I am a Senior Engineer undertaking practical and applied research in the Systems Infrastructure Research (SIR) Laboratory at Huawei Technologies Research & Development Centre, United Kingdom.
My research interests span the areas of virtualisation, operating systems, distributed computer communication systems, and service computing. I am also interested in component-based software engineering, and adaptive middleware that can reason about itself and evolve. Please learn more about my research interests and see my selected publications.
Before joining Huawei, I worked as a Computer Scientist at Adobe Inc. where I contributed to the development of its business platform services. During my spare time, I pursued my research interests in operating systems by collaborating with academics on open-source projects.
I also worked as a Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews with Prof Alan Dearle and Dr Jonathan Lewis on architecting middleware for assembling networks of heterogeneous distributed systems to support mission-oriented applications. I researched topics in hardware virtualisation and computer security to design middleware components that can be deployed quickly in trusted virtual environments. Moreover, I engineered a Unikernel operating system called Stardust which is designed to support the deployment of light-weight, self-contained, and latency avoiding services.
I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of St Andrews, where I had the privilege to be supervised by Prof Adam Barker and Prof Alan Dearle. My research focused on the construction of decentralised service-oriented orchestration systems. I worked on a range of topics related to designing functional data flow programming languages and developing heuristic techniques for partitioning and moving computations to data in distributed systems. I was awarded an industry grant from Microsoft Azure to support my research activities. I also obtained an MSc in Software Engineering from the University of St Andrews with a specialisation in critical systems engineering and software architecture evolution, and a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Jordan with distinction.
I am a Chartered Professional Member of the British Computer Society (BCS) and a member of the Society of Research Software Engineering. I am also a member of the Institute for Data-Intensive Research (IDIR) and a collaborator with the Systems Research Group (SRG) at the University of St Andrews.
Outside work, I am passionately involved in Aikido and Judo.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. — Richard Feynman