Abdul W. Basit

Arif Mahmood, Abdul Basit, M. Akhtar Munir et al.

Detecting firearms and accurately localizing individuals carrying them in images or videos is of paramount importance in security, surveillance, and content customization. However, this task presents significant challenges in complex environments due to clutter and the diverse shapes of firearms. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that leverages human-firearm interaction information, which provides valuable clues for localizing firearm carriers. Our approach incorporates an attention mechanism that effectively distinguishes humans and firearms from the background by focusing on relevant areas. Additionally, we introduce a saliency-driven locality-preserving constraint to learn essential features while preserving foreground information in the input image. By combining these components, our approach achieves exceptional results on a newly proposed dataset. To handle inputs of varying sizes, we pass paired human-firearm instances with attention masks as channels through a deep network for feature computation, utilizing an adaptive average pooling layer. We extensively evaluate our approach against existing methods in human-object interaction detection and achieve significant results (AP=77.8\%) compared to the baseline approach (AP=63.1\%). This demonstrates the effectiveness of leveraging attention mechanisms and saliency-driven locality preservation for accurate human-firearm interaction detection. Our findings contribute to advancing the fields of security and surveillance, enabling more efficient firearm localization and identification in diverse scenarios.

Abdul Basit, Maha Nawaz, Saim Rehman et al.

Efficient control of prosthetic limbs via non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) requires advanced EEG processing, including pre-filtering, feature extraction, and action prediction, performed in real time on edge AI hardware. Achieving this on resource-constrained devices presents challenges in balancing model complexity, computational efficiency, and latency. We present CognitiveArm, an EEG-driven, brain-controlled prosthetic system implemented on embedded AI hardware, achieving real-time operation without compromising accuracy. The system integrates BrainFlow, an open-source library for EEG data acquisition and streaming, with optimized deep learning (DL) models for precise brain signal classification. Using evolutionary search, we identify Pareto-optimal DL configurations through hyperparameter tuning, optimizer analysis, and window selection, analyzed individually and in ensemble configurations. We apply model compression techniques such as pruning and quantization to optimize models for embedded deployment, balancing efficiency and accuracy. We collected an EEG dataset and designed an annotation pipeline enabling precise labeling of brain signals corresponding to specific intended actions, forming the basis for training our optimized DL models. CognitiveArm also supports voice commands for seamless mode switching, enabling control of the prosthetic arm's 3 degrees of freedom (DoF). Running entirely on embedded hardware, it ensures low latency and real-time responsiveness. A full-scale prototype, interfaced with the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV EEG headset, achieved up to 90% accuracy in classifying three core actions (left, right, idle). Voice integration enables multiplexed, variable movement for everyday tasks (e.g., handshake, cup picking), enhancing real-world performance and demonstrating CognitiveArm's potential for advanced prosthetic control.

Abdul Basit, Khizar Hussain, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing various domains with their remarkable natural language processing (NLP) abilities. However, deploying LLMs in resource-constrained edge computing and embedded systems presents significant challenges. Another challenge lies in delivering medical assistance in remote areas with limited healthcare facilities and infrastructure. To address this, we introduce MedAide, an on-premise healthcare chatbot. It leverages tiny-LLMs integrated with LangChain, providing efficient edge-based preliminary medical diagnostics and support. MedAide employs model optimizations for minimal memory footprint and latency on embedded edge devices without server infrastructure. The training process is optimized using low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Additionally, the model is trained on diverse medical datasets, employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to enhance its domain-specific capabilities. The system is implemented on various consumer GPUs and Nvidia Jetson development board. MedAide achieves 77\% accuracy in medical consultations and scores 56 in USMLE benchmark, enabling an energy-efficient healthcare assistance platform that alleviates privacy concerns due to edge-based deployment, thereby empowering the community.

Maha Nawaz, Abdul Basit, Muhammad Shafique

Currently, individuals with arm mobility impairments (referred to as "patients") face limited technological solutions due to two key challenges: (1) non-invasive prosthetic devices are often prohibitively expensive and costly to maintain, and (2) invasive solutions require high-risk, costly brain surgery, which can pose a health risk. Therefore, current technological solutions are not accessible for all patients with different financial backgrounds. Toward this, we propose a low-cost technological solution called MindArm, an affordable, non-invasive neuro-driven prosthetic arm system. MindArm employs a deep neural network (DNN) to translate brain signals, captured by low-cost surface electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes, into prosthetic arm movements. Utilizing an Open Brain Computer Interface and UDP networking for signal processing, the system seamlessly controls arm motion. In the compute module, we run a trained DNN model to interpret filtered micro-voltage brain signals, and then translate them into a prosthetic arm action via serial communication seamlessly. Experimental results from a fully functional prototype show high accuracy across three actions, with 91% for idle/stationary, 85% for handshake, and 84% for cup pickup. The system costs approximately $500-550, including $400 for the EEG headset and $100-150 for motors, 3D printing, and assembly, offering an affordable alternative for mind-controlled prosthetic devices.

Zhuo Zhi, Moe Elbadawi, Adam Daneshmend et al.

