Data Mining LabFaculty of Science · Ontario Tech University

Finding Meaning
in a World of Data.

We study how to turn complex data into knowledge that helps us understand the world.

A silver mechanical research agent presents a diamond to a woman’s open hand, surrounded by data displays and a landscape of connected data points.

About

The Data Mining Lab at Ontario Tech University develops methods that turn complex data into useful knowledge. Our research spans agentic data mining, deep and reinforcement learning, natural language processing, and human–AI collaboration.

We investigate how intelligent systems can discover patterns, reason with information, and support human decision-making. Our projects connect methodological research with applications in question answering, with an emphasis on trustworthy AI and the evaluation of large language models.

We bring together students and collaborators to explore new ideas, build practical systems, and evaluate their impact. We welcome prospective students and research partners interested in advancing data mining and artificial intelligence.

Research

A mechanical agent explores a database and discovers knowledge through a feedback loop

Agentic Data Mining

Agentic Data Mining explores how AI agents can plan, carry out, and refine data analysis through interaction with data, tools, and people. We investigate methods that combine language models, reasoning, and adaptive decision-making to discover patterns and turn them into useful knowledge. Our focus is on building reliable agents that can explain their findings, recognize uncertainty, and support human oversight throughout the discovery process.

Research interest
Neural-network agent and bright ivory environment tiles connected by an action and reward feedback loop

Deep and Reinforcement Learning

Deep and Reinforcement Learning explores how intelligent systems learn useful representations from data and develop decision-making strategies through experience. We investigate methods that combine deep neural networks with reward-driven learning to address complex tasks and adapt to changing environments. Our focus is on improving learning efficiency, robustness, and generalization, while understanding how model design and reward structures influence behaviour.

Research interest
Ivory language tokens with bronze attention connections leading to a contextual meaning node

Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing explores how intelligent systems understand, generate, and reason with human language. We investigate methods that use language models and structured knowledge to support question generation, question answering, and information discovery. Our focus is on evaluating and improving the factual accuracy, reliability, and contextual understanding of these systems, with particular attention to hallucination, uncertainty, and trustworthy use.

Research interest
Human and robotic hands jointly supporting a bronze and ivory knowledge network with an amber insight gem

Human-AI Collaboration

Human–AI Collaboration explores how people and intelligent systems can work together to solve problems and make informed decisions. We investigate methods that combine human expertise and judgement with AI capabilities, allowing people to guide, question, and refine system outputs. Our focus is on designing interactions that support transparency, appropriate trust, and meaningful human oversight, while evaluating when AI assistance improves outcomes and when it should defer to people.

Research interest

Lab director

Researchers and Students

PhD Students

Hafsa Moontari Ali

Hafsa Moontari Ali

PhD Student

Ontario Tech University

Jan 2026 – Dec 2030

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Steve Bakos

Steve Bakos

PhD Student

York University

Sep 2025 – Aug 2029

Co-supervised with Prof. Aijun An

Niloufar Beyranvand

Niloufar Beyranvand

PhD Student

York University

Sep 2023 – Aug 2027

Co-supervised with Prof. Aijun An

MSc Students

Parsa Zahraei Mohammadabady

Parsa Zahraei Mohammadabady

MSc Student

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2026 – Aug 2028

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Farnaz Mirnezami

Farnaz Mirnezami

MSc Student

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2025 – Aug 2027

Personalized Temporal Causal Reasoning over Wearable Health Signals

Co-supervised with Prof. Ali Neshati

Zahra Hashemi

Zahra Hashemi

MSc Student

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2025 – Aug 2027

Computational Methods for Medical Image Super-Resolution

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Zeyuan Sun

Zeyuan Sun

MSc Student

Ontario Tech University

Jan 2025 – Dec 2026

An Agentic Computational Thinking Framework for Adaptive Algorithm Tutoring

Alexie Linardatos

Alexie Linardatos

MSc Student

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2024 – Dec 2026

Continual Learning via Exemplar Replay with Distillation

Co-supervised with Prof. Faisal Qureshi

Anushka Zaman

Anushka Zaman

MSc Student

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2024 – Dec 2026

Multidimensional Byte Pair Encoding (MDBPE) for Efficient Tokenization across Diverse Medical Imaging Modalities

