Wathiq Mansoor

Shahab Saquib Sohail, Faiza Farhat, Yassine Himeur et al.

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has gained significant interest and attention since its launch in November 2022. It has shown impressive performance in various domains, including passing exams and creative writing. However, challenges and concerns related to biases and trust persist. In this work, we present a comprehensive review of over 100 Scopus-indexed publications on ChatGPT, aiming to provide a taxonomy of ChatGPT research and explore its applications. We critically analyze the existing literature, identifying common approaches employed in the studies. Additionally, we investigate diverse application areas where ChatGPT has found utility, such as healthcare, marketing and financial services, software engineering, academic and scientific writing, research and education, environmental science, and natural language processing. Through examining these applications, we gain valuable insights into the potential of ChatGPT in addressing real-world challenges. We also discuss crucial issues related to ChatGPT, including biases and trustworthiness, emphasizing the need for further research and development in these areas. Furthermore, we identify potential future directions for ChatGPT research, proposing solutions to current challenges and speculating on expected advancements. By fully leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT, we can unlock its potential across various domains, leading to advancements in conversational AI and transformative impacts in society.

Yassine Himeur, Iraklis Varlamis, Hamza Kheddar et al.

Computer Vision (CV) is playing a significant role in transforming society by utilizing machine learning (ML) tools for a wide range of tasks. However, the need for large-scale datasets to train ML models creates challenges for centralized ML algorithms. The massive computation loads required for processing and the potential privacy risks associated with storing and processing data on central cloud servers put these algorithms under severe strain. To address these issues, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution, allowing privacy preservation by training models locally and exchanging them to improve overall performance. Additionally, the computational load is distributed across multiple clients, reducing the burden on central servers. This paper presents, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first review discussing recent advancements of FL in CV applications, comparing them to conventional centralized training paradigms. It provides an overview of current FL applications in various CV tasks, emphasizing the advantages of FL and the challenges of implementing it in CV. To facilitate this, the paper proposes a taxonomy of FL techniques in CV, outlining their applications and security threats. It also discusses privacy concerns related to implementing blockchain in FL schemes for CV tasks and summarizes existing privacy preservation methods. Moving on, the paper identifies open research challenges and potential future research directions to further exploit the potential of FL and blockchain in CV applications.

Shahab Saquib Sohail, Yassine Himeur, Hamza Kheddar et al.

The 3D point cloud (3DPC) has significantly evolved and benefited from the advance of deep learning (DL). However, the latter faces various issues, including the lack of data or annotated data, the existence of a significant gap between training data and test data, and the requirement for high computational resources. To that end, deep transfer learning (DTL), which decreases dependency and costs by utilizing knowledge gained from a source data/task in training a target data/task, has been widely investigated. Numerous DTL frameworks have been suggested for aligning point clouds obtained from several scans of the same scene. Additionally, DA, which is a subset of DTL, has been modified to enhance the point cloud data's quality by dealing with noise and missing points. Ultimately, fine-tuning and DA approaches have demonstrated their effectiveness in addressing the distinct difficulties inherent in point cloud data. This paper presents the first review shedding light on this aspect. it provides a comprehensive overview of the latest techniques for understanding 3DPC using DTL and domain adaptation (DA). Accordingly, DTL's background is first presented along with the datasets and evaluation metrics. A well-defined taxonomy is introduced, and detailed comparisons are presented, considering different aspects such as different knowledge transfer strategies, and performance. The paper covers various applications, such as 3DPC object detection, semantic labeling, segmentation, classification, registration, downsampling/upsampling, and denoising. Furthermore, the article discusses the advantages and limitations of the presented frameworks, identifies open challenges, and suggests potential research directions.

Ammar Chouchane, Abdelmalik Ouamane, Yassine Himeur et al.

