THREADS Lab is the research group of Naser Ezzati-Jivan, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Brock University. We study how software, hardware, and AI systems actually behave — and build the tracing, observability, and analysis methods needed to explain, trust, and improve them.
- Explore the research and current projects
- Meet the team
- Browse the publications
- Opportunities and open positions
Research directions
A system can only be understood, trusted, or improved to the extent that its runtime behaviour can be observed as evidence — so we build the tracing and analysis methods that turn what a system actually does at runtime into evidence you can reason about, whether that system is a distributed service, an AI agent, or a robot.
Our work sits in three connected pillars:
- Software observability, tracing & performance engineering — adaptive, multilevel tracing and root-cause methods, from application code down to kernel and hardware evidence.
- Trustworthy & agentic AI systems — making AI-driven and agentic software observable, auditable, and fair.
- Heterogeneous execution & embodied/physical systems — extending observability into heterogeneous hardware and the physical world.
See the Research page for current projects and detail, and the Publications page for the full paper list.
News and recent work
The latest announcements cover software performance engineering, distributed and kernel tracing, observability, and the governance of agentic AI systems.
- Mitacs Globalink interns join the lab (2026). Eman Chaudhary, Khaled Gardabbou, and Muhammad Maaz Hamid begin fully funded internships on automated log understanding and autonomous agent monitoring.
- IVADO Visiting Scholar grant (2026). Scholarly visit to Polytechnique Montréal, hosted by Prof. Foutse Khomh.
- New research assistants join the lab (2026). Flora Nah Asah, Mahsa Jafaie Menarbazari, Abhijeet Dhali, and Becky Kwok begin work on EDI-by-Design and Mitacs-partnered projects.
- NSERC Dimensions Canada and SSHRC Insight Development grants awarded (2026), supporting EDI-by-Design in the Age of AI and related trustworthy-AI research.
- Mitacs Accelerate award for RapidBOM (2026) — a new industry-partnered project on multimodal document AI and privacy-preserving knowledge graphs.
- CASCON 2026 — paper accepted. Our paper, Beyond Agent Logs: Cross-Layer Execution Evidence for Auditing Coding Agents, by Haitham Al Satai, Naser Ezzati-Jivan, and Foutse Khomh, has been accepted for the CASCON 2026 technical-paper program. It examines cross-layer execution evidence for auditing coding-agent behavior.
Join the lab
THREADS Lab is always looking for talented PhD, MSc, and undergraduate students, and welcomes postdoctoral researchers, visiting researchers, and collaborators working on software observability, trustworthy AI, or heterogeneous and embodied systems.
We are currently accepting PhD and MSc students, and we welcome industry collaboration. See Opportunities for what each role involves and how to apply.
