Robail Yasrab

Zeyu Fu, Jianbo Jiao, Robail Yasrab et al.

Self-supervised contrastive representation learning offers the advantage of learning meaningful visual representations from unlabeled medical datasets for transfer learning. However, applying current contrastive learning approaches to medical data without considering its domain-specific anatomical characteristics may lead to visual representations that are inconsistent in appearance and semantics. In this paper, we propose to improve visual representations of medical images via anatomy-aware contrastive learning (AWCL), which incorporates anatomy information to augment the positive/negative pair sampling in a contrastive learning manner. The proposed approach is demonstrated for automated fetal ultrasound imaging tasks, enabling the positive pairs from the same or different ultrasound scans that are anatomically similar to be pulled together and thus improving the representation learning. We empirically investigate the effect of inclusion of anatomy information with coarse- and fine-grained granularity, for contrastive learning and find that learning with fine-grained anatomy information which preserves intra-class difference is more effective than its counterpart. We also analyze the impact of anatomy ratio on our AWCL framework and find that using more distinct but anatomically similar samples to compose positive pairs results in better quality representations. Experiments on a large-scale fetal ultrasound dataset demonstrate that our approach is effective for learning representations that transfer well to three clinical downstream tasks, and achieves superior performance compared to ImageNet supervised and the current state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods. In particular, AWCL outperforms ImageNet supervised method by 13.8% and state-of-the-art contrastive-based method by 7.1% on a cross-domain segmentation task.

Robail Yasrab, Javed Ferzund, Saad Razzaq

The software development process has evolved with respect to the problems in developing large and complex applications. There is a paradigm shift towards collaborative development, which necessitates the need to evaluate this approach. A number of tools are used for collaborative software development (CSD) including social media and web 2.0 features. Collaborative development facilities are provided by IDEs and project hosting websites. In this paper, we present a survey of collaboratively developed projects and discuss challenges and issues in CSD. We analyze various issues of communication, coordination, support, lifecycle management and discuss their effect on software quality.

Robail Yasrab

Docker offers an ecosystem that offers a platform for application packaging, distributing, and managing within containers. However, the Docker platform has not yet matured. Presently, Docker is less secured than virtual machines (VM) and most of the other cloud technologies. The key to Dockers inadequate security protocols is container sharing of Linux kernel, which can lead to the risk of privileged escalations. This research will outline some significant security vulnerabilities at Docker and counter solutions to neutralize such attacks. There are a variety of security attacks like insider and outsider. This research will outline both types of attacks and their mitigations strategies. Taking some precautionary measures can save from massive disasters. This research will also present Docker secure deployment guidelines. These guidelines will suggest different configurations to deploy Docker containers in a more secure way.

Robail Yasrab

Cloud computing has brought a revolution in the field of information technology and improving the efficiency of computational resources. It offers computing as a service enabling huge cost and resource efficiency. Despite its advantages, certain security issues still hinder organizations and enterprises from it being adopted. This study mainly focused on the security of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) as well as the most critical security issues that were documented regarding PaaS infrastructure. The prime outcome of this study was a security model proposed to mitigate security vulnerabilities of PaaS. This security model consists of a number of tools, techniques and guidelines to mitigate and neutralize security issues of PaaS. The security vulnerabilities along with mitigation strategies were discussed to offer a deep insight into PaaS security for both vendor and client that may facilitate future design to implement secure PaaS platforms.