Mohammed Qasem, PhD, MSc, BSc

Email

mqasem@ualberta.ca

Phone

(780) 679-1116

Address

2 - 331 Faith & Life Centre

4901-46 Ave

Camrose AB

T4V 2R3

Mohammed Qasem is an assistant lecturer at the department of computing science. He started working at Augustana in July of 2019. Prior to arriving at Augustana, he has taught introductory programming courses, visual programming, logic design, computer architecture, and operating systems. He also worked at Manitoba Hydro International as a Software Developer. His research centers mostly on three areas: (i) ant-inspired clustering models and their applications to dynamic real-world clustering problems; (ii) semi-supervised classification and clustering; (iii) aspect-based sentiment analysis. 

A swarm of organisms, following simple rules, can achieve incredible intelligent tasks. This natural behaviour is called Swarm Intelligence (SI) and is pervasive through diverse ecological systems. An individual ant, for instance, can perform minimal functions, but an ant colony can perform complicated, intelligent tasks such as building bridges, creating superhighways, collecting and sorting piles of food and waging war. More interestingly, such tasks are achieved without central control and beyond the comprehension of any single ant. A colony of ants is self-organized by a process called stigmergy, a small action by individual ant stimulates others to behave differently, leading to a new pattern of behaviour — likewise, flocks of birds, herds of animals, schools of fish and beehives. Very generally, Dr. Qasem primary field of research interest is SI. Within SI, he focused on ant-inspired algorithms with their applications to data analytics. His doctoral research centers on developing two clustering algorithms, inspired by how real ants sort their nests, and their application to classifying large-scale dynamic data. Dr. Qasem current research work focuses on swarm intelligence for social network mining.

Teaching philosophy in a nutshell

“All students can learn and succeed, but not in the same way and not in the same day”.

– William G. Spady

 My role as a facilitator (rather than a traditional instructor) is central to my teaching philosophy. I perceive myself as a facilitator in the sense that I take responsibility for the learning environment: it is my responsibility to find out the best approach for teaching computing science in different classes.

Fall 2019

AUCSC 450 Parallel and Distributed Systems

AUCSC 310 Algorithm Design and Analysis 

Past Courses

Digital Logic Design

Computer Architecture and Organization 

Operating System Concepts

Visual Programming 

C/C++ Programming

Data Structures

Computer Science Fundamentals