K. M. Abir Mahmud

Bio: K. M. Abir Mahmud is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 31 citations.

i Worksafe: Towards Healthy Workplaces During COVID-19 With an Intelligent Phealth App for Industrial Settings

Abstract: The recent outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has given rise to diverse health issues due to its high transmission rate and limited treatment options. Almost the whole world, at some point of time, was placed in lock-down in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus, with resulting psychological and economic sequela. As countries start to ease lock-down measures and reopen industries, ensuring a healthy workplace for employees has become imperative. Thus, this paper presents a mobile app-based intelligent portable healthcare (pHealth) tool, called ${i}$ WorkSafe, to assist industries in detecting possible suspects for COVID-19 infection among their employees who may need primary care. Developed mainly for low-end Android devices, the ${i}$ WorkSafe app hosts a fuzzy neural network model that integrates data of employees’ health status from the industry’s database, proximity and contact tracing data from the mobile devices, and user-reported COVID-19 self-test data. Using the built-in Bluetooth low energy sensing technology and K Nearest Neighbor and K-means techniques, the app is capable of tracking users’ proximity and trace contact with other employees. Additionally, it uses a logistic regression model to calculate the COVID-19 self-test score and a Bayesian Decision Tree model for checking real-time health condition from an intelligent e-health platform for further clinical attention of the employees. Rolled out in an apparel factory on 12 employees as a test case, the pHealth tool generates an alert to maintain social distancing among employees inside the industry. In addition, the app helps employees to estimate risk with possible COVID-19 infection based on the collected data and found that the score is effective in estimating personal health condition of the app user.

iWorkSafe: Towards Healthy Workplaces during COVID-19 with an Intelligent pHealth App for Industrial Settings

Abstract: The recent outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has given rise to diverse health issues due to its high transmission rate and limited treatment options. Almost the whole world, at some point of time, was placed in lock-down in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus, with resulting psychological and economic sequela. As countries start to ease lock-down measures and reopen industries, ensuring a healthy workplace for employees has become imperative. Thus, this paper presents a mobile app-based intelligent portable healthcare (pHealth) tool, called iWorkSafe, to assist industries in detecting possible suspects for COVID-19 infection among their employees who may need primary care. Developed mainly for low-end Android devices, the iWorkSafe app hosts a fuzzy neural network model that integrates data of employees' health status from the industry's database, proximity and contact tracing data from the mobile devices, and user-reported COVID-19 self-test data. Using the built-in Bluetooth low energy sensing technology and K Nearest Neighbor and K-means techniques, the app is capable of tracking users’ proximity and trace contact with other employees. Additionally, it uses a logistic regression model to calculate the COVID-19 self-test score and a Bayesian Decision Tree model for checking real-time health condition from intelligent e-health platform for further clinical attention of the employees. Rolled out in an apparel factory on 12 employees as a test case, the pHealth tool generates an alert to maintain social distancing among employees inside the industry. In addition, the app helps employee to estimate risk with possible COVID-19 infection based on the collected data and found that the score is effective in estimating personal health condition of the app user.

Security Threats and Artificial Intelligence Based Countermeasures for Internet of Things Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a technology capable of connecting heterogeneous nodes/objects, such as people, devices, infrastructure, and makes our daily lives simpler, safer, and fruitful. Being part of a large network of heterogeneous devices, these nodes are typically resource-constrained and became the weakest link to the cyber attacker. Classical encryption techniques have been employed to ensure the data security of the IoT network. However, high-level encryption techniques cannot be employed in IoT devices due to the limitation of resources. In addition, node security is still a challenge for network engineers. Thus, we need to explore a complete solution for IoT networks that can ensure nodes and data security. The rule-based approaches and shallow and deep machine learning algorithms– branches of Artificial Intelligence (AI)– can be employed as countermeasures along with the existing network security protocols. This paper presented a comprehensive layer-wise survey on IoT security threats, and the AI-based security models to impede security threats. Finally, open challenges and future research directions are addressed for the safeguard of the IoT network.

Forecasting major impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on country-driven sectors: challenges, lessons, and future roadmap.

