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Khaled Ali Slhoub

Associate Professor | College of Engineering and Science: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Program Chair | Computer Information Systems and Human Centered Design

Contact Information

kslhoub@xyschool.net
(321) 674-7703
F.W. Olin Engineering Complex (OEC), Room 345

Expertise

Software Engineering, Software Testing, Software Measurements, Agent-based Systems, Software Bots, Social Media & Fake News/Propaganda, LLMs

Personal Overview

Dr. Khaled Ali Slhoub (pronounced Sal-houb) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Institute of Technology. He also serves as the Program Chair of Computer Information Systems & Human-Centered Design. Dr. Slhoub earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Florida Tech, focusing on developing a standard framework for formalizing the analysis process of agent-based systems. His academic journey includes an M.Sc. from the University of New Brunswick in Canada and a B.Sc. from Benghazi University in Libya.

His primary research interests lie in software engineering, encompassing software requirements, software testing, and quality assurance, as well as multi-agent systems. Presently, he concentrates on studying and analyzing the quality of existing agent-oriented methodologies to offer unified agent-oriented development approaches applicable in industrial settings. Additionally, he is developing a framework to detect and understand disruptive behavior among distributed social agents (bots) in social networking platforms. Dr. Slhoub's research endeavors extend to finding effective testing approaches for verifying autonomous systems and detecting irregular behavior in agent-based systems.

Educational Background

Ph.D., Computer Science, Florida Institute of Technology, USA 2018

M.Sc., Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Canada 2008

B.Sc., Computer Science, University of Benghazi, Libya 1999

Current Courses

Fall 2024:

  • (CSE 1101) Computer Disciplines and Careers
  • (CSE 4425) Software Testing
  • (SWE 5425) Advanced Software Testing
  • (CIS 5210) Database Systems

Previously Taught:

Intro. to Software Engineering, Software Testing, Advanced Software Testing, Database Systems, Software Quality and Metrics, Software Development, C++ Programming, Data Structures in C, OOP Concepts (Java), Introduction to Computer Science, Introduction to Computer Programming, Operating Systems, Concepts of Programming Languages, Computer Disciplines and Careers, and Introduction to Engineering

Selected Publications

  • C. Miskell, R. Diaz, P. Ganeriwala, K. Slhoub, and F. Nembhard, Automated Framework to Extract Software Requirements from Source Code, accepted and will be published into ACM-NLPIR 2023 conference proceedings, South Korea, December 15-17, 2023.
  • F. Nembhard, K. Slhoub, and M. Carvalho, An Agent-Based Approach Toward Smart Software Testing, accepted and will be published into Future Technologies Conference 2023, San Francisco, USA, November 2-3, 2023.
  • J. Brenner, C. Sen, R. Weaver, K. Hamed, R. Mesa-Arango, K. Demoret, K. Slhoub, and M. Gaal, Reframing Making to Integrate Entrepreneurially Minded Learning (EML), 7th International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces (ISAM23), Pittsburgh, USA, October 18-20, 2023. 
  • A. Averza, K. Slhoub and S. Bhattacharyya, "Evaluating the Influence of Twitter Bots via Agent-Based Social Simulation," in IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 129394-129407, 2022.
  • F. Alsuliman, S. Bhattacharyya, K. Slhoub, N. Nur, & C. Chambers, "Social Media vs. News Platforms: A Cross-analysis for Fake News Detection Using Web Scraping and NLP", In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA '22), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), USA, 190–196, 2022.
  • B. Wood & K. Slhoub, "Detecting Amazon Bot Reviewers Using Unsupervised and Supervised Learning", (Conf Best Paper Award ), 2022 IEEE World AI IoT Congress (AIIoT), pp. 01-08, 2022. 
  • K. Slhoub, F. Nembhard & M. Carvalho, "A Metrics Tracking Program for Promoting High-Quality Software Development", IEEE SoutheastCon2019, pp. 1-8, 2019.
  • K. Slhoub, M. Carvalho & F. Nembhard, "Evaluation and Comparison of Agent- Oriented Methodologies: A Software Engineering Viewpoint", IEEE SYSCON2019), 2019.
  • K. Slhoub & M. Carvalho, "Towards Process Standardization for Requirements Analysis of Agent-Based Systems", Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal, June 2018.
  • K. Slhoub, M. Carvalho & W. Bond, "Recommended Practices for the Specification of Multi-Agent Systems Requirements", 8th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conf. (IEEE UEMCON 2017), Columbia University, NY, USA, Oct 2017.
  • Khaled Slhoub, "A Software Quality Resource Tool That Improves Quality Management of Scaled-Down Development Environments", Proc. 11th IASTED International Conf. on Software Engineering (IASTED SE 2012), International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED), Crete, Greece, June 2012.
  • Khaled Slhoub, "A Strategy That Improves Quality of Software Engineering Projects in Classroom", Proc. 10th International Arab Conf. on Information Technology (ACIT), University of Benghazi, Libya, Dec 2010.
  • Khaled Slhoub, "Managing Software Quality in Educational and Small Business Environments (Poster)", Proc. 4th Annual Research Exposition on Information Technology (UNB CS), University of New Brunswick, Faculty of Computer Science, Fredericton, Canada, April 2007.    