Person re-identification (PRe-ID) is a crucial task in security, surveillance, and retail analysis, which involves identifying an individual across multiple cameras and views. However, it is a challenging task due to changes in illumination, background, and viewpoint. Efficient feature extraction and metric learning algorithms are essential for a successful PRe-ID system. This paper proposes a novel approach for PRe-ID, which combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based feature extraction method with Cross-view Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (XQDA) for metric learning. Additionally, a matching algorithm that employs Mahalanobis distance and a score normalization process to address inconsistencies between camera scores is implemented. The proposed approach is tested on four challenging datasets, including VIPeR, GRID, CUHK01, and PRID450S, and promising results are obtained. For example, without normalization, the rank-20 rate accuracies of the GRID, CUHK01, VIPeR and PRID450S datasets were 61.92%, 83.90%, 92.03%, 96.22%; however, after score normalization, they have increased to 64.64%, 89.30%, 92.78%, and 98.76%, respectively. Accordingly, the promising results on four challenging datasets indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Yassine Habchi, Yassine Himeur, Hamza Kheddar et al.

There has been a growing interest in creating intelligent diagnostic systems to assist medical professionals in analyzing and processing big data for the treatment of incurable diseases. One of the key challenges in this field is detecting thyroid cancer, where advancements have been made using machine learning (ML) and big data analytics to evaluate thyroid cancer prognosis and determine a patient's risk of malignancy. This review paper summarizes a large collection of articles related to artificial intelligence (AI)-based techniques used in the diagnosis of thyroid cancer. Accordingly, a new classification was introduced to classify these techniques based on the AI algorithms used, the purpose of the framework, and the computing platforms used. Additionally, this study compares existing thyroid cancer datasets based on their features. The focus of this study is on how AI-based tools can support the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer, through supervised, unsupervised, or hybrid techniques. It also highlights the progress made and the unresolved challenges in this field. Finally, the future trends and areas of focus in this field are discussed.

Hafsa Bousbiat, Roumaysa Bousselidj, Yassine Himeur et al.

Consumer's privacy is a main concern in Smart Grids (SGs) due to the sensitivity of energy data, particularly when used to train machine learning models for different services. These data-driven models often require huge amounts of data to achieve acceptable performance leading in most cases to risks of privacy leakage. By pushing the training to the edge, Federated Learning (FL) offers a good compromise between privacy preservation and the predictive performance of these models. The current paper presents an overview of FL applications in SGs while discussing their advantages and drawbacks, mainly in load forecasting, electric vehicles, fault diagnoses, load disaggregation and renewable energies. In addition, an analysis of main design trends and possible taxonomies is provided considering data partitioning, the communication topology, and security mechanisms. Towards the end, an overview of main challenges facing this technology and potential future directions is presented.

Yassine Himeur, Nour Aburaed, Omar Elharrouss et al.

With the ever-growing complexity of models in the field of remote sensing (RS), there is an increasing demand for solutions that balance model accuracy with computational efficiency. Knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as a powerful tool to meet this need, enabling the transfer of knowledge from large, complex models to smaller, more efficient ones without significant loss in performance. This review article provides an extensive examination of KD and its innovative applications in RS. KD, a technique developed to transfer knowledge from a complex, often cumbersome model (teacher) to a more compact and efficient model (student), has seen significant evolution and application across various domains. Initially, we introduce the fundamental concepts and historical progression of KD methods. The advantages of employing KD are highlighted, particularly in terms of model compression, enhanced computational efficiency, and improved performance, which are pivotal for practical deployments in RS scenarios. The article provides a comprehensive taxonomy of KD techniques, where each category is critically analyzed to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the alternative options, and illustrates specific case studies that showcase the practical implementation of KD methods in RS tasks, such as instance segmentation and object detection. Further, the review discusses the challenges and limitations of KD in RS, including practical constraints and prospective future directions, providing a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners in the field of RS. Through this organization, the paper not only elucidates the current state of research in KD but also sets the stage for future research opportunities, thereby contributing significantly to both academic research and real-world applications.

Yassine Habchi, Hamza Kheddar, Yassine Himeur et al.

