About me

Dr. Md. Saiful Islam

Welcome to my page! Currently, I am a Lecturer (Big Data Analytics) in the School of Information Technology at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia. I also hold an adjunct research fellow position in Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Before joining in Griffith, I was a Research Fellow in the School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, La Trobe University, Australia from May 2016 to Jan 2017 and Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Swinburne from Nov 2013 to Apr 2016. I received PhD in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Swinburne University of Technology in Feb 2014. My PhD thesis "On Answering WHY and WHY-NOT Questions in Databases" was in Database Usability and Data Analytics, which resulted in a Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP140103499 (2014-2016). I received FICT Dean’s Award Research Excellence (2nd prize), Swinburne University of Technology in 2013 based on my ICDE 2013 paper "On Answering WHY-NOT questions in reverse skyline queries". Recently, I have received the best paper award in ACM SSDBM 2017 for the paper "Computing Influence of a Product through Uncertain Reverse Skyline".

My teaching interest includes (not limited to):

  • Theory of Computing, Data Structure and Algorithms

  • Responsive Web Design and Web Application Development

  • Software Design, Planning and Management (SCRUM)

  • Structured and Object Oriented Programming

  • Database Management, Architecture and Administration

  • Data Mining Concepts and Techniques

  • Machine Learning and Information Retrieval

  • Data Science and Advanced Data Analytics

  • Business Information System Modeling and System Analysis

  • Customer, Operation and People Analytics

My research interest includes (browse projects for details):

  • Database Usability: WHY and WHY-NOT Query

  • No-But-Semantic-Match Query Processing

  • Data Science and Parallel Data Analytics

  • Advanced Query: Data Indexing and Processing

  • Graph Data Management: Models and Approximations

  • Product Sustainment: Models and Algorithms

  • NewNeighbourhood Query Processing: Indexing and Algorithms

  • NewSport Analytics: Technology, Innovation and Prediction


Actively looking for research enthusiastic students and collaborators to work with for solving interesting data science and engineering problems. Contact me if you are persistent and want to showcase your work in venues such as ICDE*/TKDE*, PVLDB/VLDBJ*, SIGMOD/TODS, (Elsevier) Information Systems, CIKM*, WWW/WWWJ*, EDBT/ICDT, ICDM, SDM, DMKD, SSDBM*, Geoinformatica, KAIS and other flagship data eng./mining conferences and journals ("*" denotes my appearances). Skim through my projects page before contacting me!

Best Paper Award:

  • M.S. Islam, W. Rahayu, C. Liu, T. Anwar and B. Stantic, Computing Influence of a Product through Uncertain Reverse Skyline, Proc. of the 29th Intl. Conf. on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM), pp. 4:1-4:12, 2017.

Research Grants:

  • NewGriffith University New Researcher Grant: Framework for Computing Top-k Most Important Targets/Aspects from Tourism Opinions, AUD 9,727 for 2018. Chief investigator and writer of the proposal.

  • Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP140103499): On Effectively Answering Why and Why-not Questions in Databases, AUD 373,250 for 2014-2016. Writer of the Proposal and Research Associate, March 2014-April 2016.

PhD Supervision:

Current PhD Students (Students who are currently working towards their PhD thesis):

  • Humayun Kayesh (with Griffith University, 2018 ~ present): Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Sport Related Twitter Data

  • Ryoma Ohira (with Griffith University, 2017 ~ present): Framework for Adaptive and Modular Genetic Algorithms

  • Shikha Anirban (with Griffith University, 2018 ~ present): Multilevel Graph Compression for optimizing different types of Pattern Queries

  • Agnes Haryanto (with Monash University, 2015 ~ present): Best Path Queries in Road Networks

  • Nasser Allheeib (with Monash University, 2016 ~ present): Neighborhood Query Processing in Spatial Data

PhD Graduates (Doctors who have graduated already):

  • Dr. Mehdi Naseriparsa (with Swinburne University of Technology, 2015 ~ 2018): "On Improving the Usability of Exploration over Semi-Structured Data", graduated in May 31, 2018!

Recent News (Archives):