National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences

About: National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences is a education organization based out in Islamabad, Pakistan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & The Internet. The organization has 1506 authors who have published 2438 publications receiving 26786 citations.

Remote health monitoring of elderly through wearable sensors

Abstract: Due to a rapidly increasing aging population and its associated challenges in health and social care, Ambient Assistive Living has become the focal point for both researchers and industry alike. The need to manage or even reduce healthcare costs while improving the quality of service is high government agendas. Although, technology has a major role to play in achieving these aspirations, any solution must be designed, implemented and validated using appropriate domain knowledge. In order to overcome these challenges, the remote real-time monitoring of a person’s health can be used to identify relapses in conditions, therefore, enabling early intervention. Thus, the development of a smart healthcare monitoring system, which is capable of observing elderly people remotely, is the focus of the research presented in this paper. The technology outlined in this paper focuses on the ability to track a person’s physiological data to detect specific disorders which can aid in Early Intervention Practices. This is achieved by accurately processing and analysing the acquired sensory data while transmitting the detection of a disorder to an appropriate career. The finding reveals that the proposed system can improve clinical decision supports while facilitating Early Intervention Practices. Our extensive simulation results indicate a superior performance of the proposed system: low latency (96% of the packets are received with less than 1 millisecond) and low packets-lost (only 2.2% of total packets are dropped). Thus, the system runs efficiently and is cost-effective in terms of data acquisition and manipulation.

Heap-based optimizer inspired by corporate rank hierarchy for global optimization

Abstract: In an organization, a group of people working for a common goal may not achieve their goal unless they organize themselves in a hierarchy called Corporate Rank Hierarchy (CRH). This principle motivates us to map the concept of CRH to propose a new algorithm for optimization that logically arranges the search agents in a hierarchy based on their fitness. The proposed algorithm is named as heap-based optimizer (HBO) because it utilizes the heap data structure to map the concept of CRH. The mathematical model of HBO is built on three pillars: the interaction between the subordinates and their immediate boss, the interaction between the colleagues, and self-contribution of the employees. The proposed algorithm is benchmarked with 97 diverse test functions including 29 CEC-BC-2017 functions with very challenging landscapes against 7 highly-cited optimization algorithms including the winner of CEC-BC-2017 (EBO-CMAR). In the first two experiments, the exploitative and explorative behavior of HBO is evaluated by using 24 unimodal and 44 multimodal functions, respectively. It is shown through experiments and Friedman mean rank test that HBO outperforms and secures 1 st rank. In the third experiment, we use 29 CEC-BC-2017 benchmark functions. According to Friedman mean rank test HBO attains 2 nd position after EBO-CMAR; however, the difference in ranks of HBO and EBO-CMAR is shown to be statistically insignificant by using Bonferroni method based multiple comparison test. Moreover, it is shown through the Friedman test that the overall rank of HBO is 1 st for all 97 benchmarks. In the fourth and the last experiment, the applicability on real-world problems is demonstrated by solving 3 constrained mechanical engineering optimization problems. The performance is shown to be superior or equivalent to the other algorithms, which have been used in the literature. The source code of HBO is publicly available at https://github.com/qamar-askari/HBO.

PE-Miner: Mining Structural Information to Detect Malicious Executables in Realtime

Abstract: In this paper, we present an accurate and realtime PE-Miner framework that automatically extracts distinguishing features from portable executables (PE) to detect zero-day (i.e. previously unknown) malware. The distinguishing features are extracted using the structural information standardized by the Microsoft Windows operating system for executables, DLLs and object files. We follow a threefold research methodology: (1) identify a set of structural features for PE files which is computable in realtime, (2) use an efficient preprocessor for removing redundancy in the features' set, and (3) select an efficient data mining algorithm for final classification between benign and malicious executables. We have evaluated PE-Miner on two malware collections, VX Heavens and Malfease datasets which contain about 11 and 5 thousand malicious PE files respectively. The results of our experiments show that PE-Miner achieves more than 99% detection rate with less than 0.5% false alarm rate for distinguishing between benign and malicious executables. PE-Miner has low processing overheads and takes only 0.244 seconds on the average to scan a given PE file. Finally, we evaluate the robustness and reliability of PE-Miner under several regression tests. Our results show that the extracted features are robust to different packing techniques and PE-Miner is also resilient to majority of crafty evasion strategies.

Differences and Similarities in Islamic and Conventional Banking

Abstract: Islamic Banking is growing at a rapid speed and has showed unprecedented growth and expansion in last two decades in spite of mismatching of existing financial framework and business practices. By the end of 2012 volume of assets under Islamic finance has reached to US $ 1,460 Billion with operation in more than 50 countries. Middle East is the centre of Islamic finance with contribution of approximately 74% while 26% share is contributed by rest of the world. In Pakistan Islamic banking is at infant stage although last 10 years growth is marvelous. Islamic banking has grown at an average annual rate of 63% in the last ten years (01/04-09/13) in Pakistan. Although Islamic banking faces multi challenges however three of them are very vital for its existence. First is Shari’a compliance in its operations in an environment which is dominated by interest based practices even in Muslim societies. Second is perception of financial industry practitioners about its performance whether the system is able to serve the total needs of trade and industry. Third is the perception of a large majority of Muslims whether existing practice of Islamic banking is Shari’a compliant or mere copy of conventional practices under the banner of Shari’a. This study is an attempt to address the perceptional issues by identifying the similarities and differences in Islamic and conventional banking. Evidences suggest Islamic banking is very much practiced like modern conventional banking with certain restrictions imposed by Shari’a and addresses the large number of business requirements successfully hence perceiving Islamic banking as totally foreign to business world is not correct. It is further found in the study that Islamic banking is not a mere copy of conventional practices rather major differences exist in the operations of Islamic Financial Institutions (IFIs) in comparison with conventional banking. IFIs have succeeded in creating trust in the eyes of depositors and receive deposits on profit and loss sharing basis however investment and financing options available to Islamic banks are limited in comparison with conventional banks.