Behrouz H. Far

The University of Calgary | HBI · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Use case scenarios (UCS) written in natural languages like English are popular tools for requirements elicitation. They also play an important role in the model driven design process by being used as an initial input for many automated behavior modeling such as generating sequence diagrams and class diagrams. However, there is no unified approach u...

COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in excess mortality globally and presented an unprecedented challenge to people's lives. Despite the benefits of getting a COVID-19 vaccine, there have been arguments against the available vaccines and vaccine hesitancy worldwide. In this work, we analyze the information published by the public on Reddit as a digital...

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is known as an important cause of blindness worldwide and serious public health concern in the population aged 20–65. With the burgeoning number of diabetes globally and its effects on patients' vision, the automatic detection of DR has received wide attention from the machine learning field. However, due to the black-box...

Recommender systems (RSs) have become an inseparable part of our everyday lives. They help us find our favorite items to purchase, our friends on social networks, and our favorite movies to watch. Traditionally, the recommendation problem was considered to be a classification or prediction problem, but it is now widely agreed that formulating it as...

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a complicated cancer with high level of unexplained variability that might affect the patient’s health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Using 2670 patients’ information with 433 measures per patient, our objective is to identify the minimal set of important variables which can predict 1-year follow-up HRQoL for PCa patients...

Improvement of traffic signal control (TSC) efficiency has been found to lead to improved urban transportation and enhanced quality of life. Recently, the use of reinforcement learning (RL) in various areas of TSC has gained significant traction; thus, we conducted a systematic literature review as a systematic, comprehensive, and reproducible revi...

Driving behaviour is one of the primary causes of road crashes and accidents, and these can be decreased by identifying and minimizing aggressive driving behaviour. This study identifies the timesteps when a driver in different circumstances (rush, mental conflicts, reprisal) begins to drive aggressively. An observer (real or virtual) is needed to...

The increasing availability of electronic health records and administrative data and the adoption of computer-based technologies in healthcare have significantly focused on medical informatics. Sepsis is a time-critical condition with high mortality, yet it is often not identified in a timely fashion. The early detection and diagnosis of sepsis can...

This paper proposes a decentralized network-level traffic signal control method addressing the effects of queue spillbacks. The method is traffic-responsive, does not require data communication between intersections' controllers, uses lane-based queue measurements, and is acyclic. Each traffic controller operating at an intersection aims at maximiz...

Improper driving results in fatalities, damages, increased energy consumptions, and depreciation of the vehicles. Analyzing driving behaviour could lead to optimize and avoid mentioned issues. By identifying the type of driving and mapping them to the consequences of that type of driving, we can get a model to prevent them. In this regard, we try t...

This work develops a robust classifier for a COVID-19 pre-screening model from crowdsourced cough sound data. The crowdsourced cough recordings contain a variable number of coughs, with some input sound files more informative than the others. Accurate detection of COVID-19 from the sound datasets requires overcoming two main challenges (i) the vari...

Recommender systems (RSs) are software tools and algorithms developed to alleviate the problem of information overload, which makes it difficult for a user to make right decisions. Two main paradigms toward the recommendation problem are collaborative filtering and content-based filtering, which try to recommend the best items using ratings and con...

This paper proposes a decentralized network-level traffic signal control method addressing the effects of queue spillbacks. The method is traffic-responsive, does not require data communication between intersections’ controllers, uses lane-based queue measurements, and is acyclic. Each traffic controller operating at an intersection aims at maximiz...

Information provision plays an important role in ed- ucating patients with serious illnesses, like cancer, to cope with their disease conditions and to actively partic- ipate in shared-decision making process. Recent stud- ies suggest that there is a lack of appropriate educa- tional resources for such patients, specifically prostate cancer patient...

Improvement of traffic signal control (TSC) efficiency has been found to lead to improved urban transportation and enhanced quality of life. Recently, the use of reinforcement learning (RL) in various areas of TSC has gained significant traction; thus, we conducted a systematic literature review as a systematic, comprehensive, and reproducible revi...

Objective: This paper presents an Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection method based on learning structural similarity between Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) and representing this similarity as a graph. Methods: We construct the similarity graph using embedded features of the input image (i.e., Non-Demented (ND), Very Mild Demented (VMD), Mild Demen...

Recommender systems (RSs) are becoming an inseparable part of our everyday lives. They help us find our favorite items to purchase, our friends on social networks, and our favorite movies to watch. Traditionally, the recommendation problem was considered as a simple classification or prediction problem; however, the sequential nature of the recomme...

Delivering fast response times for user transactions is a critical requirement for Web services. Often, a Web service has Service Level Agreements (SLA) with its users that quantify how quickly the service has to respond to a user transaction. Typically, SLAs stipulate requirements for Web service response time percentiles, e.g., a specified target...

There is huge growth in the amount of patient survey data being generated in healthcare industries and hospitals. Curse of dimensionality is a barrier to extracting useful information from patient survey data which can help in the treatment and care of patients. It is paramount to have methods to find importance of features based on such huge volum...