Incurable diseases continue to pose major challenges to global healthcare systems, with their prevalence shaped by lifestyle, economic, social, and genetic factors. Among these, kidney disease remains a critical global health issue, requiring ongoing research to improve early diagnosis and treatment. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has shown promise in medical imaging and diagnostics, driving significant progress in automatic kidney cancer (KC) detection. However, the success of DL models depends heavily on the availability of high-quality, domain-specific datasets, which are often limited and expensive to acquire. Moreover, DL models demand substantial computational power and storage, restricting their real-world clinical use. To overcome these barriers, transfer learning (TL) has emerged as an effective approach, enabling the reuse of pre-trained models from related domains to enhance KC diagnosis. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of DL-based TL frameworks for KC detection, systematically reviewing key methodologies, their advantages, and limitations, and analyzing their practical performance. It further discusses challenges in applying TL to medical imaging and highlights emerging trends that could influence future research. This review demonstrates the transformative role of TL in precision medicine, particularly oncology, by improving diagnostic accuracy, lowering computational demands, and supporting the integration of AI-powered tools in healthcare. The insights provided offer valuable guidance for researchers and practitioners, paving the way for future advances in KC diagnostics and personalized treatment strategies.

Colleen Farrelly, Yashbir Singh, Quincy A. Hathaway et al.

Institutional bias can impact patient outcomes, educational attainment, and legal system navigation. Written records often reflect bias, and once bias is identified; it is possible to refer individuals for training to reduce bias. Many machine learning tools exist to explore text data and create predictive models that can search written records to identify real-time bias. However, few previous studies investigate large language model embeddings and geometric models of biased text data to understand geometry's impact on bias modeling accuracy. To overcome this issue, this study utilizes the RedditBias database to analyze textual biases. Four transformer models, including BERT and RoBERTa variants, were explored. Post-embedding, t-SNE allowed two-dimensional visualization of data. KNN classifiers differentiated bias types, with lower k-values proving more effective. Findings suggest BERT, particularly mini BERT, excels in bias classification, while multilingual models lag. The recommendation emphasizes refining monolingual models and exploring domain-specific biases.

Adel Oulefki, Yassine Himeur, Thaweesak Trongtiraku et al.

Solar Photovoltaic (PV) is increasingly being used to address the global concern of energy security. However, hot spot and snail trails in PV modules caused mostly by crakes reduce their efficiency and power capacity. This article presents a groundbreaking methodology for automatically identifying and analyzing anomalies like hot spots and snail trails in Solar Photovoltaic (PV) modules, leveraging unsupervised sensing algorithms and 3D Augmented Reality (AR) visualization. By transforming the traditional methods of diagnosis and repair, our approach not only enhances efficiency but also substantially cuts down the cost of PV system maintenance. Validated through computer simulations and real-world image datasets, the proposed framework accurately identifies dirty regions, emphasizing the critical role of regular maintenance in optimizing the power capacity of solar PV modules. Our immediate objective is to leverage drone technology for real-time, automatic solar panel detection, significantly boosting the efficacy of PV maintenance. The proposed methodology could revolutionize solar PV maintenance, enabling swift, precise anomaly detection without human intervention. This could result in significant cost savings, heightened energy production, and improved overall performance of solar PV systems. Moreover, the novel combination of unsupervised sensing algorithms with 3D AR visualization heralds new opportunities for further research and development in solar PV maintenance.

Hafsa Bousbiat, Yassine Himeur, Abbes Amira et al.

Non-intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) algorithms, commonly referred to as load disaggregation algorithms, are fundamental tools for effective energy management. Despite the success of deep models in load disaggregation, they face various challenges, particularly those pertaining to privacy and security. This paper investigates the sensitivity of prominent deep NILM baselines to adversarial attacks, which have proven to be a significant threat in domains such as computer vision and speech recognition. Adversarial attacks entail the introduction of imperceptible noise into the input data with the aim of misleading the neural network into generating erroneous outputs. We investigate the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), a well-known adversarial attack, to perturb the input sequences fed into two commonly employed CNN-based NILM baselines: the Sequence-to-Sequence (S2S) and Sequence-to-Point (S2P) models. Our findings provide compelling evidence for the vulnerability of these models, particularly the S2P model which exhibits an average decline of 20\% in the F1-score even with small amounts of noise. Such weakness has the potential to generate profound implications for energy management systems in residential and industrial sectors reliant on NILM models.

El Ouanas Belabbaci, Mohammed Khammari, Ammar Chouchane et al.

