Farhana Zulkernine

Donghao Qiao, Farhana Zulkernine

Cooperative perception allows a Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) to interact with the other CAVs in the vicinity to enhance perception of surrounding objects to increase safety and reliability. It can compensate for the limitations of the conventional vehicular perception such as blind spots, low resolution, and weather effects. An effective feature fusion model for the intermediate fusion methods of cooperative perception can improve feature selection and information aggregation to further enhance the perception accuracy. We propose adaptive feature fusion models with trainable feature selection modules. One of our proposed models Spatial-wise Adaptive feature Fusion (S-AdaFusion) outperforms all other State-of-the-Arts (SOTAs) on two subsets of the OPV2V dataset: Default CARLA Towns for vehicle detection and the Culver City for domain adaptation. In addition, previous studies have only tested cooperative perception for vehicle detection. A pedestrian, however, is much more likely to be seriously injured in a traffic accident. We evaluate the performance of cooperative perception for both vehicle and pedestrian detection using the CODD dataset. Our architecture achieves higher Average Precision (AP) than other existing models for both vehicle and pedestrian detection on the CODD dataset. The experiments demonstrate that cooperative perception also improves the pedestrian detection accuracy compared to the conventional single vehicle perception process.

Donghao Qiao, Amtul Haq Ayesha, Farhana Zulkernine et al.

We propose an end-to-end framework to measure people's vital signs including Heart Rate (HR), Heart Rate Variability (HRV), Oxygen Saturation (SpO2) and Blood Pressure (BP) based on the rPPG methodology from the video of a user's face captured with a smartphone camera. We extract face landmarks with a deep learning-based neural network model in real-time. Multiple face patches also called Regions-of-Interest (RoIs) are extracted by using the predicted face landmarks. Several filters are applied to reduce the noise from the RoIs in the extracted cardiac signals called Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) signal. The measurements of HR, HRV and SpO2 are validated on two public rPPG datasets namely the TokyoTech rPPG and the Pulse Rate Detection (PURE) datasets, on which our models achieved the following Mean Absolute Errors (MAE): a) for HR, 1.73Beats-Per-Minute (bpm) and 3.95bpm respectively; b) for HRV, 18.55ms and 25.03ms respectively, and c) for SpO2, an MAE of 1.64% on the PURE dataset. We validated our end-to-end rPPG framework, ReViSe, in daily living environment, and thereby created the Video-HR dataset. Our HR estimation model achieved an MAE of 2.49bpm on this dataset. Since no publicly available rPPG datasets existed for BP measurement with face videos, we used a dataset with signals from fingertip sensor to train our deep learning-based BP estimation model and also created our own video dataset, Video-BP. On our Video-BP dataset, our BP estimation model achieved an MAE of 6.7mmHg for Systolic Blood Pressure (SBP), and an MAE of 9.6mmHg for Diastolic Blood Pressure (DBP). ReViSe framework has been validated on datasets with videos recorded in daily living environment as opposed to less noisy laboratory environment as reported by most state-of-the-art techniques.

Donghao Qiao, Farhana Zulkernine

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) use multiple sensors to gather information about their surroundings. By sharing sensor data between Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), the safety and reliability of these vehicles can be improved through a concept known as cooperative perception. However, recent approaches in cooperative perception only share single sensor information such as cameras or LiDAR. In this research, we explore the fusion of multiple sensor data sources and present a framework, called CoBEVFusion, that fuses LiDAR and camera data to create a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. The CAVs process the multi-modal data locally and utilize a Dual Window-based Cross-Attention (DWCA) module to fuse the LiDAR and camera features into a unified BEV representation. The fused BEV feature maps are shared among the CAVs, and a 3D Convolutional Neural Network is applied to aggregate the features from the CAVs. Our CoBEVFusion framework was evaluated on the cooperative perception dataset OPV2V for two perception tasks: BEV semantic segmentation and 3D object detection. The results show that our DWCA LiDAR-camera fusion model outperforms perception models with single-modal data and state-of-the-art BEV fusion models. Our overall cooperative perception architecture, CoBEVFusion, also achieves comparable performance with other cooperative perception models.

Amtul Haq Ayesha, Donghao Qiao, Farhana Zulkernine

With a surge in online medical advising remote monitoring of patient vitals is required. This can be facilitated with the Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) techniques that compute vital signs from facial videos. It involves processing video frames to obtain skin pixels, extracting the cardiac data from it and applying signal processing filters to extract the Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) signal. Different algorithms are applied to the BVP signal to estimate the various vital signs. We implemented a web application framework to measure a person's Heart Rate (HR), Heart Rate Variability (HRV), Oxygen Saturation (SpO2), Respiration Rate (RR), Blood Pressure (BP), and stress from the face video. The rPPG technique is highly sensitive to illumination and motion variation. The web application guides the users to reduce the noise due to these variations and thereby yield a cleaner BVP signal. The accuracy and robustness of the framework was validated with the help of volunteers.

