Maha Driss

Wadii Boulila, Adel Ammar, Bilel Benjdira et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a standard approach for representation learning in aerial imagery. Existing methods enforce invariance between augmented views, which works well when augmentations preserve semantic content. However, aerial images are frequently degraded by haze, motion blur, rain, and occlusion that remove critical evidence. Enforcing alignment between a clean and a severely degraded view can introduce spurious structure into the latent space. This study proposes a training strategy and architectural modification to enhance SSL robustness to such corruptions. It introduces a per-sample, per-factor trust weight into the alignment objective, combined with the base contrastive loss as an additive residual. A stop-gradient is applied to the trust weight instead of a multiplicative gate. While a multiplicative gate is a natural choice, experiments show it impairs the backbone, whereas our additive-residual approach improves it. Using a 200-epoch protocol on a 210,000-image corpus, the method achieves the highest mean linear-probe accuracy among six backbones on EuroSAT, AID, and NWPU-RESISC45 (90.20% compared to 88.46% for SimCLR and 89.82% for VICReg). It yields the largest improvements under severe information-erasing corruptions on EuroSAT (+19.9 points on haze at s=5 over SimCLR). The method also demonstrates consistent gains of +1 to +3 points in Mahalanobis AUROC on a zero-shot cross-domain stress test using BDD100K weather splits. Two ablations (scalar uncertainty and cosine gate) indicate the additive-residual formulation is the primary source of these improvements. An evidential variant using Dempster-Shafer fusion introduces interpretable signals of conflict and ignorance. These findings offer a concrete design principle for uncertainty-aware SSL. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/WadiiBoulila/trust-ssl.

Safa Ben Atitallah, Maha Driss, Henda Ben Ghezala

Deep learning-based disease diagnosis applications are essential for accurate diagnosis at various disease stages. However, using personal data exposes traditional centralized learning systems to privacy concerns. On the other hand, by positioning processing resources closer to the device and enabling more effective data analyses, a distributed computing paradigm has the potential to revolutionize disease diagnosis. Scalable architectures for data analytics are also crucial in healthcare, where data analytics results must have low latency and high dependability and reliability. This study proposes a microservices-based approach for IoT data analytics systems to satisfy privacy and performance requirements by arranging entities into fine-grained, loosely connected, and reusable collections. Our approach relies on federated learning, which can increase disease diagnosis accuracy while protecting data privacy. Additionally, we employ transfer learning to obtain more efficient models. Using more than 5800 chest X-ray images for pneumonia detection from a publicly available dataset, we ran experiments to assess the effectiveness of our approach. Our experiments reveal that our approach performs better in identifying pneumonia than other cutting-edge technologies, demonstrating our approach's promising potential detection performance.

Maha Driss, Iman Almomani, Leen Alahmadi et al.

The coronavirus pandemic has spread over the past two years in our highly connected and information-dense society. Nonetheless, disseminating accurate and up-to-date information on the spread of this pandemic remains a challenge. In this context, opting for a solution based on conversational artificial intelligence, also known under the name of the chatbot, is proving to be an unavoidable solution, especially since it has already shown its effectiveness in fighting the coronavirus crisis in several countries. This work proposes to design and implement a smart chatbot on the theme of COVID-19, called COVIBOT, which will be useful in the context of Saudi Arabia. COVIBOT is a generative-based contextual chatbot, which is built using machine learning APIs that are offered by the cloud-based Azure Cognitive Services. Two versions of COVIBOT are offered: English and Arabic versions. Use cases of COVIBOT are tested and validated using a scenario-based approach.

Maha Driss

Sentiment analysis is the task of mining the authors' opinions about specific entities. It allows organizations to monitor different services in real time and act accordingly. Reputation is what is generally said or believed about people or things. Informally, reputation combines the measure of reliability derived from feedback, reviews, and ratings gathered from users, which reflect their quality of experience (QoE) and can either increase or harm the reputation of the provided services. In this study, we propose to perform sentiment analysis on web microservices reviews to exploit the provided information to assess and score the microservices' reputation. Our proposed approach uses the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to perform sentiment analysis and the Net Brand Reputation (NBR) algorithm to assess reputation scores for microservices. This approach is tested on a set of more than 10,000 reviews related to 15 Amazon Web microservices, and the experimental results have shown that our approach is more accurate than existing approaches, with an accuracy and precision of 93% obtained after applying an oversampling strategy and a resulting reputation score of the considered microservices community of 89%.

