Dr. Azlan Ismail

About

I am an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), with over 20 years of experience in configuring, maintaining, and training others on advanced data science and computing platforms widely used in industrial and scientific domains. My expertise lies in the deployment and troubleshooting of research-grade software environments, big data infrastructure, and AI-based simulation systems.

I have led the setup and administration of UiTM’s Big Data Lab, where I managed the installation and optimization of Cloudera Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Hive on a multi-node physical and virtual cluster environment. These platforms are actively used for postgraduate training, large-scale data analysis, and simulation of real-world job scheduling workloads. I am responsible for their ongoing configuration, system performance tuning, and technical support.

In research, I developed EcoPyCSim, a simulation framework supporting deep reinforcement learning (DRL) strategies for energy-aware job scheduling. The simulator integrates environments such as OpenAI Gym and CloudSim Plus, and I handle all aspects of its configuration, testing, and customization for reproducible experimentation. This work supports both academic outputs and innovation competition participation, including recognition through multiple Gold Awards for simulator-based projects like DRL-EnergySim.

I have a number of training sessions and workshops for public agencies and industry, including Agensi Nuklear Malaysia and Technology Depository Agency Berhad, covering topics such as big data pipeline setup, model evaluation, and explainable AI. I also design lab modules and technical documentation to guide postgraduate students and professionals in using these platforms effectively.

While my domain is software-centric, the platforms and environments I develop and maintain are essential tools for modern scientific inquiry, comparable in function and complexity to physical instrumentation in other fields.

Areas of Expertise