Ralph Deters

University of Saskatchewan | U of S · Department of Computer Science

Health data sharing is very valuable for medical research, and it has the propensity to improve diagnostics, medication, policy, lifestyle changes, and many more. At the same time, sharing health data needs to be done without compromising the privacy of patients and stakeholders where necessary. However, recent advances in AI/ML and sophisticated a...

In the era of Medical 4.0, technologies such as big data, wearables, and Machine Learning (ML) are being deployed for predictive healthcare delivery. In this regard, digital twins have been adopted in healthcare to enhance diagnosis and personalized treatment. Health Digital Twins (HDTs) are virtual representations of patients’ data, mirroring the...

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) as analytical tools can be applied across multiple social domains. Thus, these tools are being deployed in several ways to address societal issues and concerns for “social good”. For instance, AI/ML has applicable use cases for crisis response, economic empowerment, educational demands, environme...

Security and privacy are primary concerns in IoT management. Security breaches in IoT resources, such as smart sensors, can leak sensitive data and compromise the privacy of individuals. Effective IoT management requires a comprehensive approach to prioritize access security and data privacy protection. Digital twins create virtual representations...

Security and privacy are primary concerns in IoT management. Security breaches in IoT resources, such as smart sensors, can leak sensitive data and compromise the privacy of individuals. Effective IoT management requires a comprehensive approach to prioritize access security and data privacy protection. Digital twins create virtual representations...

There are millions of People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) globally and over the years, addressing their concerns has been topical for many stakeholders. It is a well-known and established fact that PLWHA are at increased risk of victimization and stigmatization. Unfortunately, the world experienced an outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that has led...

Data management is the collection, processing, storing, and sharing of data. In today's dispensation, data sharing and collaborative data processing is a necessity for multi-partner organizations as it can lead to the discovery of new insight. Shared data is generally for the purpose of marketing, advertising, and other institutional decision-makin...

The use of machine learning (ML) in crop disease detection has gain significant attention from both academia and industry lately. This paper posits that ML techniques can be employed for early detection and diagnosis of the two (2) major diseases that affect cocoa production namely – Swollen Shoot and Black Pod. In this regard, a mobile application...

The major setback for data sharing is that data producers (i.e., subjects) are not able to determine how their data is being used/misused by data collectors (custodians). In view of this challenge, data trusts have been suggested to solve the problem of mistrust in multi-partner data sharing scenarios. In this research, we proposed Data Trusts as a...

Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death, worldwide. Early detection of suspicious tissues can significantly improve the survival rate. In this study, the performance of a wide variety of deep learning-based architectures is evaluated for automatic tumor segmentation of colorectal tissue samples. The proposed approach...

Auditing provides essential security control in computer systems by keeping track of all access attempts, including both legitimate and illegal access attempts. This phase can be useful in the context of audits, where eventual misbehaving parties can be held accountable. Blockchain technology can provide the trusted auditability required for access...

Trust is the main barrier preventing widespread data sharing. The lack of transparent infrastructure for implementing data trust prevents many data owners from sharing their data and concerns data users regarding the quality of the data. Data trust is a paradigm that facilitates data sharing by forcing data users to be transparent about the process...

We propose a new platform for user modeling with blockchains that allows users to share data without losing control and ownership of it and applied it to the domain of travel booking. Our new platform provides a solution to three important problems: ensuring privacy and user control, and incentives for sharing. It tracks who shared what, with whom,...

Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems have emerged to support clinicians in interpreting medical images. CAD systems are traditionally combined with artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and data augmentation to evaluate suspicious structures in medical images. This evaluation generates vast amounts of data. Traditional CAD systems belong...

Auditing provides an essential security control in computer systems, by keeping track of all access attempts, including both legitimate and illegal access attempts. This phase can be useful to the context of audits, where eventual misbehaving parties can be held accountable. Blockchain technology can provide trusted auditability required for access...

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer-related death after lung cancer and breast cancer worldwide. The risk of developing colorectal cancer could be reduced by early diagnosis of polyps during a colonoscopy. Computer-aided diagnosis systems have the potential to be applied for polyp screening and reduce the number of missing polyps. In...

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer-related death after lung cancer and breast cancer worldwide. The risk of developing colorectal cancer could be reduced by early diagnosis of polyps during a colonoscopy. Computer-aided diagnosis systems have the potential to be applied for polyp screening and reduce the number of missing polyps. In...

The newly identified Coronavirus pneumonia, subsequently termed COVID-19, is highly transmittable and pathogenic with no clinically approved antiviral drug or vaccine available for treatment. The most common symptoms of COVID-19 are dry cough, sore throat, and fever. Symptoms can progress to a severe form of pneumonia with critical complications, i...

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer-related death after lung cancer and breast cancer worldwide. The risk of developing colorectal cancer could be reduced by early diagnosis of polyps during a colonoscopy. Computer-aided diagnosis systems have the potential to be applied for polyp screening and reduce the number of missing polyps. In...

IoT systems have enabled ubiquitous communication in physical spaces, making them smart Nowadays, there is an emerging concern about evaluating suspicious transactions in smart spaces. Suspicious transactions might have a logical structure, but they are not correct under the present contextual information of smart spaces. This research reviews susp...

