A Note from Michael Farmer, Dean of the Wentworth School of Computing and Data Science

by Michael Farmer
a woman using a virtual reality headset

A student tries out a virtual reality set while attending a School of Computing and Data Science showcase event in Watson Auditorium

Dear Friends, 

 

As the new dean of the School of Computing and Data Science, I want to share with you the school’s highlights from the 2024-25 academic year. 

 

Promotions:  

 

We are particularly proud that we have had three faculty receiving promotions this past year: 
 

  • Youssef Qranfal, promoted to the rank of full-time professor
  • Abdullah Al Farooq, promoted to the rank of associate professor
  • Sunjae Park, promoted to the rank of associate professor 

 

New Hires:  

 

We are excited to welcome three new members to the SCDS team. 

 

  • Clifton Robinson, PhD, was hired as an assistant professor of Computing and Data Science. Cliff’s expertise is in the field of cybersecurity, and he joins us after recently completing his doctorate at Northeastern University. 

 

  • Kenechukwu Okeke, PhD, was hired as a lecturer of computer science. Kene most recently served here at Wentworth as a visiting assistant professor. Kene’s expertise is in the areas of data analytics, data integration, and cloud computing. 

 

  • Woodley Louis has been hired as the SCDS systems and network administrator. 

 

National-level Activities: 

 

  • Wentworth Institute of Technology has been designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in cyber defense by the National Security Agency through the academic year 2030. This is a testament to the outstanding quality of our Bachelor of Science in Cybersecurity degree and the outstanding faculty that supports that program. 

 

  • Wentworth participated in establishing a new section (The New England Section of SIAM) for the professional organization, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The inaugural conference is planned for Summer 2026 and will launch a dynamic platform for interdisciplinary exchange, research innovation, and professional development. 

 

Faculty Leadership in International Events:  

 

Our faculty organized and chaired numerous exciting research workshops across the globe. 

 

  • Abdullah Al Farooq, Ashar Neyaz, and Leonidas Deligiannidis hosted the 13th annual International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security.   
     
  • Yetunde Folajimi, Salem Othman, Shawren Singh, and Leonidas Deligiannidis hosted a workshop at the esteemed Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Annual Conference in Philadelphia on “Social Impact of AI: Research, Discovery and Inclusion Frameworks.” 
     
  • Yetunde Folajimi, Salem Othman, and Leonidas Deligiannidis—with a partner faculty in Nigeria—hosted the workshop, “Hands-on Data Science and AI Workshop for Nigerians” at the Prompt Engineering and Conversational AI, Machine Learning for Big Data Analysis Conference in Lagos, Nigeria. 

 

Faculty expertise was on display at a multitude of international conferences and workshops and in publications, covering an incredibly wide range of topics from cybersecurity to quantum gravity: 

 

Conference Papers: 

 

