Md. Samiul Alim

Salma Hoque Talukdar Koli, Fahima Haque Talukder Jely, Md. Samiul Alim et al.

Flash floods in Bangladesh's haor wetlands show up with almost no warning. They wreck the annual boro rice harvest. Current setups, built for riverine floods, miss backwater dynamics entirely. These basins are flat. Water does not behave like it does on the Brahmaputra. We built HaorFloodAlert, a deseasonalized machine learning ensemble that forecasts 72-hour flood probability for the Sunamganj Haor (approximately 8,000 km2). Temperature was acting as a seasonal cheat code - it inflated accuracy by 6.9 pp just because floods happen in warm months. We caught that. We also built an upstream Barak River Sentinel-1 SAR proxy from Silchar, Assam, giving about 36 hours of lead time. Otsu-thresholded SAR change detection validates at 84-91 percent spatial match. The operational ensemble (RF 0.5625 + XGBoost 0.4375) hits 89.6 percent LOOCV accuracy, 87.5 percent recall, and 0.943 AUC-ROC on 77 real Sentinel-1 events. A three-tier alert pipeline and a BRRI-calibrated boro rice damage estimator are included.

Md. Samiul Alim, Mahir Shahriar Tamim, Maisha Rahman et al.

Sentiment analysis, an emerging research area within natural language processing (NLP), has primarily been explored in contexts like elections and social media trends, but there remains a significant gap in understanding emotional dynamics during civil unrest, particularly in the Bangla language. Our study pioneers sentiment analysis in Bangla during a national crisis by examining public emotions amid Bangladesh's 2024 mass uprising. We curated a unique dataset of 2,028 annotated news headlines from major Facebook news portals, classifying them into Outrage, Hope, and Despair. Through Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we identified prevalent themes like political corruption and public protests, and analyzed how events such as internet blackouts shaped sentiment patterns. It outperformed multilingual transformers (mBERT: 67%, XLM-RoBERTa: 71%) and traditional machine learning methods (SVM and Logistic Regression: both 70%). These results highlight the effectiveness of language-specific models and offer valuable insights into public sentiment during political turmoil.

Md. Samiul Alim, Sharjil Khan, Amrijit Biswas et al.

Unstructured pruning remains a powerful strategy for compressing deep neural networks, yet it often demands iterative train-prune-retrain cycles, resulting in significant computational overhead. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel teacher-guided pruning framework that tightly integrates Knowledge Distillation (KD) with importance score estimation. Unlike prior approaches that apply KD as a post-pruning recovery step, our method leverages gradient signals informed by the teacher during importance score calculation to identify and retain parameters most critical for both task performance and knowledge transfer. Our method facilitates a one-shot global pruning strategy that efficiently eliminates redundant weights while preserving essential representations. After pruning, we employ sparsity-aware retraining with and without KD to recover accuracy without reactivating pruned connections. Comprehensive experiments across multiple image classification benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet, demonstrate that our method consistently achieves high sparsity levels with minimal performance degradation. Notably, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines such as EPG and EPSD at high sparsity levels, while offering a more computationally efficient alternative to iterative pruning schemes like COLT. The proposed framework offers a computation-efficient, performance-preserving solution well suited for deployment in resource-constrained environments.