Rate My Professor Vahid Alizadeh

Vahid Alizadeh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing within DePaul University's Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, a position he has held since 2020. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 2020, with a dissertation titled "A User-aware Intelligent Refactoring for Discrete and Continuous Software Integration." Earlier, he obtained an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 2013, focusing on "Face Recognition Using Thermal Image Processing," and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology in 2011, with a thesis on "Implementation and Designing Intelligent Traffic Light Control by Fuzzy Logic." His prior roles include research assistant positions in the Intelligent Software Engineering Lab and Wearable Systems & Signal Processing Lab at the University of Michigan from 2015 to 2020, as well as internships at eBay in 2018 and 2019, where he conducted software quality analysis, refactoring recommendations, and CI/CD pipeline investigations.

Alizadeh's research centers on software engineering, artificial intelligence, and recommender systems, particularly empirical software engineering, software quality, refactoring and maintenance, search-based software engineering, AI-enabled systems, software analytics, AIOps, and MLOps. He has authored over 20 publications in premier venues, including "Enabling Decision and Objective Space Exploration for Interactive Multi-Objective Refactoring" (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2022), "How Does Refactoring Impact Security When Improving Quality? A Security-Aware Refactoring Approach" (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2022), and "Semi-automated Metamodel/Model Co-evolution: A Multi-level Interactive Approach" (Software and Systems Modeling, 2022). His work has accumulated over 500 citations, with an h-index of 14. Notable awards include the Excellence in Teaching Award from DePaul University (2025), ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MODELS (2020), University of Michigan Invention of the Year (2018) for an interactive refactoring bot, and grants such as the AI in Biomedical Discovery & Healthcare Grant ($67,000, 2024) and NSF CISE Community Research Infrastructure Grant (2022).