Kashif Zafar

• PhD Computer Science
• Professor at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences

This paper proposes a novel social cognitive learning-based metaheuristic called kids Learning Optimizer (KLO), inspired by the early social learning behavior of kids organized as families in societal setup. In a society, people are organized as family groups (parents and children) where they interact with each other within and outside their family...

Machine learning-based sports activity recognition has captured a lot of interest in recent years. Automatic activity recognition not only reduces cost and time but is very helpful in analyzing health-sensitive data acquired using smart wearable technology. Gym activity recognition by incorporating smart wearable technology comes within the scope o...

In recent times, there has been a huge increase in the average number of cases of skin cancer per year, which sometimes become life threatening for humans. Early detection of various skin diseases through automated detection techniques plays a crucial role. However, the presence of numerous artefacts makes this task challenging. Dermoscopic images...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a slow neurological disorder that destroys the thought process, and consciousness, of a human. It directly affects the development of mental ability and neurocognitive functionality. The number of patients with Alzheimer’s disease is increasing day by day, especially in old aged people, who are above 60 years of age, and...

Standard convolution neural network (CNN) achieves high level of accuracy for the recognition of characters in different languages. However, like other deep neu-ral networks, training of CNN requires a substantial amount of data. Lack of sufficient training data invokes dataset bias, during learning process, which leads to a decay in the performanc...

Automatic tracking and quantification of exercises not only helps in motivating people but also contributes towards improving health conditions. Weight training, in addition to aerobic exercises, is an important component of a balanced exercise program. Excellent trackers are available for aerobic exercises but, in contrast, tracking free weight ex...

The font invariant recognition of Urdu optical characters is a difficult task due to the nature of Nastalique script. Urdu Nastalique is a complex script as it is excessively cursive and contains characters which are overlapping. Characters also change shape along with change in context. The identification of starting position of same character in...

Brain tumor is a deadly neurological disease caused by an abnormal and uncontrollable growth of cells inside the brain or skull. The mortality ratio of patients suffering from this disease is growing gradually. Analysing Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) manually is inadequate for efficient and accurate brain tumor diagnosis. An early diagnosis of t...

Discovering structural, functional and evolutionary information in biological sequences have been considered as a core research area in Bioinformatics. Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) tries to align all sequences in a given query set to provide us ease in annotation of new sequences. Traditional methods to find the optimal alignment are computati...

Internet of things (IoT) and machine learning based systems incorporating smart wearable technology are rapidly evolving to monitor and manage healthcare and physical activities. This paper is focused on the proposition of a fog-centric wireless, real-time, smart wearable and IoT-based framework for ubiquitous health and fitness analysis in a smart...

In this research we propose a framework that will strengthen the IoT devices security from dual perspectives; avoid devices to become attack target as well as a source of an attack. Unlike traditional devices, IoT devices are equipped with insufficient host-based defense system and a continuous internet connection. All time internet enabled devices...

Stroke is the second leading cause of death and disability worldwide, with ischemic stroke as the most common type. The preferred diagnostic procedure at the acute stage is the acquisition of multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This type of imaging not only detects and locates the stroke lesion, but also provides the blood flow dynam...

A number of different feature selection and classification techniques have been proposed in literature including parameter-free and parameter-based algorithms. The former are quick but may result in local maxima while the latter use dataset-specific parameter-tuning for higher accuracy. However, higher accuracy may not necessarily mean higher relia...

Dynamic route planning is a classical problem with interesting applications in optimizing car navigation, fleet management, urban evacuation planning, unmanned ground and airborne vehicle movement, and maritime route planning. While numerous traditional and heuristic-based algorithms have been proposed to address deficiencies in dynamic route plann...

Redundant and irrelevant features disturb the accuracy of the classifier. In order to avoid redundancy and irrelevancy problems, feature selection techniques are used. Finding the most relevant feature subset that can enhance the accuracy rate of the classifier is one of the most challenging parts. This paper presents a new solution to finding rele...

Urdu optical character recognition (OCR) is a complex problem due to the nature of its script, which is cursive. Recognizing characters of different font sizes further complicates the problem. In this research, long short term memory-recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN) and convolution neural network (CNN) are used to recognize Urdu optical characte...

Advancement in the field of communication facilitates the world for electronic sharing of huge amount of data. Relational databases most widely used and shared through Internet by the communities and organizations. They work in collaborative environment for sharing of knowledge and for applying data mining techniques for finding different market tr...

The effort estimation needs to be done at early stages for successful delivery of software. Numerous models have been developed to estimate software effort during the last decades, but effort estimation of a software project is still a challenging task and in the case of web based projects, it is even harder. The selection of programming language a...

Abstract: Urdu language uses cursive script which results in connected characters constituting ligatures. For identifying characters within ligatures of different scales (font sizes), Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Network are used. Both network models are trained on formerly extracted ligature thickness graphs,...

Interactive games have been an interesting area of research and have many challenges. With the advancement in technology, games have been revolutionizing at each step as per the emerging and variant interests of players. Recently, machine learning techniques are used for the generation of game content based on players experience. The Dynamic Conten...

Most of the research in the area of performance evaluation of rule-based expert systems (RBESs) is focused on verification and validation issues. Many researchers discuss usability, usefulness, portability, and response time for the evolution of RBES. The final goal of all such studies is to construct a system with optimal, accurate knowledge base....

