Muhammad Yousefnezhad

Muhammad Yousefnezhad
University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Computing Science

B.Eng., M.Sc., Ph.D.

About

94
Publications
48,716
Reads
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368
Citations
Introduction
I serve as a Research Associate at the University of Alberta, spanning the departments of Computing Science and Psychiatry. My focus lies in pioneering machine learning advancements, encompassing deep learning, NLP, and RL methodologies, tailored for text, image, and wearable data analysis, with a primary application in mental health. Visit my website at https://www.yousefnezhad.com, and explore our startup's endeavors in machine learning at https://www.learningbymachine.com.
Additional affiliations
April 2019 - April 2024
University of Alberta
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • My research interests lie in developing machine learning approaches with application to mental health data and neuroimaging such as fMRI, EEG, DTI, etc.
July 2018 - March 2019
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • I am developing Machine (Deep) Learning approaches with application to human brain mapping and decoding as well as mental health
July 2017 - June 2018
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Position
  • Managing Director
Description
  • I am handling the studies of graduate students related to understanding the patterns of the human brains. Our research can be used for recovering the brain’s tasks, such as photos, movies, emotion, risk, etc.
Education
September 2014 - June 2018
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Field of study
  • Artificial Intelligence
February 2011 - September 2013
Mazandaran University of Science and Technology
Field of study
  • Information Technology
September 2008 - August 2010
Mazandaran University of Science and Technology
Field of study
  • Computer Hardware Engineering

Publications

Publications (94)
Article
Full-text available
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) provides more precise spatial and temporal information to reconstruct stimulus images than other technologies that can be used to measure the human brain's neural responses. The fMRI scans, however, generally show heterogeneity among different subjects. The majority of the existing methods aim primarily...
Article
Full-text available
The advance in neuroscience and computer technology over the past decades have made brain-computer interface (BCI) a most promising area of neurorehabilitation and neurophysiology research. Limb motion decoding has gradually become a hot topic in the field of BCI. Decoding neural activity related to limb movement trajectory is considered to be of g...
Preprint
Full-text available
As one of the leading causes of mortality and disability worldwide, Acute Ischemic Stroke (AIS) occurs when the blood supply to the brain is suddenly interrupted because of a blocked artery. Within seconds of AIS onset, the brain cells surrounding the blocked artery die, which leads to the progression of the lesion. The automated and precise predic...
Preprint
Full-text available
As one of the leading causes of mortality and disability worldwide, Acute Ischemic Stroke (AIS) occurs when the blood supply to the brain is suddenly interrupted because of a blocked artery. Within seconds of AIS onset, the brain cells surrounding the blocked artery die. The automated and precise prediction of AIS lesions plays a vital role in the...
Article
Full-text available
Rates of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have risen significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Telehealth has emerged as a means to monitor symptoms for such disorders. This is partly due to isolation or inaccessibility of therapeutic intervention caused from the pandemic. Additional screening tools may be needed to augment identification an...
Article
Full-text available
A prominent cognitive aspect of anxiety is dysregulation of emotional interpretation of facial expressions, associated with neural activity from the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. We report machine learning analysis of fMRI results supporting a key role for a third area, the temporal pole (TP) for childhood anxiety in this context. This finding is...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding how the human brain works have attracted increasing attentions in both fields of neuroscience and machine learning. Previous studies use autoencoder and generative adversarial networks (GAN) to improve the quality of stimuli image reconstruction from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. However, these methods mainly focu...
Article
Full-text available
Similarity analysis is one of the crucial steps in most fMRI studies. Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) can measure similarities of neural signatures generated by different cognitive states. This paper develops Deep Representational Similarity Learning (DRSL), a deep extension of RSA that is appropriate for analyzing similarities between v...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) learns predictive models from task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, for distinguishing when subjects are performing different cognitive tasks — e.g., watching movies or making decisions. MVPA works best with a well-designed feature set and an adequate sample size. However, most fMRI datase...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) learns predictive models from task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, for distinguishing when subjects are performing different cognitive tasks — e.g., watching movies or making decisions. MVPA works best with a well-designed feature set and an adequate sample size. However, most fMRI datase...