The challenge of kinship verification from facial images represents a cutting-edge and formidable frontier in the realms of pattern recognition and computer vision. This area of study holds a myriad of potential applications, spanning from image annotation and forensic analysis to social media research. Our research stands out by integrating a preprocessing method named Multiscale Retinex (MSR), which elevates image quality and amplifies contrast, ultimately bolstering the end results. Strategically, our methodology capitalizes on the harmonious blend of deep and shallow texture descriptors, merging them proficiently at the score level through the Logistic Regression (LR) method. To elucidate, we employ the Local Phase Quantization (LPQ) descriptor to extract shallow texture characteristics. For deep feature extraction, we turn to the prowess of the VGG16 model, which is pre-trained on a convolutional neural network (CNN). The robustness and efficacy of our method have been put to the test through meticulous experiments on three rigorous kinship datasets, namely: Cornell Kin Face, UB Kin Face, and TS Kin Face.

A. Karthick kumar, S. Rathnamala, T. Vijayashanthi et al.

Cyberattacks in an Internet of Things (IoT) environment can have significant impacts because of the interconnected nature of devices and systems. An attacker uses a network of compromised IoT devices in a botnet attack to carry out various harmful activities. Detecting botnet attacks poses several challenges because of the intricate and evolving nature of these threats. Botnet attacks erode trust in IoT devices and systems, undermining confidence in their security, reliability, and integrity. Deep learning techniques have significantly enhanced the detection of botnet attacks due to their ability to analyze and learn from complex patterns in data. This research proposed the stacking of Deep convolutional neural networks, Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), Bi-Directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for botnet attacks detection. The UNSW-NB15 dataset is utilized for botnet attacks detection. According to experimental results, the proposed model accurately provides for the intricate patterns and features of botnet attacks, with a testing accuracy of 99.76%. The proposed model also identifies botnets with a high ROC-AUC curve value of 99.18%. A performance comparison of the proposed method with existing state-of-the-art models confirms its higher performance. The outcomes of this research could strengthen cyber security procedures and safeguard against new attacks.

Mohammad Abbadi, Yassine Himeur, Shadi Atalla et al.

Breast cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women worldwide. Ultrasound imaging, widely used due to its safety and cost-effectiveness, plays a key role in early detection, especially in patients with dense breast tissue. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the application of machine learning and deep learning techniques for breast cancer classification using ultrasound images. Using datasets such as BUSI, BUS-BRA, and BrEaST-Lesions USG, we evaluate classical machine learning models (SVM, KNN) and deep convolutional neural networks (ResNet-18, EfficientNet-B0, GoogLeNet). Experimental results show that ResNet-18 achieves the highest accuracy (99.7%) and perfect sensitivity for malignant lesions. Classical ML models, though outperformed by CNNs, achieve competitive performance when enhanced with deep feature extraction. Grad-CAM visualizations further improve model transparency by highlighting diagnostically relevant image regions. These findings support the integration of AI-based diagnostic tools into clinical workflows and demonstrate the feasibility of deploying high-performing, interpretable systems for ultrasound-based breast cancer detection.

Saleh Afzoon, Amin Beheshti, Nabi Rezvani et al.

In user-centric design, persona development plays a vital role in understanding user behaviour, capturing needs, segmenting audiences, and guiding design decisions. However, the growing complexity of user interactions calls for a more contextualized approach to ensure designs align with real user needs. While earlier studies have advanced persona classification by modelling user behaviour, capturing contextual information, especially by integrating textual and tabular data, remains a key challenge. These models also often lack explainability, leaving their predictions difficult to interpret or justify. To address these limitations, we present ExBigBang (Explainable BigBang), a hybrid text-tabular approach that uses transformer-based architectures to model rich contextual features for persona classification. ExBigBang incorporates metadata, domain knowledge, and user profiling to embed deeper context into predictions. Through a cyclical process of user profiling and classification, our approach dynamically updates to reflect evolving user behaviours. Experiments on a benchmark persona classification dataset demonstrate the robustness of our model. An ablation study confirms the benefits of combining text and tabular data, while Explainable AI techniques shed light on the rationale behind the model's predictions.

Rekha R Nair, Tina Babu, Alavikunhu Panthakkan et al.