Safa Ben Atitallah, Maha Driss, Wadii Boulila et al.

Alzheimer disease is a severe brain disorder that causes harm in various brain areas and leads to memory damage. The limited availability of labeled medical data poses a significant challenge for accurate Alzheimer disease detection. There is a critical need for effective methods to improve the accuracy of Alzheimer disease detection, considering the scarcity of labeled data, the complexity of the disease, and the constraints related to data privacy. To address this challenge, our study leverages the power of big data in the form of pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) within the framework of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) and ensemble learning. We propose an ensemble approach based on a Prototypical Network (ProtoNet), a powerful method in FSL, integrating various pre-trained CNNs as encoders. This integration enhances the richness of features extracted from medical images. Our approach also includes a combination of class-aware loss and entropy loss to ensure a more precise classification of Alzheimer disease progression levels. The effectiveness of our method was evaluated using two datasets, the Kaggle Alzheimer dataset and the ADNI dataset, achieving an accuracy of 99.72% and 99.86%, respectively. The comparison of our results with relevant state-of-the-art studies demonstrated that our approach achieved superior accuracy and highlighted its validity and potential for real-world applications in early Alzheimer disease detection.

Ayyub Alzahem, Wadii Boulila, Maha Driss et al.

Addressing uncertainty in Deep Learning (DL) is essential, as it enables the development of models that can make reliable predictions and informed decisions in complex, real-world environments where data may be incomplete or ambiguous. This paper introduces a novel algorithm leveraging Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) to integrate multiple pre-trained models to form an ensemble capable of providing more reliable and enhanced classifications. The main steps of the proposed method include feature extraction, mass function calculation, fusion, and expected utility calculation. Several experiments have been conducted on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, demonstrating superior classification accuracy of the proposed DST-based method, achieving improvements of 5.4% and 8.4%, respectively, compared to the best individual pre-trained models. Results highlight the potential of DST as a robust framework for managing uncertainties related to data when applying DL in real-world scenarios.

Safa Ben Atitallah, Chaima Ben Rabah, Maha Driss et al.

The abundance of complex and interconnected healthcare data offers numerous opportunities to improve prediction, diagnosis, and treatment. Graph-structured data, which includes entities and their relationships, is well-suited for capturing complex connections. Effectively utilizing this data often requires strong and efficient learning algorithms, especially when dealing with limited labeled data. It is increasingly important for downstream tasks in various domains to utilize self-supervised learning (SSL) as a paradigm for learning and optimizing effective representations from unlabeled data. In this paper, we thoroughly review SSL approaches specifically designed for graph-structured data in healthcare applications. We explore the challenges and opportunities associated with healthcare data and assess the effectiveness of SSL techniques in real-world healthcare applications. Our discussion encompasses various healthcare settings, such as disease prediction, medical image analysis, and drug discovery. We critically evaluate the performance of different SSL methods across these tasks, highlighting their strengths, limitations, and potential future research directions. Ultimately, this review aims to be a valuable resource for both researchers and practitioners looking to utilize SSL for graph-structured data in healthcare, paving the way for improved outcomes and insights in this critical field. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first comprehensive review of the literature on SSL applied to graph data in healthcare.

Safa Ben Atitallah, Chaima Ben Rabah, Maha Driss et al.

Graph Mamba, a powerful graph embedding technique, has emerged as a cornerstone in various domains, including bioinformatics, social networks, and recommendation systems. This survey represents the first comprehensive study devoted to Graph Mamba, to address the critical gaps in understanding its applications, challenges, and future potential. We start by offering a detailed explanation of the original Graph Mamba architecture, highlighting its key components and underlying mechanisms. Subsequently, we explore the most recent modifications and enhancements proposed to improve its performance and applicability. To demonstrate the versatility of Graph Mamba, we examine its applications across diverse domains. A comparative analysis of Graph Mamba and its variants is conducted to shed light on their unique characteristics and potential use cases. Furthermore, we identify potential areas where Graph Mamba can be applied in the future, highlighting its potential to revolutionize data analysis in these fields. Finally, we address the current limitations and open research questions associated with Graph Mamba. By acknowledging these challenges, we aim to stimulate further research and development in this promising area. This survey serves as a valuable resource for both newcomers and experienced researchers seeking to understand and leverage the power of Graph Mamba.

Lamia Berriche, Maha Driss, Areej Ahmed Almuntashri et al.

