Hamed Yaghoobian

Sahar Voghoei, James M. Byars, Scott Jackson King et al.

The importance of retention rate for higher education institutions has encouraged data analysts to present various methods to predict at-risk students. The present study, motivated by the same encouragement, proposes a deep learning model trained with 121 features of diverse categories extracted or engineered out of the records of 60,822 postsecondary students. The model undertakes to identify students likely to graduate, the ones likely to transfer to a different school, and the ones likely to drop out and leave their higher education unfinished. This study undertakes to adjust its predictive methods for different stages of curricular progress of students. The temporal aspects introduced for this purpose are accounted for by incorporating layers of LSTM in the model. Our experiments demonstrate that distinguishing between to-be-graduate and at-risk students is reasonably achievable in the earliest stages, and then it rapidly improves, but the resolution within the latter category (dropout vs. transfer) depends on data accumulated over time. However, the model remarkably foresees the fate of students who stay in the school for three years. The model is also assigned to present the weightiest features in the procedure of prediction, both on institutional and student levels. A large, diverse sample size along with the investigation of more than one hundred extracted or engineered features in our study provide new insights into variables that affect students success, predict dropouts with reasonable accuracy, and shed light on the less investigated issue of transfer between colleges. More importantly, by providing individual-level predictions (as opposed to school-level predictions) and addressing the outcomes of transfers, this study improves the use of ML in the prediction of educational outcomes.

Marc S. Montalvo, Hamed Yaghoobian

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) are transforming data-intensive domains, with finance representing a high-stakes environment where transparent and reproducible analysis of heterogeneous signals is essential. Traditional quantitative methods remain vulnerable to survivorship bias, while many AI-driven approaches struggle with signal integration, reproducibility, and computational efficiency. We introduce MASFIN, a modular multi-agent framework that integrates LLMs with structured financial metrics and unstructured news, while embedding explicit bias-mitigation protocols. The system leverages GPT-4.1-nano for reproducability and cost-efficient inference and generates weekly portfolios of 15-30 equities with allocation weights optimized for short-term performance. In an eight-week evaluation, MASFIN delivered a 7.33% cumulative return, outperforming the S&P 500, NASDAQ-100, and Dow Jones benchmarks in six of eight weeks, albeit with higher volatility. These findings demonstrate the promise of bias-aware, generative AI frameworks for financial forecasting and highlight opportunities for modular multi-agent design to advance practical, transparent, and reproducible approaches in quantitative finance.

Hamed Yaghoobian, Hamid R. Arabnia, Khaled Rasheed

Sarcasm detection is the task of identifying irony containing utterances in sentiment-bearing text. However, the figurative and creative nature of sarcasm poses a great challenge for affective computing systems performing sentiment analysis. This article compiles and reviews the salient work in the literature of automatic sarcasm detection. Thus far, three main paradigm shifts have occurred in the way researchers have approached this task: 1) semi-supervised pattern extraction to identify implicit sentiment, 2) use of hashtag-based supervision, and 3) incorporation of context beyond target text. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of the datasets, approaches, trends, and issues in sarcasm and irony detection.

Nahid Yahyapoor, Hamed Yaghoobian, Manijeh Keshtgari

Secure communication is a matter of genuine concern that includes means whereby entities can share information without a third party's interception. Key agreement protocols are one of the common approaches in which two or more parties can agree upon a key, which precludes undesired third parties from forcing a key choice on them. Over the past decade, chaos-based key agreement protocols have been studied and employed widely. Recently, Yoon and Jeon proposed a novel key agreement protocol based on chaotic maps and claimed security and practicality for their protocol. We find that Yoon-Jeon's protocol suffers certain issues: (1) It introduces a trusted third party whose very presence increases the implementation cost. (2) requires a multiplicity of encryption/decryption computations and (3) does not protect the user's anonymity. In order to overcome these problems, we present an enhanced key agreement protocol with user anonymity. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient and resists current attacks.