Maqbool Ali

Multimodal hybrid reasoning methodology for personalized wellbeing services

A wellness system provides wellbeing recommendations to support experts in promoting a healthier lifestyle and inducing individuals to adopt healthy habits. Adopting physical activity effectively promotes a healthier lifestyle. A physical activity recommendation system assists users to adopt daily routines to form a best practice of life by involving themselves in healthy physical activities. Traditional physical activity recommendation systems focus on general recommendations applicable to a community of users rather than specific individuals. These recommendations are general in nature and are fit for the community at a certain level, but they are not relevant to every individual based on specific requirements and personal interests. To cover this aspect, we propose a multimodal hybrid reasoning methodology (HRM) that generates personalized physical activity recommendations according to the user׳s specific needs and personal interests. The methodology integrates the rule-based reasoning (RBR), case-based reasoning (CBR), and preference-based reasoning (PBR) approaches in a linear combination that enables personalization of recommendations. RBR uses explicit knowledge rules from physical activity guidelines, CBR uses implicit knowledge from experts׳ past experiences, and PBR uses users׳ personal interests and preferences. To validate the methodology, a weight management scenario is considered and experimented with. The RBR part of the methodology generates goal, weight status, and plan recommendations, the CBR part suggests the top three relevant physical activities for executing the recommended plan, and the PBR part filters out irrelevant recommendations from the suggested ones using the user׳s personal preferences and interests. To evaluate the methodology, a baseline-RBR system is developed, which is improved first using ranged rules and ultimately using a hybrid-CBR. A comparison of the results of these systems shows that hybrid-CBR outperforms the modified-RBR and baseline-RBR systems. Hybrid-CBR yields a 0.94% recall, a 0.97% precision, a 0.95% f-score, and low Type I and Type II errors.

An innovative platform for person-centric health and wellness support

Modern digital technologies are paving the path to a revolutionary new concept of health and wellness care. Nowadays, many new solutions are being released and put at the reach of most consumers for promoting their health and wellness self-management. However, most of these applications are of very limited use, arguable accuracy and scarce interoperability with other similar systems. Accordingly, frameworks that may orchestrate, and intelligently leverage, all the data, information and knowledge generated through these systems are particularly required. This work introduces Mining Minds, an innovative framework that builds on some of the most prominent modern digital technologies, such as Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Internet of Things, to enable the provision of personalized healthcare and wellness support. This paper aims at describing the efficient and rational combination and interoperation of these technologies, as well as their integration with current and future personalized health and wellness services and business.

SNS Based Predictive Model for Depression

Worldwide the Mental illness is a primary cause of disability. It affects millions of people each year and whom of few receives cure. We found that social networking sites (SNS) can be used as a screening tool for discovering an affective mental illness in individuals. SNS posting truly depicts user’s current behavior, thinking style, and mood. We consider a set of behavioral attributes concerning to socialization, socioeconomics, familial, marital status, feeling, language use, and references of antidepressant treatments. We take advantage of these behavioral attributes to envision a tool that can provide prior alerts to an individual based on their SNS data regarding Major Depression Disorder (MDD). We propose a method, to automatically classify individuals into displayer and non-displayer depression using ensemble learning techniquefrom theirFacebook profile. Our developed tool is used for MDD diagnosis of individuals in additional to questioner techniques such as Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and CESD-R.

Evaluating real-life performance of the state-of-the-art in facial expression recognition using a novel YouTube-based datasets

Facial expression recognition (FER) is one of the most active areas of research in computer science, due to its importance in a large number of application domains. Over the years, a great number of FER systems have been implemented, each surpassing the other in terms of classification accuracy. However, one major weakness found in the previous studies is that they have all used standard datasets for their evaluations and comparisons. Though this serves well given the needs of a fair comparison with existing systems, it is argued that this does not go in hand with the fact that these systems are built with a hope of eventually being used in the real-world. It is because these datasets assume a predefined camera setup, consist of mostly posed expressions collected in a controlled setting, using fixed background and static ambient settings, and having low variations in the face size and camera angles, which is not the case in a dynamic real-world. The contributions of this work are two-fold: firstly, using numerous online resources and also our own setup, we have collected a rich FER dataset keeping in mind the above mentioned problems. Secondly, we have chosen eleven state-of-the-art FER systems, implemented them and performed a rigorous evaluation of these systems using our dataset. The results confirm our hypothesis that even the most accurate existing FER systems are not ready to face the challenges of a dynamic real-world. We hope that our dataset would become a benchmark to assess the real-life performance of future FER systems.

An interactive case-based flip learning tool for medical education

Legacy Case-Based Learning (CBL) medical educational systems aim to boost the learning and educational process but lacks the support of Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) and flip learning concepts. Integrating these vocabularies can exploit the learning outcomes and build confidence in students while making decision to rehearsal in advance before attending the actual CBL. The scope of this research covers delivering of medical education in interactive and intelligent way, efficient knowledge sharing, promoting team work environments, and building a knowledge-base for future to support automated computerized feedback. To achieve these goals, we propose a tool called Interactive Case-Based Flip Learning Tool (ICBFLT) that covers formulation of CBL case summaries, getting standard computerized help from both SNOMED vocabulary and state of the art solutions, and finally getting feedback from concerned tutor. In order to evaluate the ICBFLT, a scenario from the School of Medicine, University of Tasmania, Australia has been considered. This is an ongoing work and this paper gives an overview of the ICBFLT architecture with some intermediate results. The evaluation shows that the system has satisfied its users in term of interaction upto 70%.

