• Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE)1
• Patterns and Antipatterns in SOAP Web service and RESTful APIs
• Source Code Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Software Maintenance and Evolution (M&E)
• Software Architectural Quality
• Requirements Engineering (RE)
• Search-based Software Engineering (SBSE)
• Machine Learning
• Internet of Things (IoT)

Dr. Francis Palma received his Ph.D. in Software Engineering (2015) from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, University of Montreal, 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 Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. He was a member of the Ptidej team and LATECE lab (UQAM). 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 nearly 4 years as an Assistant Professor 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) with Dr. Ayse Bener hosted by Data Science Laboratory (DSL) in an IBM CAS project, where he applied Machine Learning techniques in prioritizing test cases in the context of software development and testing. Dr. Palma worked as a Research Scientist at Screaming Power Inc that builds mobile Apps and securely manages energy data for property owners and enables energy providers to connect and share energy data with their customers, which will allow us to optimize energy consumption. At Concordia University, Dr. Palma worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Dr. Ferhat Khendek (Concordia) and Dr. Maria Toeroe (Ericsson Canada Inc, Montreal) in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE). He was a member of the MAGIC team at Concordia.

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