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Soma Datta

Soma Datta, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Software Engineering,
College of Science and Engineering

Contact number: 281-283-3838
Email: datta@uhcl.edu
Office: Delta 106

Biography

As an associate professor and program chair, Dr. Soma Datta specializes in applying the agile framework in software development, machine learning, and integrating games in teaching software engineering. She has developed models to identify rules for students' attrition in higher education, which has led to peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Datta actively trains graduate students in the agile framework, requirements collection, methodology, and implementation of software development. She also teaches graduate software engineering students the skill of including data science components in software development.

Dr. Datta appreciates the importance of software engineering skills in developing successful software. Hence, she mentors and encourages students to present their research at student conferences and regional and international IEEE conferences. She has mentored high school students who wanted to become software engineers and has taught data science to sixth-graders internationally. Dr. Datta was one of two faculty leads for the Code for Girls Camp (11-14 age) at UHCL. 

Currently, she is working with graduate students to develop a virtual laboratory to facilitate the generation of reproducible results within the MicroCURE network. The laboratory is also being developed to provide an online alternative to traditional biology teaching laboratories when university facilities are unavailable because of extreme weather events, pandemics, and other disasters.

Areas of Expertise

  • Applying the agile framework in software development
  • Applied machine learning
  • Integrating games in teaching software engineering

Publications

  • M. Mirza and S. Datta, “Developing Software Using Agile and Design Thinking Framework, “ 2020 7th Annual Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI), 2020
  • M. S. Mirza and S. Datta, “Strengths and Weakness of Traditional and Agile Processes-A Systematic Review,” JSW, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 192–199, 2019.
  • M. S. Mirza, A. V. Choday, and S. Datta, “Let’s Do Feature Driven Scrum,” presented at the Proceedings of the 2019 3rd International Conference on Software and e-Business, pp. 110–114, 2019.
  • S. Datta and M. Mirza, “Software Engineers at Play,” presented at the CSCI 2019 6th Annual Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI), 2019, pp. 816–820, doi:10.1109/CSCI49370.2019.00155.
  • S. Khondker, R. Prasanna, and S. Datta, “Machine Learning Predictive Analysis Model in Smart Farming for Internet of Things (IoT) Devices,” IJITEE, Dec. 2019.
  • A. Arputharaj, S. Datta, and K. S. Hasan, “Impact of Distance Measures on Imbalanced Classes for Rule Extraction,” presented at the 2019 6th International Conference on Soft Computing & Machine Intelligence (ISCMI), 2019, pp. 29–34.
  • S. Datta and D. McDonald, “Integrating Games for Agile Software Development,” Academic Exchange Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 57–63, 2018.
  • S. Datta and S. Mengel, “Adaptable multi-phase rules over the infrequent class,” Soft Computing, vol. 22, no. 18, pp. 6067–6076, 2018.

Courses (Current Academic Year)

  • ENGR 1201 Introduction to Engineering 
  • SWEN 4342 Software Engineering 
  • SWEN 5139 Data Science and R in Software Engineering
  • SWEN 5234 Software Processes 
  • SWEN 5236 Engineering Software I
  • SWEN 5236 Software Reuse and Reengineering
  • SWEN 5237 Engineering Software II
  • SWEN 5239 Agile Software Development 
  • SWEN 5431 Testing, Verification and Validation
  • SWEN 5739 Internship in Software Engineering 
  • SWEN 5939 Ind Study Software Engineering
  • SWEN 6837 Software Engineering Capstone Project
  • SWEN 6939 Master's Thesis Research

Research Projects

Current Research:

  • Using games to help ADHD children learn better
  • Virtual labs for supplementing better learning 
  • Applying machine learning to recruit freshmen

Awards and Accomplishments

  • Honorable Mention for the “Instructional Innovation Award”, University of Houston-Clear Lake 2020
  • Recognized in https://www.onlineengineeringprograms.com/degree-types/graduate-certificates/software-engineering as “Professors to Know In Online Graduate Certificates In Software Engineering".
  • Best presentation at the 3rd International Conference on Software and e-Business 2019, Tokyo, Japan
  • New faculty award in teaching for 2018
  • Best presentation at the IEEE 4th Intl. Conference on Soft Computing & Machine Intelligence (November 2017)