Guardians of Asgaard (current members)
Cor-Paul Bezemer
Lab head
Cor-Paul Bezemer (he/his) is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Alberta. He is the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Quality Assurance of Intelligent Systems. He heads the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab. Before that, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL) at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. His research interests cover a wide variety of software engineering and performance engineering-related topics. His work has been published at premier software engineering venues such as the TSE and EMSE journals and the ESEC-FSE, ICSME and ICPE conferences. He is one of the vice-chairs of the SPEC research group on DevOps Performance. Before moving to Canada, he studied at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he received his BSc (2007), MSc (2009) and PhD (2014) degree in Computer Science.
Mohammad Reza Taesiri
Postdoc
Mohammad Reza Taesiri is a postdoc in the Analytics of Software, Games, and Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab. He finished his Ph.D. in the ASGAARD lab in Sep 2024. He is currently working on novel video game testing and debugging techniques using deep learning and reinforcement learning.
Md Saeed Siddik
PhD student
Saeed Siddik is a Ph.D. student in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the Department of ECE, University of Alberta, Canada. He is a member of the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab under the supervision of Dr. Cor-Paul Bezemer. He is working on software engineering especially the empirical analysis of the impact of Software Engineering in AI systems. He is interested in analyzing the effect of various software artifacts e.g. code documentations, developers’ practice, and user feedback. Before joining ASGAARD, Saeed served as a lecturer at IIT, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his MSc. and BSc. in software engineering in 2015 and 2013 respectively from the University of Dhaka which is the oldest university in Bangladesh. He likes playing field sports and is active in volunteer activities. More details about Saeed can be found here.
Tajkia Rahman Toma
PhD student
Tajkia Rahman Toma is a Ph.D. student in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the Department of ECE, University of Alberta, Canada. She is a member of the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab under the supervision of Dr. Cor-Paul Bezemer. Her research interests are program analysis, mining software repositories, collaborative software engineering and empirical software engineering. Before joining the lab, she was a faculty member (2018-2021) in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Islamic University of Technology (IUT). She was also a software engineer (2014-2018) at Streams Tech Ltd. for more than 3 years. She has completed her Master of Science in Software Engineering (2013-2014) from the Institute of Information Technology (IIT), University of Dhaka and Bachelor in Information Technology (Major in Software Engineering) (2009-2012) from the same institute. More info about Tajka can be found here.
Ian Gauk
MSc student
Ian Gauk is an MSc student in the ASGAARD lab. He has been actively involved in conducting video game accessibility research as part of two co-op terms at the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab as an undergraduate student. Their current research primarily focuses on video game testing, utilizing machine learning and data analytics techniques.
Balreet Grewal
MSc student
Balreet is an MSc student in the ASGAARD lab. She is passionate about learning more about analytics and the use and application of data science.
Wentao Lu
MSc student
Wentao is a Master of Science student in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the University of Alberta. He completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the same institution in 2023. At present, he is an active member of the ASGAARD lab. His areas of interest include Machine Learning System Engineering and Analytics.
Katrina Wong
Visitor
Katrina is a fifth year computer engineering student at the University of Alberta. She is currently working as a research assistant to create an automatic bug injector to help train video game bug detection models.
Asgaardians (alumni)
Hao Li
PhD student (Graduated: Aug 2024)
Hao Li is a PhD student in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the University of Alberta. He is a member of the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab, and is currently working on data analysis of the Rust package registry. He received his B.Eng. degree in Automation from the Xiamen University of Technology in 2015. He worked as an automation engineer in PI Electronics from 2015 to 2019. More info about Hao can be found here.
Finlay Macklon
PhD student (Graduated: March 2025)
Finlay Macklon was a PhD student in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the University of Alberta. He is currently a member of the ASGAARD lab, and his research is focused on automated visual testing for web applications built with the HTML5 <canvas>. Previously, he completed his BSc in Electrical Engineering at the University of Alberta in April 2020. More info about Finlay can be found here.