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Honours Thesis Students

Jeremy Thummel

Jeremy Thummel

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2026 – Apr 2027

Co-supervised with Prof. Steven Livingston

Tahoor Saad Sheikh

Tahoor Saad Sheikh

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2026 – Apr 2027

Co-supervised with Prof. Steven Livingston

Thanh Thuy Nguyen

Thanh Thuy Nguyen

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2026 – Apr 2027

Alumni

Sahar Ebrahimi

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Jan 2024 – Aug 2026

Answerability in Passage-Based Question Generation by Large Language Models

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Sakil Sarkar

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2024 – Aug 2026

CoRead: Mixed-Initiative Coordination for Collaborative Academic Reading

Co-supervised with Prof. Ali Neshati

Yasaman Akhoundzadeh Basti

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2024 – Aug 2026

CiteView: In-Situ Citation Sensemaking for Scholarly Reading

Co-supervised with Prof. Ali Neshati

Alan Zheng

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2025 – Apr 2026

Assessing Generalization & Catastrophic Forgetting in Multi-domain Continual Learning

Co-supervised with Prof. Faisal Qureshi

Jahanvi Pareshkumar Mathukia

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2025 – Apr 2026

Fluent but Fabricated: Human-Validated Benchmark for Evaluating Cultural Hallucinations in Low-Resource Indic Languages

Co-supervised with Prof. Annie Lee

Rania Rejdal

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2025 – Apr 2026

StoryTailor: Child-Centered AI Storybooks with Parent-Guided Personalization

Co-supervised with Prof. Ali Neshati

Zikun Fu

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Jan 2024 – Apr 2026

Database Entity Recognition using Language Models

Co-supervised with Prof. Ken Pu

Mosarrat Rumman

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2023 – Mar 2026

Uncertainty-aware Fusion of Foundation and Task specific Models for Cardiac MRI Segmentation

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Emon Roy

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2023 – Dec 2025

Transformation-Invariance Properties of Grad-CAM inConvolutional Neural Networks

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Madhav Goyani

MSc

Ontario Tech University

May 2024 – May 2025

Quasimetric Decision Transformer: Enhancing Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning with Structured Distance Guidance

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Aria Sinai

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2024 – Apr 2025

Hallucination in Question Generation Using Large Language Models

Faraj Allah Al-Hussaini

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2024 – Apr 2025

Towards a Structured Recipe Knowledge Graph

Co-supervised with Prof. Annie Lee

Abhinav Sharma

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Jan 2023 – Dec 2024

Hybrid MedCLIP: Enhancing Medical Image-Text Representation Learning through Fused Similarity Matrices

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Saeed Abbasi

MSc

York University

Sep 2022 – Aug 2024

Neural Document Segmentation Using Weighted Sliding Windows with Transformer Encoders

Co-supervised

Ammar Hatiya

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2023 – Apr 2024

K-VQG: A Study on Knowledge-based Visual Question Generation

Farees Siddiqui

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2023 – Apr 2024

LLM Similarity: An Analytical Approach

Co-supervised with Prof. Ken Pu

Melika Abdollahi

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Jan 2023 – Apr 2024

Generative Methods for Image Synthesis with Applications to Medical Imaging

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Moksh Shaunak Bhavsar

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2023 – Apr 2024

Using Natural Language Processing and Historical Data to Automatically Predict Bug Severity

Co-supervised with Prof. Jeremy Bradbury

Ghazaleh Babanejad

Postdoctoral Researcher

York University

Mar 2022 – Dec 2023

Outbreak Detection Method Using Social Media

Co-supervised

Tamilselvan Balasuntharam

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2021 – Dec 2023

Preferential proximal policy optimization in reinforcement learning

Co-supervised with Prof. Mehran Ebrahimi

Nicholas Bode

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2021 – Nov 2023

Discovery of Trend Dependencies Over Time-Series

Co-supervised with Prof. Jarek Szlichta

Alexander Bianchi

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2022 – Apr 2023

Query Embedding Using Machine Learning

Co-supervised with Prof. Jarek Szlichta

Andrew Chai

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2022 – Apr 2023

Explainable Question Answering Using Knowledge Graphs

Co-supervised with Prof. Jarek Szlichta

Marzieh Ahmadi Najafabadi

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Jan 2021 – Apr 2023

Transformer-based Models for Answer Extraction in Text-based Question/Answering

Peter Nagy

MSc

Ontario Tech

May 2021 – Apr 2023

Towards Deep Learning Models for Automatic Computer Program Grading

Anannya Saha

Research Associate

Ontario Tech University

Jul 2022 – Aug 2022

Implementing the Web Interface for Automatic Question Generation Frameworks

Andrei Stoica

MSc

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2019 – Jul 2022

Unified Processing of Natural Language and Relational Data

Co-supervised with Prof. Ken Pu

Aleem Alibhai

BSc Honours

Ontario Tech University

Sep 2020 – Apr 2021

Improving Deep Learning Models for Lip Reading

Publications

Journals

2025

    • Authors: M. Zihayat, A. Ayanso, H. Davoudi, Mehdi Kargar, N. Mengesha
    • Venue and date: Journal of Marketing Analytics, 2025
    • Authors: S. Bakos, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS), Vol. 328, 2025

