Tehara Fonseka

Muhammad Umair Danish, Madhushan Buwaneswaran, Tehara Fonseka et al.

The increasing impact of human-induced climate change and unplanned urban constructions has increased flooding incidents in recent years. Accurate identification of flooded areas is crucial for effective disaster management and urban planning. While few works have utilized convolutional neural networks and transformer-based semantic segmentation techniques for identifying flooded areas from aerial footage, recent developments in graph neural networks have created improvement opportunities. This paper proposes an innovative approach, the Graph Attention Convolutional U-NET (GAC-UNET) model, based on graph neural networks for automated identification of flooded areas. The model incorporates a graph attention mechanism and Chebyshev layers into the U-Net architecture. Furthermore, this paper explores the applicability of transfer learning and model reprogramming to enhance the accuracy of flood area segmentation models. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed GAC-UNET model, outperforms other approaches with 91\% mAP, 94\% dice score, and 89\% IoU, providing valuable insights for informed decision-making and better planning of future infrastructures in flood-prone areas.

Muhammad Umair Danish, Mathumitha Sureshkumar, Tehara Fonseka et al.

This research provides an in-depth evaluation of various machine learning models for energy forecasting, focusing on the unique challenges of seasonal variations in student residential settings. The study assesses the performance of baseline models, such as LSTM and GRU, alongside state-of-the-art forecasting methods, including Autoregressive Feedforward Neural Networks, Transformers, and hybrid approaches. Special attention is given to predicting energy consumption amidst challenges like seasonal patterns, vacations, meteorological changes, and irregular human activities that cause sudden fluctuations in usage. The findings reveal that no single model consistently outperforms others across all seasons, emphasizing the need for season-specific model selection or tailored designs. Notably, the proposed Hyper Network based LSTM and MiniAutoEncXGBoost models exhibit strong adaptability to seasonal variations, effectively capturing abrupt changes in energy consumption during summer months. This study advances the energy forecasting field by emphasizing the critical role of seasonal dynamics and model-specific behavior in achieving accurate predictions.