Wind turbine reliability is critical to the growing renewable energy sector, where early fault detection significantly reduces downtime and maintenance costs. This paper introduces a novel ensemble-based deep learning framework for unsupervised anomaly detection in wind turbines. The method integrates Variational Autoencoders (VAE), LSTM Autoencoders, and Transformer architectures, each capturing different temporal and contextual patterns from high-dimensional SCADA data. A unique feature engineering pipeline extracts temporal, statistical, and frequency-domain indicators, which are then processed by the deep models. Ensemble scoring combines model predictions, followed by adaptive thresholding to detect operational anomalies without requiring labeled fault data. Evaluated on the CARE dataset containing 89 years of real-world turbine data across three wind farms, the proposed method achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.947 and early fault detection up to 48 hours prior to failure. This approach offers significant societal value by enabling predictive maintenance, reducing turbine failures, and enhancing operational efficiency in large-scale wind energy deployments.

Nada Bouchekout, Abdelkrim Boukabou, Morad Grimes et al.

Timely and accurate diagnosis is crucial in addressing the global rise in thyroid cancer, ensuring effective treatment strategies and improved patient outcomes. We present an intelligent classification method that couples an Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau (CDF9/7) wavelets whose detail coefficients are modulated by an n-scroll chaotic system to enrich discriminative features. We evaluate on the public DDTI thyroid ultrasound dataset (n = 1,638 images; 819 malignant / 819 benign) using 5-fold cross-validation, where the proposed method attains 98.17% accuracy, 98.76% sensitivity, 97.58% specificity, 97.55% F1-score, and an AUC of 0.9912. A controlled ablation shows that adding chaotic modulation to CDF9/7 improves accuracy by +8.79 percentage points over a CDF9/7-only CNN (from 89.38% to 98.17%). To objectively position our approach, we trained state-of-the-art backbones on the same data and splits: EfficientNetV2-S (96.58% accuracy; AUC 0.987), Swin-T (96.41%; 0.986), ViT-B/16 (95.72%; 0.983), and ConvNeXt-T (96.94%; 0.987). Our method outperforms the best of these by +1.23 points in accuracy and +0.0042 in AUC, while remaining computationally efficient (28.7 ms per image; 1,125 MB peak VRAM). Robustness is further supported by cross-dataset testing on TCIA (accuracy 95.82%) and transfer to an ISIC skin-lesion subset (n = 28 unique images, augmented to 2,048; accuracy 97.31%). Explainability analyses (Grad-CAM, SHAP, LIME) highlight clinically relevant regions. Altogether, the wavelet-chaos-CNN pipeline delivers state-of-the-art thyroid ultrasound classification with strong generalization and practical runtime characteristics suitable for clinical integration.

Mohsine El Khayati, Ayyad Maafiri, Yassine Himeur et al.

The study explores the integration of transfer learning (TL) with mobile-enabled convolutional neural networks (MbNets) to enhance Arabic Handwritten Character Recognition (AHCR). Addressing challenges like extensive computational requirements and dataset scarcity, this research evaluates three TL strategies--full fine-tuning, partial fine-tuning, and training from scratch--using four lightweight MbNets: MobileNet, SqueezeNet, MnasNet, and ShuffleNet. Experiments were conducted on three benchmark datasets: AHCD, HIJJA, and IFHCDB. MobileNet emerged as the top-performing model, consistently achieving superior accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, with ShuffleNet excelling in generalization, particularly under full fine-tuning. The IFHCDB dataset yielded the highest results, with 99% accuracy using MnasNet under full fine-tuning, highlighting its suitability for robust character recognition. The AHCD dataset achieved competitive accuracy (97%) with ShuffleNet, while HIJJA posed significant challenges due to its variability, achieving a peak accuracy of 92% with ShuffleNet. Notably, full fine-tuning demonstrated the best overall performance, balancing accuracy and convergence speed, while partial fine-tuning underperformed across metrics. These findings underscore the potential of combining TL and MbNets for resource-efficient AHCR, paving the way for further optimizations and broader applications. Future work will explore architectural modifications, in-depth dataset feature analysis, data augmentation, and advanced sensitivity analysis to enhance model robustness and generalizability.