Mikael Sabuhi
PhD student (Graduated: Sep 2023)
Mikael Sabuhi is a PhD student in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the University of Alberta. Currently, he is a member of the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab, working on empirical performance analysis of cloud software systems and anomaly detection. Mikael received his M.Sc. (2018) and B.Sc. (2016) degree in control systems from Iran University of Science and Technology. While Mikael has different artificial intelligence-related research interests, his main focus is on applications of Deep Learning architectures for anomaly detection with a particular emphasis on applications of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for anomaly detection. Mikael is co-supervised by Dr. P. Musilek. More info about Mikael can be found here.
Markos Viggiato
PhD student (Graduated: Jan 2023)
Markos Viggiato is a PhD student in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the University of Alberta. He is a member of the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab, working with machine learning and data analytics applied to games. Overall, he is investigating how to improve different analytics approaches that help understand the enjoyability of a game. He is also working on how to leverage analytics techniques to automate game testing processes. Markos holds a BEng degree (2017) in Control and Automation Engineering, and an MSc degree (2018) in Computer Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. More info about Markos can be found here.
Sara Gholami
MSc student (Graduated: Jun 2020)
Sarah was co-supervised with Dr. H. Khazaei. More info about Sara can be found here.
Arthur Kamienski
MSc student (Graduated: Sep 2021)
Arthur Kamienski studied Game Development Q&A websites. He obtained his BSc in Computer Science from the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) in Brazil in December 2019. His current research interests involve working with game repository data and Natural Language Processing. Previously, he researched Academic Genealogical Graphs at the Future Internet and Data Science (FIDS) lab at the Federal University of ABC. More info about Arthur can be found here.
Luisa Palechor
MSc student (Graduated: Sep 2022)
Luisa Palechor is an MSc student in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the University of Alberta. She is a member of the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab, and she is currently focused on the empirical analysis of pull requests in GitHub when using Continuous Integration. She received her B.Eng. degree in Electronic and Telecommunication engineering from University of Cauca in Colombia in 2016. Before joining the ASGAARD lab she worked as a Cloud Engineer for three and a half years. More info about Luisa can be found here.
Ngoc Quang Vu
MSc student (Graduated: Sep 2020)
Quang joined the University of Alberta as an M.Sc. student in 2019 and received his M.Sc. degree in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems in 2020. His research focus was on mining online distribution platforms for indie games for insights that can help indie developers succeed in their goals. Prior to his stint at the ASGAARD lab, he worked as a software developer for three years. He received a B.Eng (2016) degree from the National University of Singapore (NUS). More info about Quang can be found here.
Stefan Antoszko
Visitor
Stefan is a Computer Engineering student at the University of Alberta. He volunteered at the ASGAARD lab over the summer of 2021 where he focused on creating and injecting bugs into a browser game.
Rain Epp
Visitor
Rain did two co-op terms in the ASGAARD lab. Rain’s research focused on trends of popular virtual reality games and their complaints.
Robbie Feng
Visitor
Robbie is a fourth-year computer engineering student at the University of Alberta. He is volunteering in the ASGAARD lab and is helping out with a project focused on identifying game bugs.
Ben Fisher
Visitor
Ben Fisher is a first-year engineering student at the University of Alberta. He is volunteering in the ASGAARD lab and is helping out with building a plagiarism detection tool.
Yunyang Lu
Visitor
Yunyang Lu is a third-year computer engineering student at the University of Alberta. He is working on game testing.
Jasmine Mah
Visitor
Jasmine Mah is an undergraduate computer engineering student at the University of Alberta. Her work at ASGAARD lab involves the research of trends in university related websites using data analytics and machine learning. More information about Jasmine can be found here.
Yihe Wang
Visitor
Yihe Wang is a third-year software engineering student at the University of Alberta. He is currently a co-op student in the Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab. He is currently focusing on data and algorithm analysis of game reviews from the Steam storefront. He is interested in research related to video games and learning the use of video games development tools (e.g., commercial game engines and graphic rendering tools). More info about Yihe can be found here.
Taekwan Yoon
Visitor
Taekwan Yoon is a second-year software engineering student at the University of Alberta. He is working on data analytics.
Mykola Zakharchuk
Visitor
Mykola did a summer internship in the ASGAARD lab through the Mitacs GRI program.
