Kazi Nabiul Alam

Kazi Nabiul Alam, Md Shakib Khan, Abdur Rab Dhruba et al.

This COVID-19 pandemic is so dreadful that it leads to severe anxiety, phobias, and complicated feelings or emotions. Even after vaccination against Coronavirus has been initiated, people feelings have become more diverse and complex, and our goal is to understand and unravel their sentiments in this research using some Deep Learning techniques. Social media is currently the best way to express feelings and emotions, and with the help of it, specifically Twitter, one can have a better idea of what is trending and what is going on in people minds. Our motivation for this research is to understand the sentiment of people regarding the vaccination process, and their diverse thoughts regarding this. In this research, the timeline of the collected tweets was from December 21 to July 21, and contained tweets about the most common vaccines available recently from all across the world. The sentiments of people regarding vaccines of all sorts were assessed by using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool named Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoner (VADER). By initializing the sentiment polarities into 3 groups (positive, negative and neutral), the overall scenario was visualized here and our findings came out as 33.96% positive, 17.55% negative and 48.49% neutral responses. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) oriented architecture such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM and Bi-LSTM) is used to assess the performance of the predictive models, with LSTM achieving an accuracy of 90.59% and Bi-LSTM achieving an accuracy of 90.83%. Other performance metrics such as Precision, Recall, F-1 score, and Confusion matrix were also shown to validate our models and findings more effectively. This study will help everyone understand public opinion on the COVID-19 vaccines and impact the aim of eradicating the Coronavirus from our beautiful world.

Md. Shakib Khan, Kazi Nabiul Alam, Abdur Rab Dhruba et al.

Melanoma is regarded as the most threatening among all skin cancers. There is a pressing need to build systems which can aid in the early detection of melanoma and enable timely treatment to patients. Recent methods are geared towards machine learning based systems where the task is posed as image recognition, tag dermoscopic images of skin lesions as melanoma or non-melanoma. Even though these methods show promising results in terms of accuracy, they are computationally quite expensive to train, that questions the ability of these models to be deployable in a clinical setting or memory constraint devices. To address this issue, we focus on building simple and performant models having few layers, less than ten compared to hundreds. As well as with fewer learnable parameters, 0.26 million (M) compared to 42.5M using knowledge distillation with the goal to detect melanoma from dermoscopic images. First, we train a teacher model using a ResNet-50 to detect melanoma. Using the teacher model, we train the student model known as Distilled Student Network (DSNet) which has around 0.26M parameters using knowledge distillation achieving an accuracy of 91.7%. We compare against ImageNet pre-trained models such MobileNet, VGG-16, Inception-V3, EfficientNet-B0, ResNet-50 and ResNet-101. We find that our approach works well in terms of inference runtime compared to other pre-trained models, 2.57 seconds compared to 14.55 seconds. We find that DSNet (0.26M parameters), which is 15 times smaller, consistently performs better than EfficientNet-B0 (4M parameters) in both melanoma and non-melanoma detection across Precision, Recall and F1 scores