Elyas Rashno, Amir Eskandari, Aman Anand et al.

Transformers have made significant strides across various artificial intelligence domains, including natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. This success has naturally garnered considerable interest from both academic and industry researchers. Consequently, numerous Transformer variants (often referred to as X-formers) have been developed for these fields. However, a thorough and systematic review of these modality-specific conversions remains lacking. Modality Conversion involves the transformation of data from one form of representation to another, mimicking the way humans integrate and interpret sensory information. This paper provides a comprehensive review of transformer-based models applied to the primary modalities of text, vision, and speech, discussing their architectures, conversion methodologies, and applications. By synthesizing the literature on modality conversion, this survey aims to underline the versatility and scalability of transformers in advancing AI-driven content generation and understanding.

Sazia Mahfuz, Farhana Zulkernine

Efficient querying and retrieval of healthcare data is posing a critical challenge today with numerous connected devices continuously generating petabytes of images, text, and internet of things (IoT) sensor data. One approach to efficiently store the healthcare data is to extract the relevant and representative features and store only those features instead of the continuous streaming data. However, it raises a question as to the amount of information content we can retain from the data and if we can reconstruct the pseudo-original data when needed. By facilitating relevant and representative feature extraction, storage and reconstruction of near original pattern, we aim to address some of the challenges faced by the explosion of the streaming data. We present a preliminary study, where we explored multiple autoencoders for concise feature extraction and reconstruction for human activity recognition (HAR) sensor data. Our Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) deep autoencoder achieved a storage reduction of 90.18% compared to the three other implemented autoencoders namely convolutional autoencoder, Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) autoencoder, and convolutional LSTM autoencoder which achieved storage reductions of 11.18%, 49.99%, and 72.35% respectively. Encoded features from the autoencoders have smaller size and dimensions which help to reduce the storage space. For higher dimensions of the representation, storage reduction was low. But retention of relevant information was high, which was validated by classification performed on the reconstructed data.

Mojtaba Moattari, Sahar Vahdati, Farhana Zulkernine

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) methods have gained enormous attention from a wide range of AI communities including Natural Language Processing (NLP) for text generation, classification and context induction. Embedding a huge number of inter-relationships in terms of a small number of dimensions, require proper modeling in both cognitive and computational aspects. Recently, numerous objective functions regarding cognitive and computational aspects of natural languages are developed. Among which are the state-of-the-art methods of linearity, bilinearity, manifold-preserving kernels, projection-subspace, and analogical inference. However, the major challenge of such models lies in their loss functions that associate the dimension of relation embeddings to corresponding entity dimension. This leads to inaccurate prediction of corresponding relations among entities when counterparts are estimated wrongly. ProjE KGE, published by Bordes et al., due to low computational complexity and high potential for model improvement, is improved in this work regarding all translative and bilinear interactions while capturing entity nonlinearity. Experimental results on benchmark Knowledge Graphs (KGs) such as FB15K and WN18 show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models in entity prediction task using linear and bilinear methods and other recent powerful ones. In addition, a parallel processing structure is proposed for the model in order to improve the scalability on large KGs. The effects of different adaptive clustering and newly proposed sampling approaches are also explained which prove to be effective in improving the accuracy of knowledge graph completion.

Aman Anand, Amir Eskandari, Elyas Rahsno et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown remarkable success in skeleton-based action recognition by leveraging data augmentations to learn meaningful representations. However, existing SSL methods rely on data augmentations that predominantly focus on masking high-motion frames and high-degree joints such as joints with degree 3 or 4. This results in biased and incomplete feature representations that struggle to generalize across varied motion patterns. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Spatio-temporal Masking (ASMa) for Skeleton Action Representation Learning, a novel combination of masking to learn a full spectrum of spatio-temporal dynamics inherent in human actions. ASMa employs two complementary masking strategies: one that selectively masks high-degree joints and low-motion, and another that masks low-degree joints and high-motion frames. These masking strategies ensure a more balanced and comprehensive skeleton representation learning. Furthermore, we introduce a learnable feature alignment module to effectively align the representations learned from both masked views. To facilitate deployment in resource-constrained settings and on low-resource devices, we compress the learned and aligned representation into a lightweight model using knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing SSL methods with an average improvement of 2.7-4.4% in fine-tuning and up to 5.9% in transfer learning to noisy datasets and achieves competitive performance compared to fully supervised baselines. Our distilled model achieves 91.4% parameter reduction and 3x faster inference on edge devices while maintaining competitive accuracy, enabling practical deployment in resource-constrained scenarios.

