Bentley Oakes

I am an Assistant Professor in the Département de génie informatique et génie logiciel (Department of Computer and Software Engineering) at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada. Polytechnique Montréal is affiliated with the Université de Montréal and the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila)

Our research in the Oakes lab focuses on enabling domain experts to efficiently capture and utilise their knowledge through a model-driven approach, to support knowledge engineering for complex cyber-physical systems. The goal is to minimise the cognitive and time effort for constructing, verifying, and validating these systems, while still maximising the insights gained during the systems engineering process.

My main research interests include:

I enjoy my time as reviewer and program committee member for software engineering journals, conferences, and workshops. I am also the lead organizer for the Software Engineering at Montreal (SEMTL) meetings, which is a regular seminar series for the software engineering researchers in Montreal.

Previously, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the GEODES lab in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research of the University of Montréal for two years. My research topic was on the modelling of domain-specific machine learning workflows.

Before that, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp in Belgium for three years. I worked on a variety of topics along with industrial partners as part of the Flanders Make strategic research centre, including verification of cyber-physical systems, configuring of co-simulations, and developing conceptual frameworks for digital twins.

I received my PhD at McGill University in 2019 on the topic of model transformation verification. During this period, I was an instructor for the Introduction to Programming course at McGill for three terms. I also was a visiting researcher at the General Motors Technical Center in Michigan, USA and the fortiss research institute in Munich, Germany.

During my bachelor’s degree at the University of Manitoba, I held three internships as part of the co-operative program. The first internship was at Blackberry (formerly Research in Motion) in Waterloo, ON. The topic of this internship was on cryptographic communication protocols. The second and third internships were at Electronic Arts in Montréal, QC. These internships focused on prototyping artifical intelligence solutions in video games.

For more information, please see my CV.

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