Social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are being extensively used by public to share their opinion on different matters. Consequently social media becomes an excellent and largest open source for gathering public opinion. To perform sentiment analysis on such voluminous data, single node computational models are inefficient. Two ways...

Sentiment classification of social media has recently become popular among scientists due to the emergence of product reviews, blogs and social networking sites. A large number of reviews are difficult to evaluate personally. Moreover due to variable nature of reviews it becomes difficult, to compile overall result of reviews, to know which product...

This paper proposes an automated sign language to speech interpreter that begins by capturing the 3D video stream through Kinect and the joints of interest in the human skeleton are then worked upon. The proposed system deals with the problems faced by mute people in conveying their message through Pakistani sign language. This research makes use o...

This paper provides an optimization technique for computation of resource allocation for the new age technology Cloud Computing. As per National Institute of Standards NITS definition, cloud computing is on-demand e-business model. The proposed solution aims to produce an efficient scheduling scheme for all the jobs 'j' given to a cloud at time 't'...

Most of the data mining projects generate information (summarized in the form of graphs and charts) for business executives and decision makers; however it leaves to the choice of decision makers either to use it or disregard it. The manual use of the extracted knowledge limits the effectiveness of data mining technology considerably. This chapter...

Most research in the area of rule mining tends to focus mining of either ‘classification rules’ or ‘association rules’, while ignoring ‘production rules’. Production rules are building blocks of rule based expert systems. This paper presents an algorithm for production rule mining. Algorithm matches two states of an object; current state and previo...

Software testing is one of the essential parts of the software development life cycle. In software industry, the testing cost can be approximately 50% of the total cost of a software project so efficient ways of testing software are crucially important in reducing costs, time and effort. There are two major methods of software testing; black-box te...

Games have always been a popular test bed for artificial intelligence techniques. Game developers are always in constant search for techniques that can automatically create computer games minimizing the developer's task. In this work we present an evolutionary strategy based solution towards the automatic generation of two player board games. To gu...

Requirement Engineering (RE) is considered as an important part in Software Development Life Cycle. It is a traditional Software Engineering (SE) process. The goal of RE is to Identify, Analyze, Document and Validate requirements. Requirement Prioritization is a crucial step towards making good decisions about product plan but it is often neglected...

Facial Expression gives important information about emotion of a person. Facial expressions are the most expressive way human being display emotions. This paper presents a technique based on multilayered artificial neural network for the detection and classification of frontal facial images. The process involves four stages pre-processing, face det...

There have been arguments that women cannot participate in IT industry economics and These arguments purport that a change in field will help them adjust in the economy. Because of dual responsibilities, women face difficulties in balancing out their work with their domestic and professional commitments. Frequently, they drop out from the field in...

This paper presents a novel digital watermarking algorithm using Contourlet and Discrete Cosine transforms to perceptually shape the watermark by taking care of two conflicting parameters imperceptibility and robustness. Multi Objective Genetic Algorithm is used to decide the optimal watermarking strength (a). Contourlet transform is used to get be...

Due to shifting of healthcare data in electronic form, huge volumes of data have been accumulated in organizations related to medical claim processing domain. This paper presents design of a data warehouse implemented as integral part of a rule based expert system. The system is being used for scrubbing of medical claims' data. Approximate star sch...

This research presents an optimization technique for multiple routes generation using simulated niche based particle swarm optimization for dynamic online route planning, optimization of the routes and proved to be an effective technique. It effectively deals with route planning in dynamic and unknown environments cluttered with obstacles and objec...

This research presents an optimization technique for route planning and exploration in unknown environments. It employs the hybrid architecture that implements detection, avoidance and planning using autonomous agents with coordination capabilities. When these agents work for a common objective, they require a robust information interchange module...

In this paper, we describe the formatting guidelines for IJCA Journal Submission. This paper presents a system for communication and control by disabled people based on automatic recognition of phonemes. This system allows users to navigate around an alphabet board by making phonemic utterances, thus enabling the user to spell out messages. Phoneme...

This research presents an optimization technique for route planning using simulated ant agents for dynamic online route planning and optimization of the route. It addresses the issues involved during route planning in dynamic and unknown environments cluttered with obstacles and objects. A simulated ant agent system (SAAS) is proposed using modifie...

This research presents an optimization technique for routeplanning using simulated ant agents for dynamic onlineroute planning and optimization of the route. It addressesthe issues involved during route planning in dynamic andunknown environments cluttered with obstacles andobjects. A simulated ant agent system (SAAS) is proposedusing modified ant...

This research presents a collaborative evolutionary planning framework for large scale grid exploration and planning problems. It caters for both dynamic and unknown environments using evolutionary techniques. In addition, we integrate the exploration and planning process in a unified framework using multi agent system. As a proof of success, we ha...

One of the most promising uses for multi agent systems is the searching for items or resources in unknown environments. The use of multi agent systems to locate unexploded ordinance proves to be an excellent example of one such application. This research explores the possibility of a hybrid architecture that implements mine detection, obstacle avoi...

In this study we present a sub-swarm based particle swarm optimization algorithm for niching (NSPSO). The NSPSO algorithm is capable of locating and maintaining a sufficient number of niches throughout the execution of the algorithm. The niches which are identified are then exploited by using a sub-swarm strategy which tries to refine the niche and...

One of the most promising uses for multi agent systems is the searching for items or resources in unknown environments. The use of multi agent systems to locate unexploded ordinance proves to be an excellent example of one such application. This research explores the possibility of a hybrid architecture that implements mine detection, obstacle avoi...