This paper introduces a new application named ArPA for Arabic kids who have trouble with pronunciation. Our application comprises two key components: the diagnostic module and the therapeutic module. The diagnostic process involves capturing the child's speech signal, preprocessing, and analyzing it using different machine learning classifiers like K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Decision Trees as well as deep neural network classifiers like ResNet18. The therapeutic module offers eye-catching gamified interfaces in which each correctly spoken letter earns a higher avatar level, providing positive reinforcement for the child's pronunciation improvement. Two datasets were used for experimental evaluation: one from a childcare centre and the other including Arabic alphabet pronunciation recordings. Our work uses a novel technique for speech recognition using Melspectrogram and MFCC images. The results show that the ResNet18 classifier on speech-to-image converted data effectively identifies mispronunciations in Arabic speech with an accuracy of 99.015\% with Mel-Spectrogram images outperforming ResNet18 with MFCC images.

Safa Ben Atitallah, Maha Driss, Wadii Boulila et al.

With the rapid rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), ensuring the security of IoT devices has become essential. One of the primary challenges in this field is that new types of attacks often have significantly fewer samples than more common attacks, leading to unbalanced datasets. Existing research on detecting intrusions in these unbalanced labeled datasets primarily employs Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or conventional Machine Learning (ML) models, which result in incomplete detection, especially for new attacks. To handle these challenges, we suggest a new approach to IoT intrusion detection using Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) with a Markov Graph Convolutional Network (MarkovGCN). Graph learning excels at modeling complex relationships within data, while SSL mitigates the issue of limited labeled data for emerging attacks. Our approach leverages the inherent structure of IoT networks to pre-train a GCN, which is then fine-tuned for the intrusion detection task. The integration of Markov chains in GCN uncovers network structures and enriches node and edge features with contextual information. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves detection accuracy and robustness compared to conventional supervised learning methods. Using the EdgeIIoT-set dataset, we attained an accuracy of 98.68\%, a precision of 98.18%, a recall of 98.35%, and an F1-Score of 98.40%.

Safa Ben Atitallah, Maha Driss, Wadii Boulila et al.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been introduced as a breakthrough technology that integrates intelligence into everyday objects, enabling high levels of connectivity between them. As the IoT networks grow and expand, they become more susceptible to cybersecurity attacks. A significant challenge in current intrusion detection systems for IoT includes handling imbalanced datasets where labeled data are scarce, particularly for new and rare types of cyber attacks. Existing literature often fails to detect such underrepresented attack classes. This paper introduces a novel intrusion detection approach designed to address these challenges. By integrating Self Supervised Learning (SSL), Few Shot Learning (FSL), and Random Forest (RF), our approach excels in learning from limited and imbalanced data and enhancing detection capabilities. The approach starts with a Deep Infomax model trained to extract key features from the dataset. These features are then fed into a prototypical network to generate discriminate embedding. Subsequently, an RF classifier is employed to detect and classify potential malware, including a range of attacks that are frequently observed in IoT networks. The proposed approach was evaluated through two different datasets, MaleVis and WSN-DS, which demonstrate its superior performance with accuracies of 98.60% and 99.56%, precisions of 98.79% and 99.56%, recalls of 98.60% and 99.56%, and F1-scores of 98.63% and 99.56%, respectively.

Wadii Boulila, Ayyub Alzahem, Aseel Almoudi et al.

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a global health crisis. Public spaces need to be safeguarded from the adverse effects of this pandemic. Wearing a facemask becomes one of the effective protection solutions adopted by many governments. Manual real-time monitoring of facemask wearing for a large group of people is becoming a difficult task. The goal of this paper is to use deep learning (DL), which has shown excellent results in many real-life applications, to ensure efficient real-time facemask detection. The proposed approach is based on two steps. An off-line step aiming to create a DL model that is able to detect and locate facemasks and whether they are appropriately worn. An online step that deploys the DL model at edge computing in order to detect masks in real-time. In this study, we propose to use MobileNetV2 to detect facemask in real-time. Several experiments are conducted and show good performances of the proposed approach (99% for training and testing accuracy). In addition, several comparisons with many state-of-the-art models namely ResNet50, DenseNet, and VGG16 show good performance of the MobileNetV2 in terms of training time and accuracy.

Wadii Boulila, Anmar Abuhamdah, Maha Driss et al.

