Ahsan Farabi

Ahsan Farabi, Israt Khandaker, Ibrahim Khalil Shanto et al.

Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is a key task in affective computing, enabling applications in human-computer interaction, e-learning, healthcare, and safety systems. Despite advances in deep learning, FER remains challenging due to occlusions, illumination and pose variations, subtle intra-class differences, and dataset imbalance that hinders recognition of minority emotions. We present InsideOut, a reproducible FER framework built on EfficientNetV2-S with transfer learning, strong data augmentation, and imbalance-aware optimization. The approach standardizes FER2013 images, applies stratified splitting and augmentation, and fine-tunes a lightweight classification head with class-weighted loss to address skewed distributions. InsideOut achieves 62.8% accuracy with a macro averaged F1 of 0.590 on FER2013, showing competitive results compared to conventional CNN baselines. The novelty lies in demonstrating that efficient architectures, combined with tailored imbalance handling, can provide practical, transparent, and reproducible FER solutions.

Ahsan Farabi, Muhaiminul Rashid Shad, Israt Khandaker

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) face persistent challenges due to evolving cyberattacks, high-dimensional traffic data, and severe class imbalance in benchmark datasets such as NSL-KDD. To address these issues, we propose IntrusionX, a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for local feature extraction and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for temporal modeling. The architecture is further optimized using the Squirrel Search Algorithm (SSA), enabling effective hyperparameter tuning while maintaining computational efficiency. Our pipeline incorporates rigorous preprocessing, stratified data splitting, and dynamic class weighting to enhance the detection of rare classes. Experimental evaluation on NSL-KDD demonstrates that IntrusionX achieves 98% accuracy in binary classification and 87% in 5-class classification, with significant improvements in minority class recall (U2R: 71%, R2L: 93%). The novelty of IntrusionX lies in its reproducible, imbalance-aware design with metaheuristic optimization.