Poster
Full-text available
Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) learns predictive models from task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, for distinguishing when subjects are performing different cognitive tasks — e.g., watching movies or making decisions. MVPA works best with a well-designed feature set and an adequate sample size. However, most fMRI datase...
Preprint
Full-text available
A prominent cognitive aspect of anxiety is dysregulation of emotional interpretation of facial expressions, associated with neural activity from the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. We report machine learning analysis of fMRI results supporting a key role for a third area, the temporal pole (TP) for childhood anxiety in this context. This finding is...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Understanding how human brain works has attracted increasing attentions in both fields of neuroscience and machine learning. Previous studies have used autoencoder and generative adversarial networks (GAN) to improve the quality of perceived image reconstruction from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. However, these methods mainly f...
Chapter
Full-text available
Understanding how human brain works has attracted increasing attentions in both fields of neuroscience and machine learning. Previous studies have used autoencoder and generative adversarial networks (GAN) to improve the quality of perceived image reconstruction from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. However, these methods mainly f...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) learns predictive models from task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, for distinguishing when subjects are performing different cognitive tasks -- e.g., watching movies or making decisions. MVPA works best with a well-designed feature set and an adequate sample size. However, most fMRI datas...
Preprint
Full-text available
Similarity analysis is one of the crucial steps in most fMRI studies. Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) can measure similarities of neural signatures generated by different cognitive states. This paper develops Deep Representational Similarity Learning (DRSL), a deep extension of RSA that is appropriate for analyzing similarities between v...
Article
Full-text available
Recently, researchers proposed heuristic frameworks which are based on the Wisdom of Crowds in order to evaluate and select the basic results. In these methods, basic results are evaluated by diversity, independency and decentralization metrics. Then, the evaluated results are selected by thresholding, and combined by a consensus function. This pap...
Article
Background: The β2 subunit of the voltage-gated l-type calcium channel gene(CACNB2) rs11013860 polymorphism is a putative genetic susceptibility marker for bipolar disorder (BD). However, the neural effects of CACNB2 rs11013860 in BD are largely unknown. Methods: Forty-six bipolar patients with first-episode mania and eighty-three healthy contro...
Article
Full-text available
Hyperalignment has been widely employed in Multivariate Pattern (MVP) analysis to discover the cognitive states in the human brains based on multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) datasets. Most of the existing HA methods utilized unsupervised approaches, where they only maximized the correlation between the voxels with the same...
Preprint
Full-text available
Hyperalignment has been widely employed in Multivariate Pattern (MVP) analysis to discover the cognitive states in the human brains based on multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) datasets. Most of the existing HA methods utilized unsupervised approaches, where they only maximized the correlation between the voxels with the same...
Article
Full-text available
In order to decode human brain, Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification generates cognitive models by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) datasets. As a standard pipeline in the MVP analysis, brain patterns in multi-subject fMRI dataset must be mapped to a shared space and then a classification model is generated by employing the m...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) aims to explore similarities between neural activities of different stimuli. Classical RSA techniques employ the inverse of the covariance matrix to explore a linear model between the neural activities and task events. However, calculating the inverse of a large-scale covariance matrix is time-consuming an...
Chapter
Full-text available
Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) aims to explore similarities between neural activities of different stimuli. Classical RSA techniques employ the inverse of the covariance matrix to explore a linear model between the neural activities and task events. However, calculating the inverse of a large-scale covariance matrix is time-consuming an...
Preprint
Full-text available
Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) aims to explore similarities between neural activities of different stimuli. Classical RSA techniques employ the inverse of the covariance matrix to explore a linear model between the neural activities and task events. However, calculating the inverse of a large-scale covariance matrix is time-consuming an...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Multi-subject fMRI data analysis is an interesting and challenging problem in human brain decoding studies. The inherent anatomical and functional variability across subjects make it necessary to do both anatomical and functional alignment before classification analysis. Besides, when it comes to big data, time complexity becomes a problem that can...
Preprint
Full-text available
In order to decode the human brain, Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification generates cognitive models by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) datasets. As a standard pipeline in the MVP analysis, brain patterns in multi-subject fMRI dataset must be mapped to a shared space and then a classification model is generated by employing t...