Nafiz Sadman, Farhana Zulkernine, Benjamin Kwan

In this paper, we construct two research objectives: i) explore the learned embedding space of BiomedCLIP, an open-source large vision language model, to analyse meaningful class separations, and ii) quantify the limitations of BiomedCLIP when applied to a highly imbalanced, out-of-distribution multi-label medical dataset. We experiment on IU-xray dataset, which exhibits the aforementioned criteria, and evaluate BiomedCLIP in classifying images (radiographs) in three contexts: zero-shot inference, full finetuning, and linear probing. The results show that the model under zero-shot settings over-predicts all labels, leading to poor precision and inter-class separability. Full fine-tuning improves classification of distinct diseases, while linear probing detects overlapping features. We demonstrate visual understanding of the model using Grad-CAM heatmaps and compare with 15 annotations by a radiologist. We highlight the need for careful adaptations of the models to foster reliability and applicability in a real-world setting. The code for the experiments in this work is available and maintained on GitHub.

Ruoran Liu, Haruna Isah, Farhana Zulkernine

Large organizations are seeking to create new architectures and scalable platforms to effectively handle data management challenges due to the explosive nature of data rarely seen in the past. These data management challenges are largely posed by the availability of streaming data at high velocity from various sources in multiple formats. The changes in data paradigm have led to the emergence of new data analytics and management architecture. This paper focuses on storing high volume, velocity and variety data in the raw formats in a data storage architecture called a data lake. First, we present our study on the limitations of traditional data warehouses in handling recent changes in data paradigms. We discuss and compare different open source and commercial platforms that can be used to develop a data lake. We then describe our end-to-end data lake design and implementation approach using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) on the Hadoop Data Platform (HDP). Finally, we present a real-world data lake development use case for data stream ingestion, staging, and multilevel streaming analytics which combines structured and unstructured data. This study can serve as a guide for individuals or organizations planning to implement a data lake solution for their use cases.

Shihao Ge, Haruna Isah, Farhana Zulkernine et al.

The rapid growth of data in velocity, volume, value, variety, and veracity has enabled exciting new opportunities and presented big challenges for businesses of all types. Recently, there has been considerable interest in developing systems for processing continuous data streams with the increasing need for real-time analytics for decision support in the business, healthcare, manufacturing, and security. The analytics of streaming data usually relies on the output of offline analytics on static or archived data. However, businesses and organizations like our industry partner Gnowit, strive to provide their customers with real time market information and continuously look for a unified analytics framework that can integrate both streaming and offline analytics in a seamless fashion to extract knowledge from large volumes of hybrid streaming data. We present our study on designing a multilevel streaming text data analytics framework by comparing leading edge scalable open-source, distributed, and in-memory technologies. We demonstrate the functionality of the framework for a use case of multilevel text analytics using deep learning for language understanding and sentiment analysis including data indexing and query processing. Our framework combines Spark streaming for real time text processing, the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning model for higher level sentiment analysis, and other tools for SQL-based analytical processing to provide a scalable solution for multilevel streaming text analytics.

Morgan Gallant, Haruna Isah, Farhana Zulkernine et al.

The exponential growth of information on the Internet is a big challenge for information retrieval systems towards generating relevant results. Novel approaches are required to reformat or expand user queries to generate a satisfactory response and increase recall and precision. Query expansion (QE) is a technique to broaden users' queries by introducing additional tokens or phrases based on some semantic similarity metrics. The tradeoff is the added computational complexity to find semantically similar words and a possible increase in noise in information retrieval. Despite several research efforts on this topic, QE has not yet been explored enough and more work is needed on similarity matching and composition of query terms with an objective to retrieve a small set of most appropriate responses. QE should be scalable, fast, and robust in handling complex queries with a good response time and noise ceiling. In this paper, we propose Xu, an automated QE technique, using high dimensional clustering of word vectors and Datamuse API, an open source query engine to find semantically similar words. We implemented Xu as a command line tool and evaluated its performances using datasets containing news articles and human-generated QEs. The evaluation results show that Xu was better than Datamuse by achieving about 88% accuracy with reference to the human-generated QE.

