Francis Palma

Research interests

• Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE)
• Software Quality
• Patterns and Antipatterns in SOAP Web service and RESTful APIs
• Source Code Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Software Maintenance and Evolution (M&E)
• Requirements Engineering (RE)
• Search-based Software Engineering (SBSE)
• Machine Learning and AI for SE

Biography

Dr. Francis Palma received his Ph.D. in Software Engineering (2015) from École Polytechnique de Montréal, University of Montréal, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Naouel Moha and Dr. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc. His research interests included Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Antipatterns, and Quality of Service (QoS) for Service-based Systems (SBSs). His Ph.D. thesis titled "Unifying Service Oriented Technologies for the Specification and Detection of Their Antipatterns" was awarded the Best Thesis of the Year 2015 from the Department of Computer and Software Engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal. Dr. Palma received his M.Sc. (2010) from the University of Trento, Italy, in Computer Science with a major in Software Technologies. His M.Sc. thesis titled "Using Interactive Genetic Algorithm for Requirements Prioritization" was supervised by Dr. Paolo Tonella.

Before joining UNB, Dr. Francis Palma worked for over three years as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Media Technology at Linnaeus University in Sweden. He also worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University (previously known as Ryerson University), under the supervision of Dr. Ayse Bener, hosted by the Data Science Laboratory (DSL) in an IBM CAS project. At Concordia University, Dr. Palma worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Dr. Ferhat Khendek (Concordia) and Dr. Maria Toeroe (Ericsson Canada Inc., Montréal) in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE). Dr. Palma has published his research findings in top IEEE, Springer, and ACM SE journals and conferences, including TSE, SQJ, FSE, ICSOC, ICSE, CASCON, and ECSA. In 2024, Dr Palma received the Most Influential Paper (MIP) award 2014-2024 at the European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2024) for their ground-breaking work titled “Specification and Detection of SOA Antipatterns in Web Services,” co-authored by Dr Naouel Moha, Dr Guy Tremblay, and Dr Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc.

Visit francis-palma.net to learn more about Dr. Palma and his work.