Fazlul Hasan Siddiqui

Ferdaus Anam Jibon, Fazlul Hasan Siddiqui, F. Deeba et al.

Epileptic seizures are neurological disorders characterized by abnormal and excessive electrical activity in the brain, resulting in recurrent seizure events. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are widely used for seizure diagnosis due to their ability to capture temporal and spatial neural dynamics. While recent deep learning methods have achieved high detection accuracy, they often lack interpretability and neurophysiological relevance. This study presents a frequency-aware framework for epileptic seizure detection based on ictal-phase EEG analysis. The raw EEG signals are decomposed into five frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, lower beta, and higher beta), and eleven discriminative features are extracted from each band. A graph convolutional neural network (GCN) is then employed to model spatial dependencies among EEG electrodes, represented as graph nodes. Experiments on the CHB-MIT scalp EEG dataset demonstrate high detection performance, achieving accuracies of 97.1%, 97.13%, 99.5%, 99.7%, and 51.4% across the respective frequency bands, with an overall broadband accuracy of 99.01%. The results highlight the strong discriminative capability of mid-frequency bands and reveal frequency-specific seizure patterns. The proposed approach improves interpretability and diagnostic precision compared to conventional broadband EEG-based methods.

Sabah Binte Noor, Fazlul Hasan Siddiqui

Partial-order plans in AI planning facilitate execution flexibility and several other tasks, such as plan reuse, modification, and decomposition, due to their less constrained nature. A Partial-Order Plan (POP) allows two actions with no ordering between them, thus providing the flexibility of executing actions in different sequences. This flexibility can be further extended by enabling parallel execution of actions in a POP to reduce its overall execution time. While extensive studies exist on improving the flexibility of a POP by optimizing its action orderings through plan deordering and reordering, there has been limited focus on the flexibility of executing actions concurrently in a plan. Execution concurrency in a POP can be achieved by incorporating action non-concurrency constraints, specifying which actions can not be executed in parallel. This work formalizes the conditions for non-concurrency constraints to transform a POP into a parallel plan. We also introduce an algorithm to enhance the plan's concurrency by optimizing resource utilization through substitutions of its subplans with respect to the corresponding planning task. Our algorithm employs block deordering that eliminates orderings in a POP by encapsulating coherent actions in blocks, and then exploits blocks as candidate subplans for substitutions. Experiments over the benchmark problems from International Planning Competitions (IPC) exhibit significant improvement in plan concurrency, specifically, with improvement in 25% of the plans, and an overall increase of 2.1% in concurrency.

Sabah Binte Noor, Fazlul Hasan Siddiqui

Partial-order plans in AI planning facilitate execution flexibility due to their less-constrained nature. Maximizing plan flexibility has been studied through the notions of plan deordering, and plan reordering. Plan deordering removes unnecessary action orderings within a plan, while plan reordering modifies them arbitrarily to minimize action orderings. This study, in contrast with traditional plan deordering and reordering strategies, improves a plan's flexibility by substituting its subplans with actions outside the plan for a planning problem. We exploit block deordering, which eliminates orderings in a POP by encapsulating coherent actions in blocks, to construct action blocks as candidate subplans for substitutions. In addition, this paper introduces a pruning technique for eliminating redundant actions within a BDPO plan. We also evaluate our approach when combined with MaxSAT-based reorderings. Our experimental result demonstrates a significant improvement in plan execution flexibility on the benchmark problems from International Planning Competitions (IPC), maintaining good coverage and execution time.

Md. Mushfiqur Rahman, Sabah Binte Noor, Fazlul Hasan Siddiqui

Class Scheduling is a highly constrained task. Educational institutes spend a lot of resources, in the form of time and manual computation, to find a satisficing schedule that fulfills all the requirements. A satisficing class schedule accommodates all the students to all their desired courses at convenient timing. The scheduler also needs to take into account the availability of course teachers on the given slots. With the added limitation of available classrooms, the number of solutions satisfying all constraints in this huge search-space, further decreases. This paper proposes an efficient system to generate class schedules that can fulfill every possible need of a typical university. Though it is primarily a fixed-credit scheduler, it can be adjusted for open-credit systems as well. The model is designed in MiniZinc and solved using various off-the-shelf solvers. The proposed scheduling system can find a balanced schedule for a moderate-sized educational institute in less than a minute.

Md. Mushfiqur Rahman, Thasin Abedin, Khondokar S. S. Prottoy et al.

Video captioning, i.e. the task of generating captions from video sequences creates a bridge between the Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision domains of computer science. The task of generating a semantically accurate description of a video is quite complex. Considering the complexity, of the problem, the results obtained in recent research works are praiseworthy. However, there is plenty of scope for further investigation. This paper addresses this scope and proposes a novel solution. Most video captioning models comprise two sequential/recurrent layers - one as a video-to-context encoder and the other as a context-to-caption decoder. This paper proposes a novel architecture, namely Semantically Sensible Video Captioning (SSVC) which modifies the context generation mechanism by using two novel approaches - "stacked attention" and "spatial hard pull". As there are no exclusive metrics for evaluating video captioning models, we emphasize both quantitative and qualitative analysis of our model. Hence, we have used the BLEU scoring metric for quantitative analysis and have proposed a human evaluation metric for qualitative analysis, namely the Semantic Sensibility (SS) scoring metric. SS Score overcomes the shortcomings of common automated scoring metrics. This paper reports that the use of the aforementioned novelties improves the performance of state-of-the-art architectures.