Chapter
Full-text available
Multi-subject fMRI data analysis is an interesting and challenging problem in human brain decoding studies. The inherent anatomical and functional variability across subjects make it necessary to do both anatomical and functional alignment before classification analysis. Besides, when it comes to big data, time complexity becomes a problem that can...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multi-subject fMRI data analysis is an interesting and challenging problem in human brain decoding studies. The inherent anatomical and functional variability across subjects make it necessary to do both anatomical and functional alignment before classification analysis. Besides, when it comes to big data, time complexity becomes a problem that can...
Article
Full-text available
Background: A universal unanswered question in neuroscience and machine learning is whether computers can decode the patterns of the human brain. Multi-Voxels Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is a critical tool for addressing this question. However, there are two challenges in the previous MVPA methods, which include decreasing sparsity and noise in the ext...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper proposes Deep Hyperalignment (DHA) as a regularized, deep extension, scalable Hyperalignment (HA) method, which is well-suited for applying functional alignment to fMRI datasets with nonlinearity, high-dimensionality (broad ROI), and a large number of subjects. Unlink previous methods, DHA is not limited by a restricted fixed kernel func...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This paper proposes Deep Hyperalignment (DHA) as a regularized, deep extension, scalable Hyperalignment (HA) method, which is well-suited for applying functional alignment to fMRI datasets with nonlinearity, high-dimensionality (broad ROI), and a large number of subjects. Unlink previous methods, DHA is not limited by a restricted fixed kernel func...
Poster
Full-text available
This paper proposes Deep Hyperalignment (DHA) as a regularized, deep extension, scalable Hyperalignment (HA) method, which is well-suited for applying functional alignment to fMRI datasets with nonlinearity, high-dimensionality (broad ROI), and a large number of subjects. Unlink previous methods, DHA is not limited by a restricted fixed kernel func...
Article
Full-text available
This paper proposes Deep Hyperalignment (DHA) as a regularized, deep extension, scalable Hyperalignment (HA) method, which is well-suited for applying functional alignment to fMRI datasets with nonlinearity, high-dimensionality (broad ROI), and a large number of subjects. Unlink previous methods, DHA is not limited by a restricted fixed kernel func...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification holds enormous potential for decoding visual stimuli in the human brain by employing task-based fMRI data sets. There is a wide range of challenges in the MVP techniques, i.e. decreasing noise and sparsity, defining effective regions of interest (ROIs), visualizing results, and the cost of brain studies. In...
Presentation
Full-text available
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification holds enormous potential for decoding visual stimuli in the human brain by employing task-based fMRI data sets. There is a wide range of challenges in the MVP techniques, i.e. decreasing noise and sparsity, defining effective regions of interest (ROIs), visualizing results, and the cost of brain studies. In...
Presentation
Full-text available
This is the original presentation in the AAAI-17 conference.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification can map different cognitive states to the brain tasks. One of the main challenges in MVP analysis is validating the generated results across subjects. However, analyzing multi-subject fMRI data requires accurate functional alignments between neuronal activities of different subjects, which can rapidly incre...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification holds enormous potential for decoding visual stimuli in the human brain by employing task-based fMRI data sets. There is a wide range of challenges in the MVP techniques, i.e. decreasing noise and sparsity, defining effective regions of interest (ROIs), visualizing results, and the cost of brain studies. In...
Article
Full-text available
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification holds enormous potential for decoding visual stimuli in the human brain by employing task-based fMRI data sets. There is a wide range of challenges in the MVP techniques, i.e. decreasing noise and sparsity, defining effective regions of interest (ROIs), visualizing results, and the cost of brain studies. In...
Article
Full-text available
The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC), as a theory in the social science, gets a new paradigm in computer science. The WOC theory explains that the aggregate decision made by a group is often better than those of its individual members if specific conditions are satisfied. This paper presents a novel framework for unsupervised and semi-supervised cluster ense...