Abstract: The pandemic caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has produced a global health calamity that has a profound impact on the way of perceiving the world and everyday lives. This has appeared as the greatest threat of the time for the entire world in terms of its impact on human mortality rate and many other societal fronts or driving forces whose estimations are yet to be known. Therefore, this study focuses on the most crucial sectors that are severely impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular reference to India. Considered based on their direct link to a country's overall economy, these sectors include economic and financial, educational, healthcare, industrial, power and energy, oil market, employment, and environment. Based on available data about the pandemic and the above-mentioned sectors, as well as forecasted data about COVID-19 spreading, four inclusive mathematical models, namely-exponential smoothing, linear regression, Holt, and Winters, are used to analyse the gravity of the impacts due to this COVID-19 outbreak which is also graphically visualized. All the models are tested using data such as COVID-19 infection rate, number of daily cases and deaths, GDP of India, and unemployment. Comparing the obtained results, the best prediction model is presented. This study aims to evaluate the impact of this pandemic on country-driven sectors and recommends some strategies to lessen these impacts on a country's economy.

COVID-19 Infection Detection from Chest X-Ray Images Using Hybrid Social Group Optimization and Support Vector Classifier.

Abstract: A novel strain of Coronavirus, identified as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-2 (SARS-CoV-2), outbroke in December 2019 causing the novel Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19). Since its emergence, the virus has spread rapidly and has been declared a global pandemic. As of the end of January 2021, there are almost 100 million cases worldwide with over 2 million confirmed deaths. Widespread testing is essential to reduce further spread of the disease, but due to a shortage of testing kits and limited supply, alternative testing methods are being evaluated. Recently researchers have found that chest X-Ray (CXR) images provide salient information about COVID-19. An intelligent system can help the radiologists to detect COVID-19 from these CXR images which can come in handy at remote locations in many developing nations. In this work, we propose a pipeline that uses CXR images to detect COVID-19 infection. The features from the CXR images were extracted and the relevant features were then selected using Hybrid Social Group Optimization algorithm. The selected features were then used to classify the CXR images using a number of classifiers. The proposed pipeline achieves a classification accuracy of 99.65% using support vector classifier, which outperforms other state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms for binary and multi-class classification.

Inverted bell-curve-based ensemble of deep learning models for detection of COVID-19 from chest X-rays

Abstract: Novel Coronavirus 2019 disease or COVID-19 is a viral disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The use of chest X-rays (CXRs) has become an important practice to assist in the diagnosis of COVID-19 as they can be used to detect the abnormalities developed in the infected patients' lungs. With the fast spread of the disease, many researchers across the world are striving to use several deep learning-based systems to identify the COVID-19 from such CXR images. To this end, we propose an inverted bell-curve-based ensemble of deep learning models for the detection of COVID-19 from CXR images. We first use a selection of models pretrained on ImageNet dataset and use the concept of transfer learning to retrain them with CXR datasets. Then the trained models are combined with the proposed inverted bell curve weighted ensemble method, where the output of each classifier is assigned a weight, and the final prediction is done by performing a weighted average of those outputs. We evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available datasets: the COVID-19 Radiography Database and the IEEE COVID Chest X-ray Dataset. The accuracy, F1 score and the AUC ROC achieved by the proposed method are 99.66%, 99.75% and 99.99%, respectively, in the first dataset, and, 99.84%, 99.81% and 99.99%, respectively, in the other dataset. Experimental results ensure that the use of transfer learning-based models and their combination using the proposed ensemble method result in improved predictions of COVID-19 in CXRs.

Attention-Based Bi-Directional Long-Short Term Memory Network for Earthquake Prediction

Abstract: An earthquake is a tremor felt on the surface of the earth created by the movement of the major pieces of its outer shell. Till now, many attempts have been made to forecast earthquakes, which saw some success, but these attempted models are specific to a region. In this paper, an earthquake occurrence and location prediction model is proposed. After reviewing the literature, long short-term memory (LSTM) is found to be a good option for building the model because of its memory-keeping ability. Using the Keras tuner, the best model was selected from candidate models, which are composed of combinations of various LSTM architectures and dense layers. This selected model used seismic indicators from the earthquake catalog of Bangladesh as features to predict earthquakes of the following month. Attention mechanism was added to the LSTM architecture to improve the model’s earthquake occurrence prediction accuracy, which was 74.67%. Additionally, a regression model was built using LSTM and dense layers to predict the earthquake epicenter as a distance from a predefined location, which provided a root mean square error of 1.25.