Congratulations Dr. Syed Juned Ali
I am extremely happy and proud to share that Syed Juned (Junaid) Ali successfully completed his PhD at TU Wien. Junaid defended his dissertation in May 2026.
This is a very special milestone for me as well: Junaid is the first PhD candidate whom I supervised from start to finish at TU Wien.
Junaid joined my team at the Business Informatics Group on March 1st, 2021, after previously working as a software developer for Apple in Hyderabad. Back then, we envisioned his PhD at the intersection of model-driven engineering and artificial intelligence. Five years later, this vision has developed into an impressive body of research on representation learning for conceptual models, spanning knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, and, more recently, large language models.
Some highlights #
During his PhD, Junaid published his research at leading conferences in our community, including CAiSE, ER, EDOC, and MODELS. Two achievements in particular deserve to be highlighted:
- In 2023, Junaid received the Best Student Paper Award at EDOC 2023 for our work on a generic and customizable genetic-algorithm-based framework for conceptual model modularization.
- In 2026, together with Zhuoxun Zheng and me, he received the Best Paper Award at CAiSE 2026 for "Shortcut or Understanding? Diagnosing LLM Type Prediction in Conceptual Models."
Beyond his own research, Junaid has been a great contributor to our team and has supported the supervision of several Master's theses at TU Wien. Over the years, it has been particularly rewarding to see him develop from a new PhD student into an independent researcher who contributes his own ideas, supports younger researchers, and helps shape the research direction of our group.
PhD thesis #
Junaid's dissertation is entitled:
"From Symbols to Signals: Representation Learning in Conceptual Modeling – A Generic Framework for Learning Semantics and Structure for Modeling Assistance"
The dissertation brings together his work on structural and semantic representation learning for conceptual models and explores how machine learning, graph neural networks, and large language models can contribute to increasingly intelligent modeling assistance.
The thesis is available through TU Wien's reposiTUm:
The journey continues #
What makes this milestone even nicer for me is that our collaboration does not end with Junaid's PhD. Junaid continues his academic career as a PostDoc in my team at TU Wien, where he is now contributing to our EAGLE – Enterprise Architecture Knowledge Graph for Learning and Exploration project, funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) through its BRIDGE programme.
Congratulations, Dr. Syed Juned Ali! It has been a great pleasure and privilege to supervise your PhD, and I am very proud of what you have achieved. I am equally excited that the journey continues.