People / Seyed Ali Tabatabaee

Research Visitor, Australian National University

Biography

Seyed Ali Tabatabaee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, supervised by Dr. William Evans. His Ph.D. research focuses on optimization with explorable uncertainty, and he is expected to graduate in August 2025. He received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a research visitor at the Australian National University for the period of April to June 2025, developing a phylogenetic tree simulator for AliSim under the supervision of Dr. Minh Bui.

Research Interests

With a solid background in both the theory and practice of computer science, Ali is interested in algorithms, optimization, distributed systems, blockchains, bioinformatics, machine learning, and software engineering.

Honors and Awards

• 2021 – 2025: The President’s Academic Excellence Initiative Ph.D. Award from UBC.

• 2021 – 2025: The Faculty of Science Ph.D. Tuition Award from UBC.

• 2020 – 2021: The Mitacs Accelerate Award (3 Units).

• 2019 – 2021: The Special UBC Graduate Scholarship - Blockchain@UBC Graduate Student Award.

• 2019 – 2023: The International Tuition Award from UBC.

• 2014 – 2019: The Grant for Undergraduate Studies from Iran’s National Elites Foundation.

• 2013: Gold Medal in the Iranian National Olympiad in Informatics (INOI).

• 2013: 1st Place in the 7th Hellinet Programming Contest by the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET).

• 2012: 1st Place in the 2nd Salamcup Programming Contest.

• 2012: Bronze Medal in the Iranian National Olympiad in Informatics (INOI).

Publications

1. Minimizing the Size of the Uncertainty Regions for Centers of Moving Entities
   W. Evans, S.A. Tabatabaee
   Proceedings of the 16th Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium (LATIN) (2024)

2. A Faster Algorithm for Constructing the Frequency Difference Consensus Tree
   J. Jansson, W. Sung, S.A. Tabatabaee, Y. Yang
   Proceedings of the 41st International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS) (2024)

3. Fractional Bamboo Trimming and Distributed Windows Scheduling
   A. Beikmohammadi, W. Evans, S.A. Tabatabaee
   Proceedings of the 49th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science (SOFSEM) (2024)

4. A Secure Sidechain for Decentralized Trading in Internet of Things
   F. Gai, J. Niu, M. Jalalzai, S.A. Tabatabaee, C. Feng
   IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J) (2023)

5. One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Transaction DoS in MimbleWimble Blockchains
   S.A. Tabatabaee, C. Nicer, I. Beschastnikh, C. Feng
   Proceedings of the IEEE 4th International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC) (2022)

6. Cumulus: A Secure BFT-based Sidechain for Off-chain Scaling
   F. Gai, J. Niu, S.A. Tabatabaee, C. Feng, M. Jalalzai
   Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 29th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS) (2021)

7. Distributed Unit Clustering
   K. Mirjalali, S.A. Tabatabaee, H. Zarrabi-Zadeh
   Proceedings of the 31st Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG) (2019)