Takfarinas Saber

About me

I am currently a Lecturer/Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of Galway.

I have a strong background in Operations Research, Nature-Inspired Computing and Machine Learning, and their application to Cloud Computing, Software Engineering and Testing, and Communication Network Systems.

Previously, I have held the position of Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin (UCD) and in the School of Computing at Dublin City University (DCU). I have also held the position of Post-doctoral Researcher in the Natural Computing Research & Applications Group at Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, UCD, under the supervision of Prof. Michael O’Neill. My Post-doctoral position was in close collaboration with Bell Labs, Nokia and aimed at applying Evolutionary Design to optimise Future Networks & Communications such as 5G networks.

I obtained both my B.Sc. in Computer Science and my M.Sc. in Computer Science, track: Optimisation In Operations Research in 2013 from the University of Nantes, France.

My résumé

Publications & Talks

Ph.D. (2017)

Takfarinas Saber, Multi-objective Virtual Machine Reassignment for Large Scale Data Centres , School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland

Talks

Invited Talk, Evolving Traffic Rerouting Strategies using Genetic Programming at The Multi-agent Systems and Smart Cities Seminar Series., 2020.
Invited Talk, Multi-objective Feature Selection in Evolving Software Product Lines at The NCRA Group, UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School., 2020.
Keynote, Multi-Objective VM Reassignment For Large Scale Data Centres, The 1st International Workshop on Sustainable Data Centres and Cloud Computing (S3DC), 2015. Slides

Grants

I won an SFI Industry Fellowship PI grant with an award amount of €60k. I have applied for the fellowship in collaboration with my industry partner, i.e., Fidelity Investments.

Awards

Best Paper Nomination at the 21st European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2018), for the paper "Multi-level grammar genetic programming for scheduling in heterogeneous networks".

Best score in Ireland at the extended round of the Google HashCode, with the design of an algorithm to optimise the placement of videos on cache servers in order to reduce the overall endpoint request latency, 2017.

3rd prize (€1000) at the 1st edition of Chainhack: The biggest Blockchain Hackathon in Europe with a project called "Open Charity", a safe, decentralized system allowing to issue IOUs ("I Owe You" tokens) for the benefit of Charity, 2015.

Best Student Paper Nomination at the 27th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2015), for the paper "MILP for the Multi-objective VM Reassignment Problem".

Journals

Takfarinas Saber, Xavier Gandibleux, Michael O'Neill, Liam Murphy, and Anthony Ventresque, A comparative study of multi-objective machine reassignment algorithms for data centres, Journal of Heuristics (JoH), 2020. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, David Fagan, David Lynch, Stepan Kucera, Holger Claussen, and Michael O’Neill, A multi-level grammar approach to grammar-guided genetic programming: the case of scheduling in heterogeneous networks, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM), 2019. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, David Brevet, Goetz Botterweck, and Anthony Ventresque, Is seeding a good strategy in multi-objective feature selection when feature models evolve?, Information and Software Technology (IST), 2018. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, James Thorburn, Liam Murphy, and Anthony Ventresque, VM Reassignment in Hybrid Clouds for Large Decentralised Companies: a Multi-objective Challenge, Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), 2018. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, Joao Marques-Silva, James Thorburn and Anthony Ventresque, Exact and hybrid solutions for the multi-objective VM reassignment problem, International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT), 2017. Paper

Conference Papers

Takfarinas Saber, and Shen Wang Evolving better rerouting surrogate travel costs with grammar-guided genetic programming, In The IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 2020. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, David Fagan, David Lynch, Stepan Kucera, Holger Claussen, and Michael ONeill Hierarchical strategies for grammar-guided genetic programming: The case of scheduling in heterogeneous networks, In The IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 2020. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, David Brevet, Goetz Botterweck, and Anthony Ventresque Milpibea: Algorithm for multi-objective features selection in (evolving) software product lines, In The 20th International Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization (EvoCOP), pages 274–280, 2020. Paper

David Lynch, Takfarinas Saber, Stepan Kucera, Holger Claussen, and Michael ONeill, Evolutionary learning of link allocation algorithms for 5g heterogeneous wireless communications networks, ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), 2019. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, David Fagan, David Lynch, Stepan Kucera, Holger Claussen, and Michael ONeill, A Hierarchical Approach to Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming: The Case of Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks, The 7th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing (TPNC), 2018. Paper

Hilmi Egemen Ciritoglu, Takfarinas Saber, Teodora Sandra Buda, John Murphy, and ChristinaThorpe, Towards a better replica management for hadoop distributed file system, IEEE BigData Congress, 2018. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, Florian Delavernhe, Mike Papadakis, Michael O’Neill, and Anthony Ventresque, A hybrid algorithm for multi-objective test case selection, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 2018. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, David Fagan, David Lynch, Stepan Kucera, Holger Claussen, and Michael ONeill, Multi-level grammar genetic programming for scheduling in heterogeneous networks, European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP), 2018. Best Paper Nomination Paper

Takfarinas Saber, David Brevet, Goetz Botterweck and Anthony Ventresque, Preliminary Study of Multi-objective Features Selection for Evolving Software Product Lines, International Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering (SSBSE), 2016. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, Anthony Ventresque, Ivona Brandic, James Thorburn and Liam Murphy, Towards a multi-objective vm reassignment for large decentralised data centres, IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), 2015. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, Anthony Ventresque, Joao Marques-Silva, James Thorburn and Liam Murphy, MILP for the Multi-objective VM Reassignment Problem, IEEE 27th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI), 2015. Best Student Paper Nomination Paper

Takfarinas Saber, Anthony Ventresque, Liam Murphy and El-Ghazali Talbi, Multi-Objective VM Reassignment for the Enterprise, The 5th International Conference on Metaheuristics and Nature Inspired Computing (META), 2014. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, Anthony Ventresque, Xavier Gandibleux and Liam Murphy, Genepi: A multi-objective machine reassignment algorithm for data centres, The 9th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics (HM), 2014. Paper

Takfarinas Saber, Anthony Ventresque and John Murphy, Rothar: Real-time on-line traffic assignment with load estimation, IEEE/ACM 17th International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT), 2013. Paper

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