Anemia is a prevalent medical condition that typically requires invasive blood tests for diagnosis and monitoring. Electronic health records (EHRs) have emerged as valuable data sources for numerous medical studies. EHR-based hemoglobin level/anemia degree prediction is non-invasive and rapid but still faces some challenges due to the fact that EHR data is typically an irregular multivariate time series containing a significant number of missing values and irregular time intervals. To address these issues, we introduce HgbNet, a machine learning-based prediction model that emulates clinicians' decision-making processes for hemoglobin level/anemia degree prediction. The model incorporates a NanDense layer with a missing indicator to handle missing values and employs attention mechanisms to account for both local irregularity and global irregularity. We evaluate the proposed method using two real-world datasets across two use cases. In our first use case, we predict hemoglobin level/anemia degree at moment T+1 by utilizing records from moments prior to T+1. In our second use case, we integrate all historical records with additional selected test results at moment T+1 to predict hemoglobin level/anemia degree at the same moment, T+1. HgbNet outperforms the best baseline results across all datasets and use cases. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of estimating hemoglobin levels and anemia degree from EHR data, positioning HgbNet as an effective non-invasive anemia diagnosis solution that could potentially enhance the quality of life for millions of affected individuals worldwide. To our knowledge, HgbNet is the first machine learning model leveraging EHR data for hemoglobin level/anemia degree prediction.

Abdul Basit, Maha Nawaz, Muhammad Shafique

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to enable intuitive control of prosthetic limbs for individuals with upper limb amputations. However, existing EEG-based control systems face challenges related to signal noise, classification accuracy, and real-time adaptability. In this work, we present BRAVE, a hybrid EEG and voice-controlled prosthetic system that integrates ensemble learning-based EEG classification with a human-in-the-loop (HITL) correction framework for enhanced responsiveness. Unlike traditional electromyography (EMG)-based prosthetic control, BRAVE aims to interpret EEG-driven motor intent, enabling movement control without reliance on residual muscle activity. To improve classification robustness, BRAVE combines LSTM, CNN, and Random Forest models in an ensemble framework, achieving a classification accuracy of 96% across test subjects. EEG signals are preprocessed using a bandpass filter (0.5-45 Hz), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for artifact removal, and Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) feature extraction to minimize contamination from electromyographic (EMG) and electrooculographic (EOG) signals. Additionally, BRAVE incorporates automatic speech recognition (ASR) to facilitate intuitive mode switching between different degrees of freedom (DOF) in the prosthetic arm. The system operates in real time, with a response latency of 150 ms, leveraging Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) networking for synchronized data acquisition. The system is evaluated on an in-house fabricated prosthetic arm and on multiple participants highlighting the generalizability across users. The system is optimized for low-power embedded deployment, ensuring practical real-world application beyond high-performance computing environments. Our results indicate that BRAVE offers a promising step towards robust, real-time, non-invasive prosthetic control.

Youssef Abdalla, Marrisa Taub, Eleanor Hilton et al. · oxford

Data scarcity in pharmaceutical research has led to reliance on labour-intensive trial-and-error approaches for development rather than data-driven methods. While Machine Learning offers a solution, existing datasets are often small and noisy, limiting their utility. To address this, we developed a Variationally Encoded Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Network (VECT-GAN), a novel generative model specifically designed for augmenting small, noisy datasets. We introduce a pipeline where data is augmented before regression model development and demonstrate that this consistently and significantly improves performance over other state-of-the-art tabular generative models. We apply this pipeline across six pharmaceutical datasets, and highlight its real-world applicability by developing novel polymers with medically desirable mucoadhesive properties, which we made and experimentally characterised. Additionally, we pre-train the model on the ChEMBL database of drug-like molecules, leveraging knowledge distillation to enhance its generalisability, making it readily available for use on pharmaceutical datasets containing small molecules, an extremely common pharmaceutical task. We demonstrate the power of synthetic data for regularising small tabular datasets, highlighting its potential to become standard practice in pharmaceutical model development, and make our method, including VECT-GAN pre-trained on ChEMBL available as a pip package.

Zhuo Zhi, Ziquan Liu, Moe Elbadawi et al.

Multimodal machine learning with missing modalities is an increasingly relevant challenge arising in various applications such as healthcare. This paper extends the current research into missing modalities to the low-data regime, i.e., a downstream task has both missing modalities and limited sample size issues. This problem setting is particularly challenging and also practical as it is often expensive to get full-modality data and sufficient annotated training samples. We propose to use retrieval-augmented in-context learning to address these two crucial issues by unleashing the potential of a transformer's in-context learning ability. Diverging from existing methods, which primarily belong to the parametric paradigm and often require sufficient training samples, our work exploits the value of the available full-modality data, offering a novel perspective on resolving the challenge. The proposed data-dependent framework exhibits a higher degree of sample efficiency and is empirically demonstrated to enhance the classification model's performance on both full- and missing-modality data in the low-data regime across various multimodal learning tasks. When only 1% of the training data are available, our proposed method demonstrates an average improvement of 6.1% over a recent strong baseline across various datasets and missing states. Notably, our method also reduces the performance gap between full-modality and missing-modality data compared with the baseline.