Imad H. Elhajj

American University of Beirut | AUB · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Objective The COVID-19 infodemic has been a global public health challenge, especially affecting vulnerable populations such as Syrian refugees with limited internet access and functional, health, digital, and media literacies. To address this problem, we developed Wikaytek, a software to diffuse reliable COVID-19 information using WhatsApp, the pr...

Robots have become ubiquitous tools in various industries and households, highlighting the importance of human-robot interaction (\textbf{HRI}). This has increased the need for easy and accessible communication between humans and robots. Recent research has focused on the intersection of virtual assistant technology, such as Amazon's Alexa, with ro...

In this work, an Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) coplanar sensor design is used to detect the presence of oil beneath ice, alongside estimating its depth and thickness. Oil spill response in the arctic region requires a non-intrusive and efficient method to detect and measure oil under ice, and this is where the role of coplanar ECT comes i...

Background Maternal and newborn healthcare providers are essential professional groups vulnerable to physical and psychological risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This study uses machine learning algorithms to create a predictive tool for maternal and newborn healthcare providers’ perception of being safe in the workplace globally during...

Site inspection is a notably tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone process when carried out manually by construction inspectors. One portion of site inspection is the generation and comparison of as-built drawings to their as-planned counterparts to ensure conformity. Current as-built evaluation systems rely on manually positioning and transport...

Network security is a key challenge for the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT). New attacks have been developed to exploit the vulnerabilities of IoT devices. Moreover, IoT immense scale will amplify traditional network attacks. Machine learning has been extensively applied for traffic classification and intrusion detection. In this paper, we p...

Machine learning (ML)-based traffic classification is evolving into a well-established research domain. Considering statistical characteristics of the traffic flows, ML-based classification methods have succeeded in even classifying encrypted traffic. However, recent research efforts have emerged, for privacy preservation, where traffic obfuscation...

This project developed oil thickness sensors to quantify the thickness of oil floating on water. Two unique sensors were developed to measure oil thickness greater than 3 mm in real time. The first is a hand held unit that can be deployed from a vessel or used in a test environment. Measurements are read by the user directly from the sensor. The s...

During oil spills, an accurate estimate of the oil-slick thickness at different locations within the affected area is an essential requirement to estimate the spilled amount, assess and enhance the performance of skimmers, and decide on type of remediation techniques to be applied such as in situ burning. This requirement cannot be satisfied usin...

Traffic classification is a key network function for managing both Quality of Service (QoS) and security. While some traffic classification applications (e.g. QoS based path allocation) can tolerate delays, other applications (e.g. attack detection) are time critical. In this context, early traffic classification has been proposed based on the firs...

Background: COVID-19 digital contact tracing apps were created to assist public health authorities in curbing the pandemic. Contact tracing apps require users’ permissions to access specific functions on their mobile phones, such as geolocation, Bluetooth or Wi-fi connections, or personal data to work correctly. As these functions have privacy repe...

BACKGROUND COVID-19 digital contact-tracing apps were created to assist public health authorities in curbing the pandemic. These apps require users’ permission to access specific functions on their mobile phones, such as geolocation, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections, or personal data, to work correctly. As these functions have privacy repercussions,...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to detail the design and prototyping of a smart automation solution for de-strapping plastic bonding straps on shipping pallets, which are loaded with multiple containers secured by a top-cover as they move on a conveyor belt. Design/methodology/approach The adopted design methodology to have the system perform...

Recently, advancements in computational machinery have facilitated the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) to almost every field and industry. This fast-paced development in AI and sensing technologies have stirred an evolution in the realm of robotics. Concurrently, augmented reality (AR) applications are providing solutions to a myriad of...

Research has proved that supposedly secure encrypted network traffic is actually threatened by privacy and security violations from many aspects. This is mainly due to flow features leaking evidence about user activity and data content. Currently, adversaries can use statistical traffic analysis to create classifiers for network applications and in...

It has been well established that the Internet of Things will bring an expansion in traffic volume and types. This will bring new challenges in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) and security, requiring innovative traffic {management} techniques. {Traffic classification is a main network function that helps in managing both QoS and security.} Differ...

Provided herein are systems , methods and apparatuses for a thickness measurement device based on a capacitive array; https://patents.google.com/patent/US10976147B2/en.

