Amirali Abari

Associate Professor

Faculty of Business and IT

Computer Science

Ontario Tech University

About

I am an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology at Ontario Tech University, where I co-lead the SAIN lab. Prior that, I was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow, with a joint appointment at University of Toronto (UofT) and University of Waterloo (UW). I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UofT in 2016. My research is on designing, exploring and extending the capabilities of user-centered intelligent systems, aiming to automate or assist the human decision making. I have contributed in various areas of computer science such as artificial intelligence, computer security, machine learning, recommender systems, algorithms, and human-computer interaction.

Research Keywords

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, Graph Neural Networks, Computer Security, and Network Science.

Recent News

We have multiple openings at the SAIN lab. See this posting for details. August 20, 2022.
AAAI 2023 has announced its call for papers. I am serving as a program committee member. August 15, 2022.

Research Group

Current

Madhav Goyani, MSc, 2024-Present.
Danial Saber, MSc, 2023-Present.

Alumni

Graduate

Shweta Jacob, MSc, 2021-2023.
Paul Luis, MSc, 2021-2023.
Tony Wang, MSc, 2020-2023 (co-advised with Julie Thorpe).
Alireza Naman, MSc, 2019-2021 (co-advised with Julie Thorpe).
Aryan Asadian, MSc, 2019-2021.
Sarina Sajjadi, MSc, 2019-2021.
Bahare Askari, MSc, 2018-2020 (co-advised with Jarek Szlichta).
Conor Cushing, MSc, 2017-2020 (co-advised with Julie Thorpe).

Undergrad

Nicholas Hughes, 2022-2023.
Rui David, Undergraduate, 2021-2022.
Issac Ogunmola, 2021-2022.
Dinah Malapaya, 2021-2022.
Zach Parish, 2019-2021.
Arun Sharma, 2019-2020.
Kalev Gonvick, 2018-2019 (co-advised with Julie Thorpe).
Zach Parish, 2018-2019 (co-advised with Julie Thorpe).
Danustan Alphonza, Fall 2017.
Joshua Lemon, Fall 2017 (co-advised with Ken Pu).
Mario Acosta, 2016.
Rob McDiarmid, 2012.

Publications

Shweta Ann Jacob, Paul Louis, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Stochastic Subgraph Neighborhood Pooling for Subgraph Classification. In CIKM, 2023.

Shengqian Wang, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. PiXi: Password Inspiration by Exploring Information. In ICICS, 2023.

Samira Zibaei, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. Dissecting Nudges in Password Managers: Simple Defaults are Powerful. In SOUPS, 2023.

Paul Louis, Shweta Ann Jacob, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Sampling Enclosing Subgraphs for Link Prediction. In CIKM, 2022.

Samira Zibaei, Dinah Malapaya, Benjamin Mercier, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. Do Password Managers Nudge Secure (Random) Passwords?. In SOUPS, 2022.

Alireza Naman, Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Improving Peer Assessment with Graph Neural Networks. In EDM, 2022.

Sarina Sajadi Ghaemmaghami, Amirali Salehi-Abari. DeepGroup: Group Recommendation with Implicit Feedback. In CIKM, 2021.

Zach Parish, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. A Study on Priming Methods for Graphical Passwords.. In JISA, 2021.

Bahare Askari, Jarek Szlichta, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Variational Autoencoders for Top-K Recommendation with Implicit Feedback. In SIGIR, 2021.

Zach Parish, Connor Cushing, Shourya Aggarwal, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. Password Guessers Under a Microscope: An In-Depth Analysis to Inform Deployments. In IJIS, 2021.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Kate Larson. Group Recommendation with Noisy Subjective Preferences. In CI, 2020.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Craig Boutilier, Kate Larson. Empathetic Decision Making in Social Networks. In AIJ, 2019.

Allan Borodin, Denis Pankratov, Amirali Salehi-Abari. On Conceptually Simple Algorithms for Variants of Online Bipartite Matching. In TCS, 2019.