2024

    • Authors: G. Babanejaddehaki, A. An, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience, 23(4), 2024
    • Authors: M. Rumman, H. Davoudi, M. Ebrahimi
    • Venue and date: Journal of Computational Vision and Imaging Systems, Vol. 10, 2024
    • Authors: N. Babanejad, H. Davoudi, A. Agrawal, A. An, M. Papagelis
    • Venue and date: IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 15(1), pp. 254-272, 2024

2023

    • Authors: P. D. Nagy, M. A. Najafabadi, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: World Scientific Annual Review of Artificial Intelligence (WSARAI), volume 1, 2023

2021

    • Authors: M. Zihayat, A. Ayanso, H. Davoudi, Mehdi Kargar, N. Mengesha
    • Venue and date: Journal of Business Research, Volume 135, October 2021

2020

    • Authors: S. Bryson, H. Davoudi, L. Golab, M. Kargar, Y. Lytvyn, P. Mierzejewski, J. Szlichta, M. Zihayat
    • Venue and date: Information Retrieval Journal (IRJ), 23(5), 2020
    • Authors: H. Davoudi, A. An, M. Zihayat, G. Edall
    • Venue and date: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 33(10), 2020

2019

    • Authors: M. Zihayat, A. Ayanso, X. Zhao, H. Davoudi, A. An
    • Venue and date: Decision Support Systems, 117, 14 - 27, 2019

2017

    • Authors: H. Davoudi, M. Zihayat, A. An
    • Venue and date: Journal of BMC Systems Biology, 11(6): 109, 2017

2016

    • Authors: E. Delpisheh, A. An, H. Davoudi, E. G. Boroujerdi
    • Venue and date: Big Data and Information Analytics, 1(2), 2016

Conferences

2026

  1. CTATutor: From Instructor-Guided Computational Thinking Blueprints to Adaptive Algorithm Tutoring
    • Authors: Z. Sun, A. Neshati, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), Detroit, United States, November 2026
  2. CiteLen: In-Situ Multi-Lens Citation Analysis for Scholarly Reading
    • Authors: Y. A. Basti, Z. Sun, H. Davoudi, A. Neshati
    • Venue and date: The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), Detroit, United States, November 2026
    • Authors: S. Sarkar, Y. A. Basti, H. Davoudi, A. Neshati
    • Venue and date: 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), Napoli, Italy, October 2026
    • Authors: S. Bakos, H. Davoudi, A. An
    • Venue and date: The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Budapest, Hungary, October 2026
    • Authors: M. Goyani, H. Davoudi, M. Ebrahimi
    • Venue and date: The 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Vienna, Austria, June 2026
    • Authors: M. Rumman, H. Davoudi, M. Ebrahimi
    • Venue and date: SPIE Medical Imaging 2026 – Computer-Aided Diagnosis, Vancouver, Canada, February 2026

2025

    • Authors: S. Bakos, C. Xing, H. Davoudi, A. An, R. DiCarlantonio
    • Venue and date: The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025), Suzhou, China, November 4–9 2025
    • Authors: N. Beyranvand, H. Dastmalchi, A. An, H. Davoudi, W. Chan, R. DiCarlantonio
    • Venue and date: The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025), Suzhou, China, November 4–9 2025
    • Authors: Y. A. Basti, H. Davoudi, A. Neshati
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (ACM CUI), Waterloo, ON, Canada, July 8–10 2025
    • Authors: S. Sarker, C. C. Garcia, P. CK Hung, H. Davoudi, A. Neshati
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (ACM CUI), Waterloo, ON, Canada, July 8–10 2025
    • Authors: S. Abbasi, A. An, H. Davoudi, R. Di Carlantonio, G. Farmaner
    • Venue and date: The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025), Abu Dhabi, UAE, January 19–24 2025

