastassiou, MSc, 2024
    Thesis: A Language-Agnostic Compression Framework for the Bitcoin Blockchain
  9. Azadehs Mousavi, MSc, 2024 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: K-edge Connected Components in Graphs
  10. Yichun Zhao, MSc, 2024 (co-supervised with M. Nacenta)
    Thesis: Designing TADA: Touch-and-Audio-based Diagram Access for People with Visual Impairments
  11. Keanelek Enns, MSc, 2023 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Identifying Autism Spectrum Disorder in fMRI Brain Scans
  12. Hanieh Sadri, MSc, 2023 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: K-edge Connected Components in Large Graphs: An Empirical Analysis
  13. Joseph Howie, MSc, 2022 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Scaling Up Structural Clustering to Large Probabilistic Graphs Using Lyapunov Central Limit Theorem
  14. Quinton Yong, MSc, 2022 (co-supervised with V. King)
    Thesis: Computing (1+ε)-Approximate Degeneracy in Sublinear Time
  15. Olga Gould, MSc, 2022
    Thesis: Improving the learning experience of decision support systems in entrepreneurship with 3D management simulation games
  16. Mohammad Ali Akber, MSc, 2022 (co-supervised with S. Chester)
    Thesis: Efficient Skyline Community Discovery in Large Networks
  17. Alison Ziesel, MSc, 2022 (co-supervised with H. Jabbari)
    Thesis: Identifying RNA secondary structures in the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome
  18. Suyin Pan, MSc, 2022 (co-supervised with K. Wu)
    Thesis: Data Visualization of COVID-19 in Canada
  19. Anmol Mann, MSc, 2021 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Approximating 4-cliques in streaming graphs: the power of dual sampling
  20. Jasbir Singh, MSc, 2021 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Utility-based summarization for large graphs
  21. William Liu, MSc, 2021
    Thesis: Distributed enumeration of four node graphlets at quadrillion-scale
  22. Tengkai Yu, MSc, 2020 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Triangle Enumeration on Massive Graphs using AWS Lambda Functions
  23. Paramvir Singh, MSc, 2020 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Fast and scalable triangle counting in graph streams: the hybrid approach
  24. Jian Wu, MSc, 2019 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Graph-XLL: a graph library for extra large graph analytics on a single machine
  25. Mahsa Daneshmand-Mehrabani, MSc, 2019
    Thesis: Truss decomposition in large probabilistic graphs
  26. Farzana Yesmin, MSc, 2018
    Thesis: Performance comparison of GraphChi, GridGraph and Mosaic
  27. Pooja Bhojwani, MSc, 2018 (co-supervised with S. Ganti)
    Thesis: Triangle Enumeration in Massive Graphs using Map Reduce
  28. Yudi Santoso, MSc, 2018 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Triangle counting and listing in directed and undirected graphs using single machines
  29. Akshay Khot, MSc, 2017
    Thesis: Engineering scalable influence maximization
  30. Jiaping Xu, MSc, 2017 (co-supervised with D. Hoffman)
    Thesis: Graph Grammar Based RDF Benchmarking System
  31. Ran Wei, MSc, 2017
    Thesis: Efficient algorithms for discovering importance-based communities in large web-scale networks
  32. Shu Chen, MSc, 2017
    Thesis: Influential community discovery in massive social networks using a consumer-grade machine
  33. Hu Xin, MSc, 2017 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: An Experimental Evaluation of Vertex-Centric K-Core Decomposition using Giraph and GraphChi
  34. Babak Tootoonchi, MSc, 2017
    Thesis: Efficient Implementation of Anchored 2-core Algorithm
  35. Daniel Xia, MSc, 2016 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: On the Optimality of TeraSort in MapReduce
  36. Junnan Lu, MSc, 2016
    Thesis: An Experimental Evaluation of Giraph and GraphChi
  37. Matthew Imrie, MSc, 2015 (co-supervised with U. Stege and J. Taylor)
    Thesis: Network Centralities and the Retention of Genes Following Whole Genome Duplication in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
  38. Lan Zheng, MSc, 2015 (co-supervised with K. Wu and V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Performance Evaluation of Latent Factor Models for Rating Prediction
  39. Michael Simpson, MSc, 2014 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Clearing Contamination in Large Networks
  40. Wissam Khaouid, MSc, 2014 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: K-core Decomposition for Massive Networks on a Single PC
  41. Nazpar Yazdanfar, MSc, 2014
    Thesis: Link Recommender: Collaborative Filtering For Recommending URLs to Twitter Users
  42. Sadena Ashrafi, MSc, 2014 (co-supervised with W. Wadge)
    Thesis: A Review of Pricing Methods in Social Networks
  43. Yasamin Heshmat Dehkordi, MSc, 2014 (co-supervised with S. Ganti)
    Thesis: Incorporating User Reviews as Implicit Feedback for Improving Recommender Systems
  44. Sahar Ebrahimi, MSc, 2013 (co-supervised with H. Muller)
    Thesis: SmarterDeals: a context-aware deal recommendation system based on the SmarterContext engine
  45. Clecio Varjao, MSc, 2013 (co-supervised with J. Gutberlet)
    Thesis: Inventory Management System for Recycling Cooperatives in Sao Paulo
  46. Nasrin Hassanlou, MSc, 2012
    Thesis: Probabilistic graph summarization
  47. Daniel Hou, MSc, 2012 (co-supervised with N. Horspool)
    Thesis: Experiments with and Evaluation of Statistical Machine Translation Systems
  48. Nikolay Korovaiko, MSc, 2011
    Thesis: Predicting trust from user ratings
  49. Ian Sandler, MSc, 2011
    Thesis: Mining frequent highly-correlated item-pairs at very low support levels
  50. Maryam Khezrzadeh, MSc, 2010 (co-supervised with W. Wadge)
    Thesis: Harnessing the power of "favorites" lists for recommendation systems
  51. Sean Chester, MSc, 2009
    Thesis: Scalable APRIORI-based frequent pattern discovery
  52. Ying Ying Ye, MSc, 2008 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Visibly pushdown transducers for approximate validation of streaming XML
  53. Maryam Shoaran, MSc, 2007
    Thesis: Distributed multi-source regular path queries
  54. Manuel Tamashiro, MSc, 2007 (co-supervised with V. Srinivasan)
    Thesis: Towards practically feasible answering of regular path queries in LAV data integration
  55. Zhuo Miao, MSc, 2007
    Thesis: Grid-aware evaluation of regular path queries on large spatial networks
  56. Marina Barsky, MSc, 2006 (co-supervised with U. Stege and C. Upton)
    Thesis: All-against-all approximate substring matching

PhD – Current

  1. Shikha Malik, PhD (co-supervised with A. Saxena)
    Topic: Synthetic social network generation using LLMs with structural property guarantees
  2. Anmol Mann, PhD
    Topic: Behavioral regression detection and budget-aware evaluation for tool-using LLM agents

MSc – Current

  1. Peirong Li, MSc
    Topic: Differentially private text sanitization
  2. Cyrus Parson, MSc
    Topic: AI-driven natural language to graph query translation