Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) · University of the Fraser Valley
I pursue accountability by contract for AI agents
I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of the Fraser Valley. My research combines software engineering and model-driven engineering (MDE) to make AI agents accountable for their decisions and transparent about their collaborations. I approach this by applying Foundational Contracts1 that allow us to capture human goals, assumptions, and constraints, and connect them to evidence of agent behavior so people can check whether those expectations are met. I hold a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from Queen's University, and my work has received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. I advocate for open research software and bring experience from both academia and industry.
1 Here, I use “foundational contracts” to mean a contract between the stochastic nature of AI responses and deterministic human expectations. Related work: [anonymous for review] (under review); identifying details are withheld. ↩
Agentic AI systems plan, delegate, and collaborate, yet they rarely see the higher-level concerns people care about, and people rarely see how agent teams reach their objectives. My research builds abstractions in both directions. Building this loop efficiently and effectively is, I believe, what is missing.
Safety, correctness, intent, and organizational constraints usually reach an agent as informal prose. I use model-driven engineering (models, contracts, and model transformations) so that agentic systems can be specified against these concerns and checked for them.
Transcripts, tool logs, and traces are abundant but unreadable at scale. I build abstractions (slices, typed hand-offs, provenance, and knowledge graphs) that explain how agent teams collaborate, where they break, and why an objective was or was not achieved.
Specifications without visibility cannot tell us whether they were honored; visibility without specifications gives us nothing to check against. The loop must be effective, with abstractions at the level people reason about yet precise enough to check. It must also be efficient enough to repeat whenever a team, prompt, or model changes.
Read the full agendaBehavioral models to isolate interactions, replay executions, and regression-test distributed real-time systems.
Knowledge graphs, semantic analysis, and LLMs that turn traces, changes, and repositories into decisions developers can check.
Formalization and model checking for safe coordination, composition defects, and guardrail guarantees in agent teams.
Explicit assumptionsTraceable evidenceCheckable guarantees
Refereed journal articles and conference papers, with abstracts, artifacts, and BibTeX. Submitted and in-progress work is listed separately and is not counted as published.
Statuses mirror the curriculum vitae. Abstract summaries are paraphrases; follow the source link for the original.
Software engineering and programming at UFV, building on courses and program coordination at McGill, Concordia, Queen's, and St. Lawrence College.
| Term | Course | Title | Students |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fall 2026NOW | COMP 370 | Software Engineering · 2 sections | 25 + 27 |
| CIS 285 | End User Training and Support | 23 | |
| COMP 481 | Functional and Logic Programming | 28 | |
| COMP 155 | Object-oriented Programming | 26 | |
| Winter 2026 | COMP 370 | Software Engineering · 2 sections | 25 + 25 |
| Fall 2025 | COMP 370 | Software Engineering | 26 |
| COMP 481 | Functional and Logic Programming | 32 |
Enrolments count course seats across completed and current terms, not unique students.
ECSE 437, Software Delivery — Fall 2022 and Fall 2023; software-project instruction with structured peer feedback. Course site ↗
CCCS 300 Programming Techniques 1 (W24, W25) · CCCS 301 Programming Techniques 2 (F23, W24, W25) · CCCS 330 Database Design (S23) · CCCS 610 Digital Thinking for Data Analysis (F24).
Academic Program Coordinator for the Certificate in Computers and Information Technology and the Micro-credential in Digital Product Management and Emerging Technologies; curriculum review and program redesign.
COMP 218, Fundamentals of Programming (Fall 2021, Winter 2023).
ELEC 377, Operating Systems (Fall 2021), plus course-lecturer and TA experience during the Ph.D.; applied AI and machine-learning teaching at St. Lawrence College (2020–2022).
Currently co-supervising, with Abbas Heydarnoori, two graduate students and one undergraduate on AI-powered fault localization and context engineering. With Fatemeh Hendijani Fard, I co-supervise graduate and undergraduate students on collaborative projects, including CodeFaithBench, a benchmark on the faithfulness of LLM code explanations.
Link Prediction on Distributed Systems. Publication: ICPE 2025.
Now Research Assistant, York University
TAAF: A Trace Abstraction and Analysis Framework Synergizing Knowledge Graphs and LLMs. Publication: ICSE 2026.
Now Data Quality Specialist, Cohere
Semantic code coverage using topic models and LLMs; LLM-generated README files from source code.
A review of AI-enabled continuous testing in DevOps; LLMs and technical debt in DevOps.
DAPPER, a subscription application (ECSE 458 capstone).
A decentralized NFT-locking application (ECSE 458 capstone).
If you are a bachelor's, master's, or capstone student interested in model-driven engineering, software testing, or trustworthy AI systems, I'd like to hear from you. In your email, please include:
Write to majid.babaei@ufv.ca.
Conference organizing and program committees for the software engineering community, institutional committees, and industry partnerships that connect UFV students with practice.
As Chair of Industry Partnerships (Fall 2025–September 2026), I built relationships that support experiential learning, curriculum relevance, applied research, and professional pathways for UFV computing students.
Enhanced LLMs with KGs: Towards explainable performance analysis in microservices
Software testing in distributed systems
From red to blue: How to apply test-driven development techniques
Recursive thinking with Fibonacci!
Before academia I spent a decade building software in industry — PKI and networking in Tehran, IoT analytics at Bosch in Germany, and DevOps in Canada. That experience still shapes what I teach and the problems I choose.
University of the Fraser Valley · School of Computing
Chair of Industry Partnerships (Fall 2025–Sep 2026).
McGill University · Electrical and Computer Engineering
Adjunct professorship under review.
McGill University · School of Continuing Studies
Academic Program Coordinator, Certificate in Computers and Information Technology.
McGill University · School of Continuing Studies
Academic Program Coordinator, Micro-credential in Digital Product Management and Emerging Technologies.
Concordia University · Computer Science and Software Engineering
Software robustness analysis, with Prof. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc.
McGill University · Electrical and Computer Engineering
Knowledge-graph explainability for information retrieval, hosted by Prof. Dániel Varró; industry project with Aggregate Intelligence.
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
Regression Testing of Distributed Real-Time Embedded Systems in the Context of Model-Driven Development. Supervisor: Prof. Juergen Dingel.
Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany
Pattern recognition for Big Data from distributed embedded AMRA boxes. Supervisor: Prof. Martin Gaedke.
Shahrood University of Technology, Iran
Imaginary Spaces, Canada
Row64 development and debugging; CI/CD workflows for Pipeline-In-Box readers and writers.
National Research Council Canada, Ottawa
Representation learning for cybersecurity logs; advanced persistent threat detection.
Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany
Bosch IoT/AMRA datasets; React and React Native monitoring apps; log analysis for real-time embedded devices.
EPAK GmbH, Leipzig, Germany
VSAT/TV antenna networking platform, simulation, and web interfaces.
Farazpajohan, Tehran, Iran
PKI-based digital certificates; Linux networking APIs; modular TCP/SSL servers.
School of Computing
University of the Fraser Valley
Abbotsford campus, Building C, Room ABC-2454