Recognition & Awards

 2022  Recipient of FY23 COES Institutional Research Incentive (IRI)

  • Received IRI funding for the software engineering research - extracting software requirements directly from source code, USA

 2022  KEEN Rising Star Award

  • Named as Florida Tech's 2022 Campus Rising Star by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network National Organization (KEEN). Also be submitted for review and consideration for the National KEEN Rising Star award http://engineeringunleashed.com/content/2022-campus-keen-rising-stars

2013  Recipient of A Government Scholarship

  • Selected by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research to undertake graduate studies in Computer Science in United State of America, Libya

Research

I am currently accepting new graduate students (Masters and Doctoral). Please reach out to me if you are interested and have SE/CS or other related background.

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Projects:

Evaluation and Testing of Large Language Models (LLMs)

The goal of this project is to explore and develop methods for evaluating and testing large language models (LLMs) to ensure their accuracy, fairness, and robustness across different domains. A major focus of the project will be on testing the performance of LLMs through various scenarios and stress-testing techniques. This includes the design of test cases for handling edge cases, adversarial inputs, and ambiguous queries to assess how well these models generalize and respond to challenging conditions.

Testing will involve both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Quantitative testing will use performance metrics like perplexity, accuracy, and response diversity, while qualitative testing will focus on human evaluation to determine how well the model responds to real-world, contextually complex questions. In addition to functional performance, tests will assess ethical concerns like bias detection, fairness, and handling of sensitive or inappropriate content. The project will also explore adversarial testing techniques to evaluate the model’s ability to resist attacks or manipulation, ensuring its robustness in unpredictable environments.

The project aims to produce reliable evaluation techniques and guidelines to make LLMs more reliable, robust, and ethically sound, helping improve their performance in diverse, real-world applications.

 

Towards a Framework to Extract Software Requirements Directly from Source Code - Funded by FIT-IRI

This research project aims to conduct research in developing an intuitive framework for analyzing source code files and generating requirement specifications to show the functions the code is trying to accomplish. Instead of attempting to comprehend and manually construct requirements of open-source systems or legacy systems, our proposed framework will extract the newly requirements directly from source code. While some attempts exist, a fully functional system that efficiently fulfills this task has not been created. This research effort will help us contribute to the ever-growing body of knowledge concerning requirements elicitation for open-source software or legacy systems.

 

A Framework to Model and Analyze the Behavior of Social Agents (Bots)

Co-PI: Dr. Siddhartha Bhattacharyya

The influence of social media in our daily lives has increased significantly over the last decade. This is evident from the change in stock prices guided by Reddit or the increase in participation of protesters/activists for a cause or the increase in new job opportunities, known as influencers. On Twitter, bot software can post content, respond to others, retweet content, create relationships with other users, and direct message other accounts. One of the key factors in this increasing influence of social media is the encouragement or information provided by recommending social agents; the phenomenon is known as Computational Propaganda. Computational Propaganda summarizes automated systems that spread fake/false information and make use of data-driven methods to shape public opinion. Politicians, for example, misuse bots in social media platforms to increase voting participation, influence voters to support them, and promote their campaign platform. It has been demonstrated through societal outcomes that Computational Propaganda can have lasting and overreaching influence that might lead to dangerous or unsafe societal outcomes.

This project's goal is to conduct research on developing a framework that leads to a better understanding, monitoring, and managing of the behavior of social agents to assure the integrity and prevent unsafe and unethical actions. This will help us contribute to the ever-growing body of knowledge concerning content manipulation by social agents that use social media to influence the stock market and society in general.

 

Managing Software Quality in Educational and Small Business Environments

The purpose of this research is to develope a small-scale modality for applying and managing software quality in classroom and small business projects, such as those typically conducted in in-house development environments. The modality consists of a lightweight development methodology along with a set of associated quality metrics and standards. The methodology should utilize several features of Agile-based practices that are well suited for small projects. Simplicity, flexibility, and maintainability are examples of such features. The quality metrics include metrics for tracking product and process quality, specifically risk, product satisfaction, prototype suitability, prototype development duration, workweek, productivity, efficiency, defect density, and maintainability with respect to coding standards and documentation standards. The standards include logging, coding, documentation, and benchmark procedures applied during the proposed development methodology. In addition, an automated tool was being developed to facilitate the application of the proposed modality, called the Software Quality Resource Tool. The tool can be useful in assisting developers in quality analysis activities.

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