Cloud computing provisions scalable resources for high performance industrial applications. Cloud providers usually offer two types of usage plans: reserved and on-demand. Reserved plans offer cheaper resources for long-term contracts while on-demand plans are available for short or long periods but are more expensive. To satisfy incoming user dema...

In the constantly evolving world of software development, switching back and forth between tasks has become the norm. While task switching often allows developers to perform tasks effectively and may increase creativity via the flexible pathway, there are also consequences to frequent task-switching. For high-momentum tasks like software developmen...

In the constantly evolving world of software development, switching back and forth between tasks has become the norm. While task switching often allows developers to perform tasks effectively and may increase creativity via the flexible pathway, there are also consequences to frequent task-switching. For high-momentum tasks like software developmen...

In the last decade, the area of Transportation Engineering (TE), and its underlying disciplines such as public transit, connected vehicles, road planning, and air traffic management, has become increasingly prominent. A better understanding of what the most challenging topics related to TE are among practitioners will greatly help to identify the a...

This book addresses the impacts of various types of services such as infrastructure, platforms, software, and business processes that cloud computing and Big Data have introduced into business. Featuring chapters which discuss effective and efficient approaches in dealing with the inherent complexity and increasing demands in data science, a variet...

Nowadays, the consistency of customer relationship is not guaranteed. Since organizations are faced with many costs with losing their customers and to generate stable profits, the main focus of the organizations is based on customer retention.

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death around the world. Finding the risk factors related to different types of cancer can help researchers understand the process of cancer development and find new ways of preventing the disease. Most of the researches done on cancer datasets focus only one type of cancer. This research aims to provide a new...

A limited resource processing platform may not be suited to process a large volume of data. The distributed processing platforms can solve this problem by incorporating commodity hardware collaboratively to process a large volume of data. The MapReduce programming framework is one candidate framework for large-scale processing, and Hadoop is its op...

Cloud computing is a new era of computing that offers resources and services for web applications. Selection of optimal cloud resources is the main goal in cloud resource allocation. Sometimes, customers pay more than required since cloud providers’ pricing strategy is designed for the interest of the providers. Nonetheless, cloud customers are int...

The area of Traffic Management (TM) is characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and imprecision. The complexity of software systems in the TM domain which contributes to a more challenging Requirements Engineering (RE) job mainlystems from the diversity of stakeholders and complexity of requirements elicitation in this domain. This work brings an...

The area of Traffic Management (TM) is characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and imprecision. The complexity of software systems in the TM domain which contributes to a more challenging Requirements Engineering (RE) job mainly stems from the diversity of stakeholders and complexity of requirements elicitation in this domain. This work brings an...

The goal of Big Data analysis is delineating hidden patterns from data and leverage them into strategies and plans to support informed decision making in a diversity of situations. Big Data are characterized by large volume, high velocity, wide variety, and high value, which may represent difficulties in storage and processing. Research on Big Data...

Over the years, studies presented on shock wave model optimization have been limited to the proposal of optimization control policies using queue length constraints in oversaturated conditions, and also finding the optimum cycle time and green splits based on either a known cycle time from the field or an optimum cycle time obtained from other meth...

With an accelerating rate of data generation, sophisticated techniques are essential to meet scalability requirements. One of the promising avenues for handling large datasets is distributed storage and processing. Further, data summarization is a useful concept for managing large datasets, wherein a subset of the data can be used to provide an app...

Traffic accidents negatively affect the lives of human beings. Accidents may result in deaths, severe injuries, and loss of income to the impacted families. Accident detection and prevention is a keystone in improving road safety. In this paper, a system for detecting vehicle collision and rollover is presented. The proposed system includes three k...

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among Canadian women and the second cause of death from cancer. Fine needle aspirate (FNA) is a technology used to investigate early breast tumors to detect cancer. In this paper, we demonstrate the application of a new ordered weighted averaging operator (OWA) to the problem of breast tumor classification. T...

Accurate and reliable vehicle localization is a key component of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. Personalized travel related services and recommendation systems like collision avoidance rely principally on the accurate and reliable knowledge of vehicles’ positioning. In this paper we propose a cooperative multi-sensor multi-ve...

In real world situations, customer needs and preferences are changing over time and induce segment instability. The aim of this paper is to explore the patterns of customer segments’ structural changes. This study examines how businesses can gain better insight and knowledge through using data mining techniques to support intelligent decision makin...

Modern clinical decision support based on data analytics requires a framework that incorporates distributed processing platforms, sustainable data models, and inference algorithms. The ultimate objective of this chapter is to identify the common components of a user-centered analytics framework that can reason using different clinical historical Bi...

The scalability of the system is of vital importance in the design of social networks. This research attempts to establish a comprehensive framework for analysis and validation of requirements and design documents for software systems. In previous work, we applied this framework to analyze the requirements of a social network of agents with respect...