  1. En-Bing Lin delivered a Keynote speech “The Dynamic Fusion of AI, Applied Mathematics, and Granular Computing,” 4th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Application Technologies, Yokohama, Japan, December 5-7, 2024.
  2. Leonidas Deligiannidis, “A Practical Tutorial on Implementing Shor's Algorithm.” CSCE 2025, Las Vegas NV USA, July 21-24, 2025.
  3. Elijah Dodson, Salem Othman, Leonidas Deligiannidis, and Yetunde Folajimi, “Toxicity Detection Using Large Language Models”, International Conference on the AI Revolution: Research, Ethics, and Society (AIR-RES 2025).  Springer Nature. April 14-16, 2025, Las Vegas, USA.
  4. Pierre Jecrois, Salem Othman, Leonidas Deligiannidis, and Yetunde Folajimi. “A Framework for Emotional Transition Detection,” International Conference on the AI Revolution: Research, Ethics, and Society (AIR-RES 2025), Springer Nature. April 14-16, 2025, Las Vegas, USA.
  5. Yetunde Folajimi, Leonidas Deligiannidis, Salem Othman, Shawren Singh, Chika Ayo-Banjo, “Scaling Inclusive AI Education through Feedback Analytics in Underserved Contexts: Empowering Learners for the Generative AI Era,” The 39th Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'25) Conference, Springer Nature. Philadelphia, PA USA. Feb. 25-Mar. 4, 2025.
  6. Yetunde Folajimi, Leonidas Deligiannidis, Salem Othman, Shawren Singh, “Shaping the Future of Learning: AI-Driven Adaptive Feedback for Programming Education in Resource-Constrained Setting,” The 39th Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'25) Conference, Springer Nature. Philadelphia, PA USA. Feb. 25-Mar. 4, 2025.
  7. Yetunde Folajimi, Erik Noyes, Salem Othman, Leonidas Deligiannidis. “AI-Based Framework for Assessing Innovativeness in Product Design Categories”. In Proc. of the 2024 Int. Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI'24), Springer Nature. Dec. 11-13, 2024, Las Vegas USA.
  8. M. Irfan, M. J. Lee, and D. Nobayashi, "Robust deepfake detection and resilient adversarial image reconstruction with reduced features set," in Advances in Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems (INCoS 2024), L. Barolli, Ed., Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol. 225, Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2024. 
  9. M. Irfan et al., "Flow-Level Bandwidth Allocation on P4 Tofino Switch with In-Network DRL Inference," 2025 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Information and Communication (ICAIIC), Fukuoka, Japan, 2025, pp. 0204-0209. 
  10. M. Irfan, M. J. Lee, A. Neyaz and D. Nobayashi, "A Novel Multi-Scale Spectral-Guided Graph Attention Network for DeepFake Video Detection," 2025 13th International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security (ISDFS), Boston, MA, USA, 2025. 
  11. M. Irfan, "DDPG-pFlow: DNS query prioritization and optimization with deep reinforcement learning," in Proc. 6th Int. Conf. Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Control (AIRC 2025), Savannah, GA, USA, May 2025. 
  12. Ashar Neyaz, “Digital Forensics Analysis of iMazing Phone Explorer Tool.” in the International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security 2025, Boston, MA, April 2025.
  13. Ashar Neyaz, “Enhancing Phishing Website Detection with Machine Learning Algorithms,” in the International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security 2025, Boston, MA, April 2025.
  14. Ashar Neyaz, “A Novel Multi-Scale Spectral-Guided Graph Attention Network for DeepFake Video Detection,” in the International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security 2025, Boston, MA, April 2025.
  15. Wang, Y., Reisman, J., Berlowitz, D., Morin, P., Arasa, V. C., Mittler, B., Zhang, R., Monfared, A. T., Irizarry, M., Zhang, Q., & Xia, W. (2024). “Associative attribution of intracerebral hemorrhage events to CAA or hypertensive comorbidities in AD from real-world databases”, Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease Conference.
  16. Wang, Y., Morin, P. J., Andreu Arasa, V. C., Mittler, B., Reisman, J., Zhang, R., Monfared, A. A. T., Irizarry, M., Zhang, Q., & Xia, W. (2024). “All-cause mortality among veterans with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s dementia who have intracerebral hemorrhage”, Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC).
  17. Gabe Cunningham, “Polytopality criteria for the mix of polytopes and maniplexes”, at the Workshop on Graph Embeddings and Maps on Surfaces (GEMS) in Slovakia, June 2025.  

 

Journal Papers: 

 

In addition to the incredible output in conference papers, several of our faculty were successfully published in some leading journals in their fields. 