Amir Eskandari, Aman Anand, Elyas Rashno et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the go-to model for graph data analysis. However, GNNs rely on two key operations - aggregation and update, which can pose challenges for low-latency inference tasks or resource-constrained scenarios. Simple Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) offer a computationally efficient alternative. Yet, training an MLP in a supervised setting often leads to suboptimal performance. Knowledge Distillation (KD) from a GNN teacher to an MLP student has emerged to bridge this gap. However, most KD methods either transfer knowledge uniformly across all nodes or rely on graph-agnostic indicators such as prediction uncertainty. We argue this overlooks a more fundamental, graph-centric inquiry: "How important is a node to the structure of the graph?" We introduce a framework, InfGraND, an Influence-guided Graph KNowledge Distillation from GNN to MLP that addresses this by identifying and prioritizing structurally influential nodes to guide the distillation process, ensuring that the MLP learns from the most critical parts of the graph. Additionally, InfGraND embeds structural awareness in MLPs through one-time multi-hop neighborhood feature pre-computation, which enriches the student MLP's input and thus avoids inference-time overhead. Our rigorous evaluation in transductive and inductive settings across seven homophilic graph benchmark datasets shows InfGraND consistently outperforms prior GNN to MLP KD methods, demonstrating its practicality for numerous latency-critical applications in real-world settings.

Bo Wen, Raquel Norel, Julia Liu et al.

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have opened up new opportunities for transforming patient engagement in healthcare through conversational AI. This paper presents an overview of the current landscape of LLMs in healthcare, specifically focusing on their applications in analyzing and generating conversations for improved patient engagement. We showcase the power of LLMs in handling unstructured conversational data through four case studies: (1) analyzing mental health discussions on Reddit, (2) developing a personalized chatbot for cognitive engagement in seniors, (3) summarizing medical conversation datasets, and (4) designing an AI-powered patient engagement system. These case studies demonstrate how LLMs can effectively extract insights and summarizations from unstructured dialogues and engage patients in guided, goal-oriented conversations. Leveraging LLMs for conversational analysis and generation opens new doors for many patient-centered outcomes research opportunities. However, integrating LLMs into healthcare raises important ethical considerations regarding data privacy, bias, transparency, and regulatory compliance. We discuss best practices and guidelines for the responsible development and deployment of LLMs in healthcare settings. Realizing the full potential of LLMs in digital health will require close collaboration between the AI and healthcare professionals communities to address technical challenges and ensure these powerful tools' safety, efficacy, and equity.

Tariq Abughofa, Ahmed A. Harby, Haruna Isah et al.

Community detection is an important research topic in graph analytics that has a wide range of applications. A variety of static community detection algorithms and quality metrics were developed in the past few years. However, most real-world graphs are not static and often change over time. In the case of streaming data, communities in the associated graph need to be updated either continuously or whenever new data streams are added to the graph, which poses a much greater challenge in devising good community detection algorithms for maintaining dynamic graphs over streaming data. In this paper, we propose an incremental community detection algorithm for maintaining a dynamic graph over streaming data. The contributions of this study include (a) the implementation of a Distributed Weighted Community Clustering (DWCC) algorithm, (b) the design and implementation of a novel Incremental Distributed Weighted Community Clustering (IDWCC) algorithm, and (c) an experimental study to compare the performance of our IDWCC algorithm with the DWCC algorithm. We validate the functionality and efficiency of our framework in processing streaming data and performing large in-memory distributed dynamic graph analytics. The results demonstrate that our IDWCC algorithm performs up to three times faster than the DWCC algorithm for a similar accuracy.

Chantal Montgomery, Haruna Isah, Farhana Zulkernine

Tackling the information retrieval gap between non-technical database end-users and those with the knowledge of formal query languages has been an interesting area of data management and analytics research. The use of natural language interfaces to query information from databases offers the opportunity to bridge the communication challenges between end-users and systems that use formal query languages. Previous research efforts mainly focused on developing structured query interfaces to relational databases. However, the evolution of unstructured big data such as text, images, and video has exposed the limitations of traditional structured query interfaces. While the existing web search tools prove the popularity and usability of natural language query, they return complete documents and web pages instead of focused query responses and are not applicable to database systems. This paper reports our study on the design and development of a natural language query interface to a backend relational database. The novelty in the study lies in defining a graph database as a middle layer to store necessary metadata needed to transform a natural language query into structured query language that can be executed on backend databases. We implemented and evaluated our approach using a restaurant dataset. The translation results for some sample queries yielded a 90% accuracy rate.

Kennedy Ralston, Yuhao Chen, Haruna Isah et al.

