7.3AIMay 19
HaorFloodAlert: Deseasonalized ML Ensemble for 72-Hour Flood Prediction in Bangladesh Haor WetlandsSalma 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.
1.5CVMay 15
AgriMind: An Ensemble Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Class Plant Disease ClassificationSalma Hoque Talukdar Koli, Fahima Haque Talukder Jely
Plant disease detection is still largely manual in Bangladesh, where extension workers eyeball leaf samples across millions of smallholdings. We built AgriMind to automate this: an ensemble of ResNet50, EfficientNet-B0, and DenseNet121 trained on 20,638 PlantVillage images across 15 pepper, potato, and tomato disease classes. Transfer learning with frozen ImageNet backbones and 10 epochs of head-only training keeps the pipeline lightweight. Individual models hit 96--97% on the held-out test set, but averaging their softmax outputs pushes the ensemble to 99.23% -- a two-thirds cut in error rate. We tried biasing the average toward the best validation model; it backfired. Dropping any single model also hurt. Pepper and potato classify perfectly; tomato, with ten visually similar classes, still reaches 99.01%. On an NVIDIA T4 GPU the full ensemble runs at 53 FPS. Whether that translates to real-time mobile use depends on TensorFlow Lite optimization -- work we have not yet completed.