We’d like to congratulate Umar Qasim, System Developer with Library Information and Technology Support (LITS), on successfully completing his doctorate in Information Systems from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Umar’s PhD thesis, titled “Active Caching for Recommender Systems,” proposes new approaches to improving the performance of recommender systems (e.g. Amazon’s “people who liked this item also like these”).

Simultaneously working full time, raising a family (as of this October Umar has 3 children) and researching a PhD thesis definitely pose challenges, but Umar dealt with it all calmly and effectively. “I’m lucky in that my wife was always so supportive, and my children were very young,” he says.

Umar intends to pursue further research into recommender systems in collaboration with colleagues. “I already have contacts here at Dal, as well as at my school and at McMaster where I used to work,” he says. “The good thing about working at a university is that you’re constantly interacting with others in your field and the environment encourages research. Dal is great—I love coming to work in the morning!”