Ever since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a pandemic, there has been a public health debate concerning medical resources and supplies including hospital beds, intensive care units (ICU), ventilators and protective personal equipment (PPE). Forecasting COVID-19 dissemination has played a k...

Background: With an aging population, it is essential to maintain good health and autonomy for as long as possible. Instead of hospitalisation or institutionalisation, older people with chronic conditions can be assisted in their own home with numerous "smart" devices that support them in their activities of daily living, manage their medical cond...

Security is one of the principle concerns confronting the improvement of new networking and communications systems. Another challenge is to verify network consistency, such that it is functioning precisely as planned. On the other hand, propels in Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation are expected to play a key role in offensive and defensive mea...

Measurement of oil's internal flow resistance, usually known as viscosity, is essential in several domains such as automotive and oil production. Although different types of viscometers are available in the market, several limitations affect their usability in real-time applications; mainly the requirement for calibration. In this paper, we introdu...

Measurement of oil’s viscosity is essential in several domains such as automotive and oil production. Viscometers available in the market have several limitations that affect their usability under real time conditions. We introduce a new method for measuring the oil viscosity under real time conditions based on coplanar capacitive sensors installed...

Link: https://ieee-dataport.org/open-access/dataset-binary-classification-digital-sensor-signals. The dataset is composed of digital signals obtained from a capacitive sensor electrodes that are immersed in water or in oil. Each signal, stored in one row, is composed of 10 consecutive intensity values and a label in the last column. The label is +1...

One of the challenges facing humanoid robots is the design of a more human-like gait. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for gait design for humanoids that is founded in the field of Kinesiology and is based on energy-exchange between potential and kinetic energies. Additionally, we propose an energy-based controller, which not only maintains...

Exoskeleton robots have demonstrated the potential to rehabilitate stroke dyskinesia. Unfortunately, poor human-machine physiological coupling causes unexpected damage to human of muscles and joints. Moreover, inferior humanoid kinematics control would restrict human natural kinematics. Failing to deal with these problems results in bottlenecks and...

Ever since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a pandemic, there has been a public health debate concerning medical resources and supplies including hospital beds, intensive care units (ICU), ventilators, and Protective Personal Equipment (PPE). Forecasting COVID-19 dissemination has played a...

Background: Recognizing low right ventricular (RV) function from 2-dimentiontial echocardiography (2D-ECHO) is challenging when parameters are contradictory. We aim to develop a model to predict low RV function integrating the various 2D-ECHO parameters in reference to cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR)-the gold standard. Methods: We retrospective...

Traffic classification acquired the interest of the Internet community early on. Different approaches have been proposed to classify Internet traffic to manage both security and Quality of Service (QoS). However, traditional classification approaches consisting of modifying the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) scheme have no...

Traffic classification is key for managing both QoS and security in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, new traffic obfuscation techniques have been developed to thwart classification. Traffic mutation is one such obfuscation technique, that consists of modifying the flow’s statistical characteristics to mislead the traffic classifier. In fact,...

Traffic classification is key for managing both QoS and security in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, new traffic obfuscation techniques have been developed to thwart classification. Traffic mutation is one such obfuscation technique, that consists of modifying the flow's statistical characteristics to mislead the traffic classifier. In fact,...

The study introduces and evaluates a unique inter-faculty service learning course as a pedagogical model that enhances students’ learning and knowledge of health problems and associated engineering intervention design for populations affected by protracted crises. Background: With an increase in humanitarian protracted crises around the world, due...

Objectives. In heart failure, invasive angiography is often employed to differentiate ischaemic from non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy. We aim to examine the predictive value of echocardiographic strain features alone and in combination with other features to differentiate ischaemic from non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy, using artificial neural network (ANN...

Mobile apps are known to be rich sources for gathering privacy-sensitive information about smartphone users. Despite the presence of encryption, passive network adversaries who have access to the network infrastructure can eavesdrop on the traffic and therefore fingerprint a user’s app by means of packet-level traffic analysis. Since it is difficul...

The search for better networking paradigms has fostered the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN), which allows the decoupling of the data plane from the control plane and to configure the network dynamically. SDN provides network operators with significant visibility and granularity of their networks leading to more flexibility in program...

