Academic Intent

Statement of Academic Intent

After scrutinizing my interests, past B.Sc. and M.Sc. educations, work experiences and final ambition, I have decided to pursue a PhD in Computer Science, in my field of interest which is Health Informatics and Big Data, which will lead me to a research career of data analyst. I have described my academic background, research interests and career goals in this essay.

The undergraduate program of "Computer Engineering – Software" at the Azad University of Tehran, Iran provided me with a strong foundation of Software Engineering and exposed me to its various fields. I have always been interested in data-related problems, which eventually led to an inclination towards software analysis and design methods for data-intensive

business systems backed by RDBMS. In the last year of my undergraduate studies, my senior thesis was "Analysis, Design and Implementation of an Inventory and Purchase/Order Business Systems using SSADM methodology", under guidance of Dr. Babak Vaziri.

As a starting point in my career, I got employed as an analyst programmer in Sakha Rayaneh Toos Pty. Ltd. located in Tehran, Iran in 2001. I was poured with many programming and analysis opportunities in several software system projects ranging from document management systems, to enterprise management systems, to financial systems, to framework development, all in Microsoft technologies, during the period of October 2001 till October 2008. I took these opportunities to learn, to explore, to build, to experiment, to renovate and to give a shape to myself. Due to my achievements in system analysis and development, I was promoted to Senior Programmer Analyst and then to Team Lead positions.

With that wealth of experiments and knowledge I gained in my first employment, I immigrated to Australia to take more challenging opportunities. As soon as I arrived in Australia, I got certified with Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) and Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) certificates.

In Feb 2009, I got employed with Health Communication Network (HCN) Pty. Ltd. in Sydney, a leading eHealth company in Australia. Having been working in HCN for the past 6 years, I have led the development of one of the most sophisticated clinical software package for checking drug and disease interactions using large scale drug database (Big Data) containing all available and scheduled compounds in Australia.

During my employment in HCN, my long term desire to learn more advanced methods to solve data-related problems at Internet scale software systems led me to accomplish a Master of Information Technology with a major in Database and e-Commerce Systems. I successfully designed and developed several course-based projects in the latest technologies such as Cloud, No-SQL and SOA, and graduated with Distinction grade from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 2012.

As an example, my final project was an e-Enterprise Project in my M.Sc. program at UNSW. Due to the rise of different data management cloud services, the objective of this research was to identify a generic API, called Uniform Data Management Service API (UDMSA), which could be used to communicate with different data management cloud services in a uniform way. We investigated various SQL and non-SQL data management cloud services including Graph (Neo4j), Document (MongoDB), Relational (Xeround.com), and Object Relational (Database.com) databases and their respective Execution environments, Configuration settings and Security features. Through Commonality/Variability analysis, we identified the operations of the generic service and respective individual services, created an open architecture and presented in UML diagrams to unify the interfaces, and ultimately implemented an experimental prototype in Java to test the usage of the generic API in applications.

Even though my education in software engineering and work experience have provided me with a strong foundation in my field, a reputed postgraduate program is necessary to increase my knowledge and also to shape me into a good data analyst scientist and researcher.

My purpose of research lies in the fields of Health Informatics, Big Data, Cloud Computing and innovating Data Mining and Machine Learning methods to improve analysis of large amount of data generated in the public and private industrial sectors, such as healthcare data in my current employment. I believe that I have strong dedication and motivation required for successful career in these fields using big data analytics and computing techniques to improve the health care of the

society.

The Computer Science (Information Science) PhD program used for Health Informatics PhD at University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) is suited for me to achieve my goals as a data analyst scientist because Health Informatics is a strong area of research at your university.

I have found the research topics of Professor Carolyn McGregor quite impressive. I believe that to be associated with this research faculty would give me a great opportunity to pursue my career in research and industry. In addition to the Big Data real-time analytics platform called Artemis, I have also been astonished by the unique facilities available at your university's health informatics research laboratory that support fundamental and applied research and provides innovative advanced prototyping and simulation environment to support next-generation health informatics solutions such as simulated current and proposed next-generation functions of intensive care units (ICUs) and neonatal ICUs (NICUs). My graduate supervisor and professors have also backed my decision to pursue my higher education at your renowned university. I am confident that given an opportunity, I will be proved useful and could make significant contribution to a going research. I look forward to joining UOIT as a postgraduate PhD student at Health Informatics Research

Laboratory.

Sincerely,
Azadeh Khoddami