 

  1. Gabe Cunningham, et al, “Cayley extensions of maniplexes and polytopes”, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A, Volume 212, May 2025,
  2.  Sanderson, Maitra, and Liberatore, "Anomalous diffusion and factor ordering in (1+1)-dimensional Lorentzian quantum gravity", Nuclear Physics B, January 2025.
  3. Wang, Y., Li, M., Haughton, D., & Kazis, L. E. (2024). Transition of mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s disease: Medications as modifiable risk factors. Plos one, 19(8), e0306270.
  4.  Laura Garland, Ashar Neyaz, Cihan Varol, and Narasimha K. Shashidhar, “Investigating DF Artifacts Generated from 3D Printing Slicing Software”, MDPI Electronics Journal, July 2024.
  5. M. Mansoor, G. Tao, A. F. Mirza, M. Irfan, and W. Chen, “Feature fusion temporal convolution: Wind power forecasting with light hyperparameter optimization,” Energy Reports, vol. 13, pp. 2468-2481, 2025. 
  6. M. Mansoor, X. Tan, A. F. Mirza, T. Gong, Z. Song, and M. Irfan, WindDefNet: A multi-scale attention-enhanced ViT-Inception-ResNet model for real-time wind turbine blade defect detection,” Machines, vol. 13, no. 6, p. 453, 2025. 
  7. M. Mansoor, G. Tao, A. F. Mirza, and M. Irfan, "FTLNet: Federated deep learning model for multi-horizon wind power forecasting," Discover Internet of Things, vol. 5, no. 21, 2025.  

 

Book Chapters and Editing:  

 

Our faculty also wrote book chapters and edited multiple books. 

 

  1. Othman, Salem, Noyes, Erik, Folajimi, Yetunde and Deligiannidis, Leonidas, “Chapter 5 AI-powered framework for objective scoring of product design innovation”. Imaging Science: Computer Vision, Image and Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, Edited by Leonidas Deligiannidis, George Dimitoglou and Hamid Arabnia, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2025, pp. 89-108. 
  2. Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning, Convolutional Neural Networks and Large Language Models, Intelligent Computing Series. Editors: Leonidas Deligiannidis, George Dimitoglou and Hamid R. Arabnia. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2024.
  3. Big Data, Data Mining and Data Science: Algorithms, Infrastructures, Management and Security. Intelligent Computing Series. Editors: George Dimitoglou, Leonidas Deligiannidis and Hamid R. Arabnia. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
  4. Dimitoglou, George, Deligiannidis, Leonidas and Arabnia, Hamid R. Cybersecurity: Cyber Defense, Privacy and Cyber Warfare, De Gruyter, 2025. 

 

External Funding:  

 

In addition to the extraordinary research output, our faculty also participated in external grant writing with wonderful success. 

 

  1. Ying Wang, Corporate sponsored research project: Maximizing Veterans’ Access to Medicine for Alzheimer’s Disease Under the New Therapeutic Paradigm Our grant was signed with UMass Lowell (Dr. Xia, the PI, who had master contract with the company EISAI), The grant was from Oct. 1, 2023 through Sept. 30, 2024, with $86,436.
  2. Fariba Khoshnasib-Zeinabad, Rachel Maitra, and Weijie Pang, MAA Tensor Women & Mathematics grant to start a collaboration with the Boston Public School system and bring students to campus and hopefully inspire them to do something related to mathematics.
  3. Yetunde Folajimi (PI), Salem Othman, Leonidas Deligiannidis, NSF Proposal “Equitable Undergraduate Adaptive Learning with Artificial Intelligence (EQUAL-AI)”. NSF 23-510: Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Directorate for STEM Education (IUSE: EDU). Division Of Undergraduate Education. Submitted: Jan. 15, 2025. $400,000 (submitted but not awarded). 

 

I am so excited to be serving as dean of the School of Computing and Data Science, and I am looking forward to another inspiring year as we have a number of exciting developments being initiated that will come to fruition in 2026. The faculty and I welcome our new incoming class of exceptional students in the fall. And congratulations to all our 2025 graduates! 

 

Best wishes, 

Michael Farmer, Ph.D.  

Dean, School of Computing and Data Science