MD Samiul Islam completed his PhD in Computing Science in Fall 2025, supervised by Professor Irene Cheng. He describes the journey as a shift from working hard to working smart, and credits his “dedicated Multimedia Research Centre (MRC) team members.”
After a slow first two years, a deliberate change of strategy toward high-impact venues and international collaboration produced 13 published papers by the end of his program. Two of them came from a collaboration he led with Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), whose dataset underpins the group’s large-scale rice mapping in Brazil; the joint work continues on precision agriculture.
Along the way he mentored undergraduates through the Computing Research Association’s UR2PhD program, led an NSERC USRA student team to a peer-reviewed publication, and founded CellShoppe, a startup applying AI to sustainable electronics repair.
He’s now pursuing postdoctoral opportunities in Canada, aiming his satellite-data research at the country’s priorities in defence and digital agriculture.
Further reading: Fall Convocation 2025: MD Samiul Islam (UofA Faculty of Science News, November 2025).