Francis Palma, PhD
- Profile Summary:
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Dr. Francis Palma is an Associate Professor since September 2025 at the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick. He was also an Assistant Professor Faculty of Computer Science during September 2022 and August 2025. He is the Director of the SE+AI Research Lab and an affiliated member of the Analytics Everywhere Lab. His work focuses on advancing software engineering through empirical methods and the integration of artificial intelligence techniques.
- Before joining UNB, Dr. Francis Palma worked for over 3 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). At Concordia University, Dr. Palma worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Dr. Ferhat Khendek (Concordia) and Dr. Maria Toeroe (Ericsson Canada Inc.) in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE).
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Dr. Palma’s research addresses key challenges in software design, maintenance, and evolution, with a strong emphasis on improving software quality and development processes. His interdisciplinary approach combines traditional software engineering with machine learning to tackle complex real-world problems.
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Dr. Francis Palma earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering (Software Engineering) from the University of Montreal, Canada, in 2015. His doctoral research, titled Unifying Service-Oriented Technologies for the Specification and Detection of their Antipatterns, was awarded Best Thesis (2015) by the Department of Software Engineering and Computer Engineering, under the supervision of Dr. Naouel Moha and Dr. Dr. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc.
- He previously completed a Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Computer Science (Software Technologies) at the University of Trento, Italy, in 2010, where his thesis, "Using Interactive Genetic Algorithm for Requirements Prioritization", was supervised by Dr. Paolo Tonella and Dr. Angelo Susi.
- Research Interests:
- Empirical Software Engineering, Software Quality, Patterns and Antipatterns in SOAP Web service and RESTful APIs, Source Code Analysis and Natural Language Processing, Software Maintenance and Evolution, Requirements Engineering, Search-based Software Engineering, Machine Learning and AI for SE