Context-aware scheduling in MapReduce: a compact review

It is a fact that the attention of research community in computer science, business executives, and decision makers is drastically drawn by big data. As the volume of data becomes bigger, it needs performance‐oriented data‐intensive processing frameworks such as MapReduce, which can scale computation on large commodity clusters. Hadoop MapReduce processes data in Hadoop Distributed File System as jobs scheduled according to YARN fair scheduler and capacity scheduler. However, with advancement and dynamic changes in hardware and operating environments, the performance of clusters is greatly affected. Various efforts in literature have been made to address the issues of heterogeneity (i.e., clusters consisting of virtual machines and machines with different hardware), network communication, data locality, better resource utilization, and run‐time scheduling. In this paper, we present a survey to discuss various research efforts made so far to improve Hadoop MapReduce scheduling. We classify scheduling algorithms and techniques proposed in the literature so far based on their addressing areas and present a taxonomy. Furthermore, we also discuss various aspects of open issues and challenges in the scheduling of MapReduce to improve its performance. Copyright

KEM-DT: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology to Produce an Integrated Rules Set using Decision Tree Classifiers

In artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering is one of the key research areas in which knowledge-based systems are developed to solve the real-world problems and helps in decision making. For constructing a rule-based knowledge base, normally single decision tree classifier is used to produce If-Then rules (i.e. production rules). In the health-care domain, these machine generated rules are normally not well accepted by domain experts due to knowledge credibility issues. Keeping in view these facts, this paper proposes a knowledge engineering methodology called KEM-DT, which generates classification models of multiple decision trees, transforms them into production rules sets, and lastly, after rules verification and validation from an expert, integrates them to construct an integrated as well as a credible rule-based knowledge base. Finally, in order to realize the KEM-DT methodology, a Data-Driven Knowledge Acquisition Tool (DDKAT) is developed.

uEFS: An efficient and comprehensive ensemble-based feature selection methodology to select informative features

Feature selection is considered to be one of the most critical methods for choosing appropriate features from a larger set of items. This task requires two basic steps: ranking and filtering. Of these, the former necessitates the ranking of all features, while the latter involves filtering out all irrelevant features based on some threshold value. In this regard, several feature selection methods with well-documented capabilities and limitations have already been proposed. Similarly, feature ranking is also nontrivial, as it requires the designation of an optimal cutoff value so as to properly select important features from a list of candidate features. However, the availability of a comprehensive feature ranking and a filtering approach, which alleviates the existing limitations and provides an efficient mechanism for achieving optimal results, is a major problem. Keeping in view these facts, we present an efficient and comprehensive univariate ensemble-based feature selection (uEFS) methodology to select informative features from an input dataset. For the uEFS methodology, we first propose a unified features scoring (UFS) algorithm to generate a final ranked list of features following a comprehensive evaluation of a feature set. For defining cutoff points to remove irrelevant features, we subsequently present a threshold value selection (TVS) algorithm to select a subset of features that are deemed important for the classifier construction. The uEFS methodology is evaluated using standard benchmark datasets. The extensive experimental results show that our proposed uEFS methodology provides competitive accuracy and achieved (1) on average around a 7% increase in f-measure, and (2) on average around a 5% increase in predictive accuracy as compared with state-of-the-art methods.

mlCAF: Multi-Level Cross-Domain Semantic Context Fusioning for Behavior Identification

The emerging research on automatic identification of user’s contexts from the cross-domain environment in ubiquitous and pervasive computing systems has proved to be successful. Monitoring the diversified user’s contexts and behaviors can help in controlling lifestyle associated to chronic diseases using context-aware applications. However, availability of cross-domain heterogeneous contexts provides a challenging opportunity for their fusion to obtain abstract information for further analysis. This work demonstrates extension of our previous work from a single domain (i.e., physical activity) to multiple domains (physical activity, nutrition and clinical) for context-awareness. We propose multi-level Context-aware Framework (mlCAF), which fuses the multi-level cross-domain contexts in order to arbitrate richer behavioral contexts. This work explicitly focuses on key challenges linked to multi-level context modeling, reasoning and fusioning based on the mlCAF open-source ontology. More specifically, it addresses the interpretation of contexts from three different domains, their fusioning conforming to richer contextual information. This paper contributes in terms of ontology evolution with additional domains, context definitions, rules and inclusion of semantic queries. For the framework evaluation, multi-level cross-domain contexts collected from 20 users were used to ascertain abstract contexts, which served as basis for behavior modeling and lifestyle identification. The experimental results indicate a context recognition average accuracy of around 92.65% for the collected cross-domain contexts.

UDeKAM: A methodology for acquiring declarative structured knowledge from unstructured knowledge resources

An effective knowledge representation has always proved its importance for mankind intelligence. Among various kinds of knowledge, declarative knowledge has a vital role in medical domain and is critical for health-care safety and quality. A large volume of declarative knowledge is hidden in multiple knowledge resources such as clinical notes, standard guidelines etc. that can play an important role in decision support systems as well as in health and wellness applications after structured transformation. In this paper, an Unstructured Declarative Knowledge Acquisition Methodology, called UDeKAM, is proposed that acquires and constructs the declarative structured knowledge from unstructured knowledge resources using Documents Clustering, Topic Modeling, and Controlled Natural Language processing techniques. The proposed methodology is designed for different domains to serve a variety of applications. It is an ongoing work and for the realization of UDeKAM, a diabetes scenario is explained through example.