Cum Laude PhD for Majeed Mohammadi

Majeed Mohammadi successfully defended his PhD thesis on 28 February. He received his doctorate cum laude. A great achievement since only 5% of dissertations are awarded cum laude at TU Delft and the process leading up to it is very rigorous.

His dissertation is entitled “Ontology alignment: Simulated annealing-based system, statistical evaluation, and application to logistics interoperability”. Majeed conducted his research in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) section in Engineering Systems and Services (ESS) department, under the supervision of Prof. Yao-Hua Tan, and Dr. Wout Hofman from TNO.

Majeed explored the use of ontology alignment to enabling interoperability in logistics. Ontology alignment refers to a class of techniques and methods being used to match the identical or similar entities of two different data structures. To that end, Majeed studied the ontology alignment problem and developed an ontology alignment system, named SANOM, based on simulated annealing that solves the ontology alignment problem efficiently. SANOM has participated in the world ontology alignment contest for several years and has been ranked as one of the top systems. In addition, an extensive part of Majeed’s research focused on the evaluation and comparison of different alignment systems, for which he developed several statistical methodologies that are used by the world contest as a means for comparing and ranking the participating alignment systems.

Majeed is a prolific researcher, with writing 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including four singled-authored, during his PhD. This basically justifies the reason he was awarded his PhD cum laude. For future, Majeed will continue his research at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science located in Den Bosch.