Abstract Mobile ads are plagued with fraudulent clicks which is a major challenge for the advertising community. Although popular ad networks use many techniques to detect click fraud, they do not protect the client from possible collusion between publishers and ad networks. In addition, ad networks are not able to monitor the user’s activity for c...

During an oil spill response, one of the main challenges is the ability to measure, in situ and in real time, the oil slick thickness at different locations throughout the slick. This paper presents an instrument that can respond to this need by employing a capacitive-based sensor designed for oils of different viscosities. There are three main adv...

Network convergence is an important aspect in networks because it can limit the damage resulting from network failures and changes. Consequently, a lot of research considered comparing the performance of different routing protocols, whether in IP or SDN, to assess their convergence speed and reaction to failures. We previously modeled OSPF vs SDN n...

Capacitive sensors are widely used in different liquid level sensing applications, including multi-phase thickness measurements. The performance of these sensors usually degrades when dealing with highly viscous liquids under dynamic conditions. In such situations, in what is known as fouling, liquid accumulates on the sensor body causing errors in...

This paper presents a novel method for characterizing the distribution of a multiphase gas/liquid mixture under dynamic conditions. The main advantage of the proposed technique is its ability to leverage sensor motion information to correct measurement errors. The proposed method is applied to the measurement of oil thickness within a gas/oil/water...

Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining input or enlisting the services of a crowd of people with the aim of finding the best solution to a proposed problem. The method with which the collected input is aggregated affects the outcome of the crowdsourcing process. In this paper, we introduce a modelling framework through which we compare several a...

Measuring the soil moisture is an essential task in precision agriculture and smart irrigation strategies. However, most of the available measurement instruments are expensive and are not suitable for use by traditional farmers with a low level of education. In addition, several technical limitations affect the performance of the currently used soi...

One of the key features impacting the effectiveness of the currently used oil spill cleaning techniques is knowing, in real-time, the actual thickness of oil films. Aiming to enhance the efficiency of the oil spill response, this paper presents the design, prototyping, and testing of a LED-based spectrometer instrument that measures the thickness o...

Purpose: Driven by the shortage in qualified nurses and the high percentage of aging populations, the past decade has witnessed a significant growth in the use of robots in nursing, especially in countries like Japan. This article is a scoping review of the different tracks in which robots are used in nursing. Whereas assistive robots are used for...

Stroke has become the leading cause of disability and the second-leading cause of mortality worldwide. Dyskinesia complications are the major reason of these high death and disability rates. As a tool for rapid motion function recovery in stroke patients, exoskeleton robots can reduce complications and thereby decrease stroke mortality rates. Howev...

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT). While some analysts disvalue the IoT hype, several technology leaders, governments, and researchers are putting serious efforts to develop solutions enabling wide IoT deployment. Thus, the huge amount of generated data, the high network scale, the security and privacy...

Network operators and mobile carriers are facing serious security challenges caused by an increasing number of services provided by smartphone Apps. For example, Android OS has more than 1 million Apps in stores. Hence, network administrators tend to adopt strict policies to secure their infrastructure. The aim of this study is to propose an effici...

One of the challenges of teleoperation is the recognition of a user’s intended commands, particularly in the manning of highly dynamic systems such as drones. In this paper, we present a solution to this problem by developing a generalized scheme relying on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that is trained to recognize a user’s intended commands...

Purpose This work presents an approach to reduce energy consumption in data centers. Subsequently, it reduces electricity bills and carbon dioxide footprints resulting from their use. Design/methodology/approach We present a mathematical model of the energy dissipation optimization problem. We formulate analytically the server selection problem...

Quick User Datagram Protocol Internet Connection (QUIC) ¹ boosts web traffic performance by solving a number of transport-layer and application-layer problems. QUIC provides key advantages to HTTP/2 such as reduced connection establishment latency, improved congestion control, forward error correction, and connection migration. However, QUIC suffer...

The complete report can be obtained from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) at https://www.bsee.gov/sites/bsee.gov/files/research-reports//1078aa.pdf. This technical report presents the design, prototyping, and testing of two low cost floating oil thickness measurement instruments, that provide near real-time measurements for...