Umayer Reza

About

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computing and Information Science at the University of Maine, where I conduct research with Dr. Torsten Hahmann at the Spatial Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence (SKAI) Lab. My research lies at the intersection of knowledge representation, ontology engineering, and natural language processing. I focus on developing CelloGraph, a knowledge discovery system that extracts and structures knowledge from scientific publications—primarily in PDF format—related to cellulosic materials. Cellulose is a sustainable, renewable, and widely studied material with applications across multiple domains, yet much of the knowledge about it remains scattered across unstructured literature. This project seeks to address that challenge by enabling automated knowledge extraction and semantic integration, and it is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA NIFA & ARS) and the U.S. Forest Service.

Beyond my primary research, I am broadly interested in machine learning, natural language processing, ontology engineering, and knowledge representation, particularly in interdisciplinary and data-intensive settings. I enjoy work that blends analytical thinking, thoughtful modeling, and robust software development. My long-term goal is to build intelligent systems that are transparent, reliable, and grounded in strong theoretical foundations, while remaining practical for real-world use. I am especially motivated by approaches that improve semantic interoperability and automated reasoning, enabling the transformation of raw, unstructured data into meaningful and actionable knowledge.


Education