Systems powered by artificial intelligence are being developed to be more user-friendly by communicating with users in a progressively human-like conversational way. Chatbots, also known as dialogue systems, interactive conversational agents, or virtual agents are an example of such systems used in a wide variety of applications ranging from customer support in the business domain to companionship in the healthcare sector. It is becoming increasingly important to develop chatbots that can best respond to the personalized needs of their users so that they can be as helpful to the user as possible in a real human way. This paper investigates and compares three popular existing chatbots API offerings and then propose and develop a voice interactive and multilingual chatbot that can effectively respond to users mood, tone, and language using IBM Watson Assistant, Tone Analyzer, and Language Translator. The chatbot was evaluated using a use case that was targeted at responding to users needs regarding exam stress based on university students survey data generated using Google Forms. The results of measuring the chatbot effectiveness at analyzing responses regarding exam stress indicate that the chatbot responding appropriately to the user queries regarding how they are feeling about exams 76.5%. The chatbot could also be adapted for use in other application areas such as student info-centers, government kiosks, and mental health support systems.

Dev Shah, Haruna Isah, Farhana Zulkernine

Stock market forecasting is very important in the planning of business activities. Stock price prediction has attracted many researchers in multiple disciplines including computer science, statistics, economics, finance, and operations research. Recent studies have shown that the vast amount of online information in the public domain such as Wikipedia usage pattern, news stories from the mainstream media, and social media discussions can have an observable effect on investors opinions towards financial markets. The reliability of the computational models on stock market prediction is important as it is very sensitive to the economy and can directly lead to financial loss. In this paper, we retrieved, extracted, and analyzed the effects of news sentiments on the stock market. Our main contributions include the development of a sentiment analysis dictionary for the financial sector, the development of a dictionary-based sentiment analysis model, and the evaluation of the model for gauging the effects of news sentiments on stocks for the pharmaceutical market. Using only news sentiments, we achieved a directional accuracy of 70.59% in predicting the trends in short-term stock price movement.

Sazia Mahfuz, Haruna Isah, Farhana Zulkernine et al.

Detecting patterns in real time streaming data has been an interesting and challenging data analytics problem. With the proliferation of a variety of sensor devices, real-time analytics of data from the Internet of Things (IoT) to learn regular and irregular patterns has become an important machine learning problem to enable predictive analytics for automated notification and decision support. In this work, we address the problem of learning an irregular human activity pattern, fall, from streaming IoT data from wearable sensors. We present a deep neural network model for detecting fall based on accelerometer data giving 98.75 percent accuracy using an online physical activity monitoring dataset called "MobiAct", which was published by Vavoulas et al. The initial model was developed using IBM Watson studio and then later transferred and deployed on IBM Cloud with the streaming analytics service supported by IBM Streams for monitoring real-time IoT data. We also present the systems architecture of the real-time fall detection framework that we intend to use with mbientlabs wearable health monitoring sensors for real time patient monitoring at retirement homes or rehabilitation clinics.

Mandeep Singh Kandhari, Farhana Zulkernine, Haruna Isah

Automatic voice-controlled systems have changed the way humans interact with a computer. Voice or speech recognition systems allow a user to make a hands-free request to the computer, which in turn processes the request and serves the user with appropriate responses. After years of research and developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, today voice-controlled technologies have become more efficient and are widely applied in many domains to enable and improve human-to-human and human-to-computer interactions. The state-of-the-art e-commerce applications with the help of web technologies offer interactive and user-friendly interfaces. However, there are some instances where people, especially with visual disabilities, are not able to fully experience the serviceability of such applications. A voice-controlled system embedded in a web application can enhance user experience and can provide voice as a means to control the functionality of e-commerce websites. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of speech recognition systems (SRS) and present a voice-controlled commodity purchase e-commerce application using IBM Watson speech-to-text to demonstrate its usability. The prototype can be extended to other application scenarios such as government service kiosks and enable analytics of the converted text data for scenarios such as medical diagnosis at the clinics.

Tiffany Leung, Farhana Zulkernine, Haruna Isah

Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly being recognized for its educational potential and as an effective way to convey new knowledge to people, it supports interactive and collaborative activities. Affordable VR powered by mobile technologies is opening a new world of opportunities that can transform the ways in which we learn and engage with others. This paper reports our study regarding the application of VR in stimulating interdisciplinary communication. It investigates the promises of VR in interdisciplinary education and research. The main contributions of this study are (i) literature review of theories of learning underlying the justification of the use of VR systems in education, (ii) taxonomy of the various types and implementations of VR systems and their application in supporting education and research (iii) evaluation of educational applications of VR from a broad range of disciplines, (iv) investigation of how the learning process and learning outcomes are affected by VR systems, and (v) comparative analysis of VR and traditional methods of teaching in terms of quality of learning. This study seeks to inspire and inform interdisciplinary researchers and learners about the ways in which VR might support them and also VR software developers to push the limits of their craft.