Seraj A Mostafa, Ph. D.

 

Big Data Analytics Lab

 

Department of Information Systems
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.
Email: serajmost _at_ umbc_dot_edu
Lab: ITE 471
Profiles: Google Scholar, LinkedIn

 

Short Biography

Seraj Mostafa completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC under the guidance of Dr. Jianwu Wang. His research focused on artificial intelligence techniques in Earth Informatics, particularly within the remote sensing domain. He began the program in Fall 2021 and completed it on June 30, 2025. His work included an Ocean Eddy detection and localization project funded by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, followed by a project on gravity wave identification in the upper atmosphere supported by NASA Goddard. He developed scalable analytics pipelines on high-performance computing platforms and trained deep neural networks for large-scale remote sensing data.

In addition to his Earth science research, Seraj investigated reinforcement learning methods to optimize cloud infrastructure for training complex AI models on massive datasets. His work was supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and UMBC’s Division of Information Technology through its Research Computing resources. He is currently serving as a Cloud Lead and Applied Vision Scientist at a startup.

Research Focus

    • Artificial Intelligence | Computer Vision | Object Detection | Pattern Recognition
    • Cloud Computing | Optimization | Distributed Analytics | HPC
    • Climate Change | Earth Informatics

Invited Talk

    • In April 2025, Seraj delivered an invited talk at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where he presented his research on artificial intelligence approaches for object detection in complex imagery.
    • On September 12, 2023, Seraj was invited to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Mississippi to discuss his AI-driven remote sensing work. He presented applications of AI in ocean research, highlighting its potential impact for the U.S. Navy.

Education

    • 2021 ~ 2025: Ph.D.  in Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Maryland, USA
    • 2017 ~ 2020: M.Sc. in Computer Science, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana, USA
    • 2010 ~ 2012: M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden
    • 2001 ~ 2004: B.Sc. in Computing Information Systems, London Metropolitan University, UK

Publication

    • Enhancing Satellite Object Localization with Dilated Convolutions and Attention-aided Spatial Pooling, Seraj Mostafa, C Wang, J Yue, Yuta Hozumi, J Wang, Accepted, IEEE/AMLDS 2025
    • gWaveNet: Classification of Gravity Waves from Noisy Satellite Data using Custom Kernel Integrated Deep Learning Method, SAM Mostafa, O Faruque, C Wang, J Yue, S Purushotham, J Wang, ICPR 2025 [springer, preprint]
    • YOLO based Ocean Eddy Localization with AWS SageMaker, Seraj Mostafa, Jinbo Wang, Benzamin Holt, Jianwu Wang, IEEE/Big Data 2024 [publication link, arXiv]
    • Machine learning based model for mesospheric gravity wave detection from noisy satellite images, J Yue, S Mostafa, C Wang, Y Hozumi, J Wang, S Purushotham, M Cham, AGU23 [link]
    • CNN based Ocean Eddy Detection using Cloud Services, Seraj Mostafa, Jinbo Wang, Benzamin Holt, Jianwu Wang, IEEE/Big Data, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (IGARSS) 2023. [IEEE, Publication Link]
    • Atmospheric Gravity Wave Detection Using Transfer Learning Techniques. Published by the 2022 IEEE/ACM 9th International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies (BDCAT 2022). [IEEE, Publication Link]
    • Benchmarking Probabilistic Machine Learning Models for Arctic Sea Ice. Published by the 2022 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2022), IEEE. [IGARSS, Publication Link]
    • More at Google Scholar

Awards 

    • Student Poster Award, College of Engineering and Information Technology (CoEIT) Research Day, UMBC, April 2024
    • PhD Student Research Award, IS Student Research Symposium, Department of Information Systems, UMBC, May 2023
    • NSF Student Travel Award, 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data.

Advising

    • Summer 2022 REU program: A NSF funded program to support Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) from various US universities. Seraj advised 5 students in a Transfer Learning Project to detect Gravity Wave from Remote Sensing Satellite Imagery.
    • Advised Four Masters students for AWS cloud environments namely, SageMaker and EC2 to deploy RESTFull API services to automate Machine Learning model training and inferencing.