Finding information about tourist places to visit is a challenging problem that people face while visiting different countries. This problem is accentuated when people are coming from different countries, speak different languages, and are from all segments of society. In this context, visitors and pilgrims face important problems to find the appropriate doaas when visiting holy places. In this paper, we propose a mobile application that helps the user find the appropriate doaas for a given holy place in an easy and intuitive manner. Three different options are developed to achieve this goal: 1) manual search, 2) GPS location to identify the holy places and therefore their corresponding doaas, and 3) deep learning (DL) based method to determine the holy place by analyzing an image taken by the visitor. Experiments show good performance of the proposed mobile application in providing the appropriate doaas for visited holy places.

Safa Ben Atitallah, Maha Driss, Wadii Boulila et al.

By the start of 2020, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been declared a worldwide pandemic. Because of the severity of this infectious disease, several kinds of research have focused on combatting its ongoing spread. One potential solution to detect COVID-19 is by analyzing the chest X-ray images using Deep Learning (DL) models. In this context, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are presented as efficient techniques for early diagnosis. In this study, we propose a novel randomly initialized CNN architecture for the recognition of COVID-19. This network consists of a set of different-sized hidden layers created from scratch. The performance of this network is evaluated through two public datasets, which are the COVIDx and the enhanced COVID-19 datasets. Both of these datasets consist of 3 different classes of images: COVID19, pneumonia, and normal chest X-ray images. The proposed CNN model yields encouraging results with 94% and 99% of accuracy for COVIDx and enhanced COVID-19 dataset, respectively.

Maha Driss, Daniah Hasan, Wadii Boulila et al.

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has led to the emergence of multiple smart applications in different vital sectors including healthcare, education, agriculture, energy management, etc. IoT aims to interconnect several intelligent devices over the Internet such as sensors, monitoring systems, and smart appliances to control, store, exchange, and analyze collected data. The main issue in IoT environments is that they can present potential vulnerabilities to be illegally accessed by malicious users, which threatens the safety and privacy of gathered data. To face this problem, several recent works have been conducted using microservices-based architecture to minimize the security threats and attacks related to IoT data. By employing microservices, these works offer extensible, reusable, and reconfigurable security features. In this paper, we aim to provide a survey about microservices-based approaches for securing IoT applications. This survey will help practitioners understand ongoing challenges and explore new and promising research opportunities in the IoT security field. To the best of our knowledge, this paper constitutes the first survey that investigates the use of microservices technology for securing IoT applications.

Safa Ben Atitallah, Maha Driss, Wadii Boulila et al.

Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have made a great performance for remote sensing image classification. Plant recognition using CNNs is one of the active deep learning research topics due to its added-value in different related fields, especially environmental conservation and natural areas preservation. Automatic recognition of plants in protected areas helps in the surveillance process of these zones and ensures the sustainability of their ecosystems. In this work, we propose an Enhanced Randomly Initialized Convolutional Neural Network (ERI-CNN) for the recognition of columnar cactus, which is an endemic plant that exists in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley in southeastern Mexico. We used a public dataset created by a group of researchers that consists of more than 20000 remote sensing images. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model compared to other models reported in the literature like InceptionV3 and the modified LeNet-5 CNN. Our ERI-CNN provides 98% of accuracy, 97% of precision, 97% of recall, 97.5% as f1-score, and 0.056 loss.

Muhammad Almas Khan, Muazzam A Khan, Shahid Latif et al.

Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming human lives by paving the way for the management of physical devices on the edge. These interconnected IoT objects share data for remote accessibility and can be vulnerable to open attacks and illegal access. Intrusion detection methods are commonly used for the detection of such kinds of attacks but with these methods, the performance/accuracy is not optimal. This work introduces a novel intrusion detection approach based on an ensemble-based voting classifier that combines multiple traditional classifiers as a base learner and gives the vote to the predictions of the traditional classifier in order to get the final prediction. To test the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are performed on a set of seven different IoT devices and tested for binary attack classification and multi-class attack classification. The results illustrate prominent accuracies on Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors and weather sensors to 96% and 97% and for other machine learning algorithms to 85% and 87%, respectively. Furthermore, comparison with other traditional machine learning methods validates the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Wadii Boulila, Maha Driss, Mohamed Al-Sarem et al.

During the last decade, several research works have focused on providing novel deep learning methods in many application fields. However, few of them have investigated the weight initialization process for deep learning, although its importance is revealed in improving deep learning performance. This can be justified by the technical difficulties in proposing new techniques for this promising research field. In this paper, a survey related to weight initialization techniques for deep algorithms in remote sensing is conducted. This survey will help practitioners to drive further research in this promising field. To the best of our knowledge, this paper constitutes the first survey focusing on weight initialization for deep learning models.