Preprint
Full-text available
A universal unanswered question in neuroscience and machine learning is whether computers can decode the patterns of the human brain. Multi-Voxels Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is a critical tool for addressing this question. However, there are two challenges in the previous MVPA methods, which include decreasing sparsity and noises in the extracted feat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification can map different cognitive states to the brain tasks. One of the main challenges in MVP analysis is validating the generated results across subjects. However, analyzing multi-subject fMRI data requires accurate functional alignments between neuronal activities of different subjects, which can rapidly incre...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A universal unanswered question in neuroscience and machine learning is whether computers can decode the patterns of the human brain. Multi-Voxels Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is a critical tool for addressing this question. However, there are two challenges in the previous MVPA methods, which include decreasing sparsity and noises in the extracted feat...
Article
Full-text available
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification can map different cognitive states to the brain tasks. One of the main challenges in MVP analysis is validating the generated results across subjects. However, analyzing multi-subject fMRI data requires accurate functional alignments between neuronal activities of different subjects, which can rapidly incre...
Preprint
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification can map different cognitive states to the brain tasks. One of the main challenges in MVP analysis is validating the generated results across subjects. However, analyzing multi-subject fMRI data requires accurate functional alignments between neuronal activities of different subjects, which can rapidly incre...
Article
Full-text available
This research introduces a new strategy in cluster ensemble selection by using Independency and Diversity metrics. In recent years, Diversity and Quality, which are two metrics in evaluation procedure, have been used for selecting basic clustering results in the cluster ensemble selection. Although quality can improve the final results in cluster e...
Preprint
This research introduces a new strategy in cluster ensemble selection by using Independency and Diversity metrics. In recent years, Diversity and Quality, which are two metrics in evaluation procedure, have been used for selecting basic clustering results in the cluster ensemble selection. Although quality can improve the final results in cluster e...
Article
Full-text available
A universal unanswered question in neuroscience and machine learning is whether computers can decode the patterns of the human brain. Multi-Voxels Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is a critical tool for addressing this question. However, there are two challenges in the previous MVPA methods, which include decreasing sparsity and noises in the extracted feat...
Preprint
The Wisdom of Crowds is a phenomenon described in social science that suggests four criteria applicable to groups of people. It is claimed that, if these criteria are satisfied, then the aggregate decisions made by a group will often be better than those of its individual members. Inspired by this concept, we present a novel feedback framework for...
Article
Full-text available
This Study proposes a routing strategy of combining a packet scheduling with congestion control policy that applied for LEO satellite network with high speed and multiple traffic. It not only ensures the QoS of different traffic, but also can avoid low priority traffic to be "starve" due to their weak resource competitiveness, thus it guarantees th...
Preprint
This Study proposes a routing strategy of combining a packet scheduling with congestion control policy that applied for LEO satellite network with high speed and multiple traffic. It not only ensures the QoS of different traffic, but also can avoid low priority traffic to be "starve" due to their weak resource competitiveness, thus it guarantees th...
Preprint
Clustering explores meaningful patterns in the non-labeled data sets. Cluster Ensemble Selection (CES) is a new approach, which can combine individual clustering results for increasing the performance of the final results. Although CES can achieve better final results in comparison with individual clustering algorithms and cluster ensemble methods,...
Presentation
Full-text available
This presentation introduces the Hyperalignment problem in the human brain decoding
Technical Report
Full-text available
Clustering explores meaningful patterns in the non-labeled data sets. Cluster Ensemble Selection (CES) is a new approach, which can combine individual clustering results for increasing the performance of the final results. Although CES can achieve better final results in comparison with individual clustering algorithms and cluster ensemble methods,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Clustering explores meaningful patterns in the non-labeled data sets. Cluster Ensemble Selection (CES) is a new approach, which can combine individual clustering results for increasing the performance of the final results. Although CES can achieve better final results in comparison with individual clustering algorithms and cluster ensemble methods,...
Code
WSCE algorithm is an unsupervised cluster ensemble method for general clustering problems
Article
Full-text available
Classification Ensemble, which uses the weighed polling of outputs, is the art of combining a set of basic classifiers for generating high-performance, robust and more stable results. This study aims to improve the results of identifying the Persian handwritten letters using Error Correcting Output Coding (ECOC) ensemble method. Furthermore, the fe...