Alaadin Addas, Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Towards Models for Quantifying the Known Adversary. In NSPW, 2019.

Alaadin Addas, Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Geographic Hints for Passphrase Authentication. In PST, 2019.

Alaadin Addas, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. Geographical Security Questions for Fallback Authentication. In PST, 2019.

PDF Project arXiv Extended Version

Alan Tsang, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Kate Larson. Boundedly Rational Voters in Large(r) Networks. In AAMAS, 2018.

Allan Borodin, Denis Pankratov, Amirali Salehi-Abari. A Simple PTAS for the Dual Bin Packing Problem and Advice Complexity of Its Online Version. In SOSA, 2017.

PDF Project arXiv

Allan Borodin, Denis Pankratov, Amirali Salehi-Abari. On Conceptually Simple Algorithms for Variants of Online Bipartite Matching. In WAOA, 2017.

PDF Project arXiv

Brent MacRae, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. An Exploration of Geographic Authentication Schemes. In IEEE TIFS, 2016.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Craig Boutilier. Preference-oriented Social Networks: Group Recommendation and Inference. In ACM RecSys, 2015.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Craig Boutilier. Empathetic Social Choice on Social Networks. In AAMAS, 2014.

PDF Project Extended Version

Julie Thorpe, Muath Al-Badawi, Brent MacRae, Amirali Salehi-Abari. The Presentation Effect on Graphical Passwords. In ACM CHI, 2014.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Craig Boutilier. Ranking Networks. In FNAMMA, 2013.

Julie Thorpe, Brent MacRae, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Usability and Security Evaluation of GeoPass: a Geographic Location-Password Scheme. In SOUPS, 2013.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Craig Boutilier. Empathetic Social Choice on Social Networks. In COMSOC, 2012.

Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Robert Burden. Video-Passwords: Advertising While Authenticating. In NSPW, 2012.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Tony White. DART: A Distributed Analysis of Reputation and Trust Framework. In Computational Intelligence, 2012.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Tony White. The Relationship of Trust, Demand and Utility: Be More Trustworthy, Then I Will Buy More. In IEEE PST (Winner, Best Student Paper Award), 2010.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Tony White. Trust Models and Con-man Agents: From Mathematical to Empirical Analysis. In AAAI, 2010.

Tony White, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Braden Box. How Ants Put Advertisements on the Web. In IEA-AIE, 2010.

P.C. van Oorschot, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. Purely Automated Attacks on PassPoints-Style Graphical Passwords. In IEEE TIFS, 2010.

Tony White, Wayne Chu, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Tony White, Wayne Chu, and Amirali Salehi-Abari. In SocialComp, 2010.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Tony White. On the Impact of Witness-Based Collusion in Agent Societies. In PRIMA, 2009.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Tony White. The Uphill Battle of Ant Programming vs. Genetic Programming. In ICEC, 2009.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Tony White. Towards Con-resistant Trust Models for Distributed Agent Systems. In IJCAI, 2009.

Tony White, Shaun McQuaker, Amirali Salehi-Abari. On the Importance of Relational Concept Knowledge in Referral Networks. In Artificial Intelligence Review, 2009.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Tony White. The Impact of Naive Agents in Heterogeneous Trust-aware Societies. In MABS, 2009.

Tony White, Shaun McQuaker, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Using Relational Concept Knowledge to Improve Search in Referral Networks. In AAMAS, 2009.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe, Paul C. van Oorschot. On Purely Automated Attacks and Click-Based Graphical Passwordse. In ACSAC, 2008.

Tony White, Amirali Salehi-Abari. A Swarm-based Crossover Operator for Genetic Programming. In GECCO, 2008.

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Tony White. Enhanced Generalized Ant Programming (EGAP). In GECCO, 2008.

Contact

(905) 721-8668 ext. 5544
ERC 2086, UOIT, 2000 Simcoe Street North,Oshawa, Ontario, L1H 7K4
Email for appointment