[Sept 30,2022]
Marouane Kessentini, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, was recognized at the OU Research, Innovation and Engagement Town Hall on November 3 with two awards, Researcher of The Year and Most Research Active Award Winner. The Researcher of the Year award recognizes the faculty member at OU who has achieved the largest amount of competitive grant funding in the fiscal year. The Most Active Research Award is presented to the faculty member who has been awarded the highest number of grants during the fiscal year.
Research productivity is a top priority for Kessentini and the CSE community at OU. CSE Graduate Program Coordinator and Associate Professor Hua Ming remarked on hearing the news, “for a fast growing department, keeping the momentum of research productivity is vital to the department profile and School of Engineering, and for Oakland University overall. This kind of work lends us all a strong hand to develop deeper collaborations with local industry, and also provides state of the art, hands-on projects and material to teach our graduate students. The Research Office is recognizing Dr. Kessentini’s leadership in research, which is truly deserved and appreciated by the entire CSE Department and School of Engineering.”
Kessentini joined Oakland University in 2022 and serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, as well as Director of the NSF IUCRC center on Pervasive AI; Michigan Site. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Montreal in Canada in 2012. Dr. Kessentini is a recipient of the prestigious 2018 President of Tunisia distinguished research award, has received 4 best paper awards, including an IEEE 10 Year Most Influential Paper award in Program Comprehension (2011-2021).
Kessentini is known for his AI-based software refactoring invention, licensed and deployed by Fortune 500 companies, and selected as one of the Top 8 inventions at the University of Michigan for 2018 among over 500 inventions, by the UM Technology Transfer Office. He has published over 160 papers in top journals and conferences. Kessentini has extensive collaborations with the industry on different areas related to refactoring, software engineering intelligence, search-based software engineering, Edge AI, AI/MLOps, AI and cyber-physical systems, intelligent software bots, etc. He is the co-founder of many workshops, General Chair of SSBSE16 and ASE22, and PC chair of MODELS19, SANER 2021, GECCO, etc. He served as a keynote speaker at various venues including ICSR, SSBSE, GECCO, WCCI, etc. He has served as associate editor in 7 journals and PC member of over 150 conferences.