2024

    • Authors: S. Bakos, P. Madani, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: 2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (TPS-ISA), Washington, DC, USA, October 28–31 2024
    • Authors: J. Fletcher, N. Dehnen, S. N. Tayarani Bathaie, A. An, H. Davoudi, R. Di Carlantonio, G. Farmaner
    • Venue and date: 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024), Miami, Florida, November 12–16 2024

2023

    • Authors: M. Abdollahi, H. Davoudi, M. Ebrahimi
    • Venue and date: 2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, IEEE, Las Vegas, NV, USA, December 13–15 2023
    • Authors: T. Balasuntharam, H. Davoudi, M. Ebrahimi
    • Venue and date: 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA 2023), Jacksonville, FL, USA, December 15–17 2023
    • Authors: W. Chan, A. An, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE Big Data 2023), Sorrento, Italy, December 15–18 2023
    • Authors: G. Babanejaddehaki, A. An, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: 2023 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (IEEE BIBM 2023), Istanbul, Turkey, December 5–8 2023
    • Authors: P. D. Nagy, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: The 10th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2023), Thessaloniki, Greece, October 9–13 2023
    • Authors: A. Naeiji, A. An, H. Davoudi, M. Delpisheh, M. Alzghool
    • Venue and date: The 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023), Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 2–6 2023

2022

    • Authors: H. Hajiyan, H. Davoudi, M. Ebrahimi
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference, October 10–21 2022
    • Authors: S. Bakos, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: 2022 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG'22), August 21–24 2022

2021

    • Authors: J. Nemec, H. Davoudi, L. Golab, M. Kargar, Y. Lytvyn, P. Mierzejewski, J. Szlichta, M. Zihayat
    • Venue and date: The 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2021), November 1–5 2021

2020

    • Authors: N. Babanejad, H. Davoudi, A. An, M. Papagelis
    • Venue and date: The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING'20), Online, December 8–13 2020
    • Authors: A. Stoica, K. Q. Pu, H. Davoudi
    • Venue and date: IEEE 21st International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI'20), Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2020

2019

    • Authors: N. Babanejad, A. Agrawal, H. Davoudi, A. An, M. Papagelis
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the 7'th International Workshop on News Recommendation and Analytics (INRA'19) in conjunction with RecSys’19, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 16–20 2019
    • Authors: H. Davoudi, P. Godfrey, L. Golab, M. Kargar, D. Srivastava, J. Szlichta
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the 13'th Alberto Mendelzon International Workshop on Foundations of Data Management (AMW'19), Asuncion, Paraguay, June 3–7 2019
    • Authors: H. Davoudi, A. An, G. Edall
    • Venue and date: The 17'th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2019), Minneapolis, USA, June 2–7 2019

2018

    • Authors: H. Davoudi, A. An, M. Zihayat, G. Edall
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'18), London, U.K., August 19–23 2018

2017

    • Authors: H. Davoudi, M. Zihayat, A. An
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM'17), Houston, Texas, USA, April 27–29 2017
    • Authors: Y. Chen, M. L.-Jing Yann, J. Choi, H. Davoudi, Aijun An, Z. Mei
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the 21'st Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD'17), Jeju, South Korea, May 23–26 2017

2016

    • Authors: M. Zihayat, H. Davoudi, A. An
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM'16), Shenzhen, China, December 15–18 2016
    • Authors: A. Agrawal, R. Sahdev, H. Davoudi, F. Khonsari, A. An, S. McGrath
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'16), Omaha, Nebraska, USA, October 13–16 2016

2015

    • Authors: H. Davoudi, Aijun An
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the 22'nd International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, Lyon, France, October 21–23 2015

2014

    • Authors: H. Davoudi, Xiaoli Li, M. N. Nguyen, S. P. Krishnaswamy
    • Venue and date: Proceedings of the 18'th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD'14), Taiwan, May 13–16 2014

Book Chapters

2025

    • Authors: M. Abdollahi, A. Abedjooy, H. Davoudi, M. Ebrahimi
    • Venue and date: Imaging Science, Computer Vision, Image and Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, De Gruyter, pp. 111—126, 2025
    • Authors: M. Abdollahi, H. Davoudi, M. Ebrahimi
    • Venue and date: Imaging Science, Computer Vision, Image and Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, De Gruyter, pp. 3—16, 2025

Join Us

Join us · For prospective students

Interested in graduate research in natural language processing or machine learning? Email Kourosh Davoudi with your current CV and relevant skills.

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