Bentley James Oakes

I am a post-doctoral researcher at the GEODES lab in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research of the University of Montréal since Fall 2021. I work with Houari Sahraoui and Michalis Famelis.

My research focuses on enabling experts from various domains to efficiently capture and utilise their knowledge to build software systems through a model-driven approach. The goal is to minimise the cognitive and time effort for constructing these systems, while still maximising the insights gained during the engineering process. My main research interests include verification of cyber-physical systems, digital twins, model-driven engineering, knowledge representation including ontologies, and model transformations.

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 gathering of the software engineering researchers in Montreal.

Previously, 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 my degree, 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.