Web services have increasingly begun to rely on public cloud platforms. The virtualization technologies employed by public clouds can, however, trigger contention between virtual machines (VMs) for shared physical machine resources, thereby leading to performance problems for Web services. Past studies have exploited physical-machine-level performa...

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is an important application domain for information reuse and integration. Efficient integration and deployment of information and communication technologies (ICT) can potentially reduce travel time and emission, improve usage of parking and public spaces, offer personalized travel related services, and more i...

Modeling and simulation of transportation systems are extensively used because of high costs and potential safety and security issues associated with its prototyping in a real traffic. Modeling and simulation play a key role in understanding real systems through abstraction and evaluating new technologies. In this paper, we conducted a simulation-b...

This paper presents a unique and practical study toward automating analysis and design of software. In this work, we have automated generation of package diagrams in software design process. We have employed a clustering algorithm, and have defined a similarity measure for packaging classes of the software. The similarity measure is defined in a wa...

Cities are facing increasingly challenges with the projected population growth and the resulting increased urban travel demand. Road safety is a major issue in urban planning. Much of the empirical research on road safety and determining the probability of accidents has focused on the accident events. While human error and mechanical failure are co...

Software agents in Multiagent Systems (MAS) have several interactions that are designed and represented in the scenarios of the system. These communications should be verified to detect whether the agents will show a new behavior in their execution, which is known as emergent behavior or implied scenario. Most research use different versions of sta...

Real-time analysis of traffic data is a key challenge in intelligent transportation system. It aims at discovering useful traffic patterns that can help decision makers better manage the transportation system and test and introduce new policies. Discovered patterns can also be used to support road users to reach their destination safely and with re...

The emergence of massive datasets in a clinical setting presents both challenges and opportunities in data storage and analysis. This so called “big data” challenges traditional analytic tools and will increasingly require novel solutions adapted from other fields. Advances in information and communication technology present the most viable solutio...

Although management of Road Safety has been an area of concern over the past several decades the following behavior-based problem areas still exist: unsafe driving behaviors and high-risk drivers. A Behavior-Based Safety Management System (BBSMS) can help address these areas by introducing concepts of Activators, Behaviors and their Consequences. T...

Software agents with autonomous interaction, negotiation and learning capabilities can be considered as a social network. Central problems in these social networks are: (1) investigating the network to find hot spots (nodes that actively participate in the expansion of the net both physically and functionally); (2) detecting violating nodes, i.e. n...

In this research we utilize PARAMICS traffic micro-simulation software to study the impact of deploying Connected Vehicles (CV) in Deerfoot trail, Calgary, Alberta. We have implemented a V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) Assisted V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) system for PARAMICS. It uses Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) protocol to acquire traff...

As patients become more proactive about their health and turn to technologies such as the Internet to acquire knowledge, the patient-health care professional relationship has been changing. Traditionally, information has flowed from health care professional to patient, but change to a two-way dialogue is taking place. In this study, we examine a hi...

Peripheral blood smear image examination is a part of the routine work of every laboratory. The manual examination of these images is tedious, time-consuming and suffers from interobserver variation. This has motivated researchers to develop different algorithms and methods to automate peripheral blood smear image analysis. Image analysis itself co...

PARAMICS traffic microsimulator is a popular simulator among universities and government agencies since it is capable of representing many parts of the world's street maps and designed to handle scenarios ranging from a single intersection to a congested freeway, or the modeling of a complete traffic system. However, it lacks the ability of simulat...

Multiagent Systems (MAS) consists of many software agents that interact to each other to perform their actions and achieve system goals. Due to the growing demand of Distributed Software Systems (DSS) and MAS as a branch of DSS, the verification of these systems has taken a special attention. The verification of these systems is required because MA...

Microscopic examination of a properly prepared blood smear is valuable in complete blood count (CBC) and differential blood count (DBC). A hematopathologist may spend enormous time manually inspecting the good working area (GWA) of the blood smear under a light microscope system to perform CBC or DBC. In this paper we focus on automatic localizatio...

An effective and efficient approach in designing software systems to describe system requirements is using scenarios. A scenario, commonly shown as a message sequence chart or a sequence diagram, is a temporal sequence of messages sent between system components. Scenarios are appealing because of their expressive power and simplicity. Moreover due...

A major challenge in design of distributed software systems is predicting and avoiding unexpected behaviors at the run time. Detecting those behaviors after the system is implemented can be very costly and detecting them during design and implementation stages is a cost effective alternative. Therefore, model-based verification at early design stag...

Road related deaths and injuries continue to be one of the highest incidents recorded in organizations. Road Safety has become a major concern worldwide. Therefore the United Nations has introduced a new movement: UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020, which aims to reduce road deaths and injuries worldwide. An effective Safety Management S...

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is the most common type of blood cancer in Canadian adults. The relative 5-year survival rates for CLL in Canada is decreasing. CLL cell morphology maybe similar to normal lymphocytes and require a hematopathologist examination for diagnosis. There are a low number of related works on image analysis in CLL. This p...