In recent years, the digital world has experienced a massive amount of data being captured in various domains due to improvements in technology. Accordingly, big data management has emerged for storing, managing, and extracting valuable knowledge from collected data. Due to the explosion of the amount of data, developing tools for accurate and time...

Big Data analytics or systems developed with parallel distributed processing frameworks (e.g., Hadoop and Spark) are becoming popular for finding important insights from a huge amount of heterogeneous data (e.g., image, text, and sensor data). These systems offer a wide range of tools and connect them to form workflows for processing Big Data. Inde...

Melanoma is one of the deadliest skin cancers. Early diagnosis plays an essential role in effective treatment planning and reducing the mortality rate of skin cancer. In this study, we propose a compact deep learning-based classification model with a separable convolutional neural network for melanoma detection. The proposed architecture is aimed t...

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the major causes of blindness worldwide. With proper treatment, early diagnosis of DR can prevent the progression of the disease. In this paper, we present a new feature extraction method using a modified Xception architecture for the diagnosis of DR disease. The proposed method is based on deep layer aggregation...

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death across the world in women. Early diagnosis of this type of cancer is critical for treatment and patient care. Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems using convolutional neural networks (CNN) could assist in the classification of abnormalities. In this study, we proposed an ensemble deep learning-b...

Breast cancer is one of the most common causes of cancer-related death in women worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer may significantly increase the survival rate of patients. In this study, we aim to develop a fully automatic, deep learning-based, method using descriptor features extracted by Deep Convolutional Neural Network (D...

Automatic detection of leukemic B-lymphoblast cancer in microscopic images is very challenging due to the complicated nature of histopathological structures. To tackle this issue, an automatic and robust diagnostic system is required for early detection and treatment. In this paper, an automated deep learning-based method is proposed to distinguish...

Access control is a mechanism in computer security that regulates access to the system resources. The current access control systems face many problems, such as the presence of the third-party, inefficiency, and lack of privacy. These problems can be addressed by blockchain, the technology that received major attention in recent years and has many...

Community-based online platforms for hospitality services have connected hosts and guests globally. With the increasing popularity of those platforms - e.g., Airbnb - some management issues have attracted the attention of researchers — for instance, granting access to properties and rooms remotely, without requiring hosts and guests to meet in pers...

Automatic detection of leukemic B-lymphoblast cancer in microscopic images is very challenging due to the complicated nature of histopathological structures. To tackle this issue, an automatic and robust diagnostic system is required for early detection and treatment. In this paper, an automated deep learning-based method is proposed to distinguish...

Breast cancer is one of the most common causes of cancer-related death in women worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer may significantly increase the survival rate of patients. In this study, we aim to develop a fully automatic, deep learning-based, method using descriptor features extracted by Deep Convolutional Neural Network (D...

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death across the world in women. Early diagnosis of this type of cancer is critical for treatment and patient care. Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems using convolutional neural networks (CNN) could assist in the classification of abnormalities. In this study, we proposed an ensemble deep learning-b...

With the advent of blockchain technology, some management tasks of IoT networks can be moved from central systems to distributed validation authorities. Cloud-centric blockchain implementations for IoT have shown satisfactory performance. However, some features of blockchain are not necessary for IoT. For instance, a competitive consensus. This res...

The tremendous technological advancement in the last few decades has brought many enterprises to collaborate in a better way while making intelligent decisions. The use of Information Technology tools in obtaining data of people's everyday life from various autonomous data sources allowing unrestricted access to user data has emerged as an importan...

Access to the system resources. The current access control systems face many problems, such as the presence of the third-party, inefficiency, and lack of privacy. These problems can be addressed by blockchain, the technology that received major attention in recent years and has many potentials. In this study, we overview the problems of the current...

The high demand for food makes it necessary to implement plant phenotyping processes into breeding programs to deal with global food security. Image-based plant phenotyping generates vast amounts of data. Traditionally, this data has been managed in a centralized manner requiring that an administrator grants access permissions. This approach has so...

Physical inactivity has been recognized as one of the leading causes of non-communicable diseases and mortality globally. Though persuasive technology has been identified as a potential tool for tackling physical inactivity and sedentary behaviors, very little attention has been paid to investigating the effectiveness of culture-tailored interventi...

Distributed Ledger (blockchain) technology provides an alternative for distributed databases. It creates a secure and immutable record of data transactions, thus tracking how data are shared and accessed. The access and operations on data can be regulated via "smart contracts" that allows setting conditions for accessing the data - by whom, for wha...

The idea of connecting physical things and cyber components to enable new and richer interactions is a key component in any smart space concept. One of the central challenges in these new smart spaces is the access control of data, services and things. In recent years, Distributed Ledger technology (DLT) like Blockchain Technology (BCT), emerged as...

Many studies have been done to improve the performance of centrally controlled business processes and enhance the integration between different parties of these collaborations. However, the most serious issues of collaborative business processes remained unsolved in these studies, lack of trust and divided data on various confidential ledgers. Bloc...

The set of distributed ledger architectures known as blockchain is best known for cryptocurrency applications such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These permissionless block chains are showing the potential to be disruptive to the financial services industry. Their broader adoption is likely to be limited by the maximum block size, the cost of the Proof o...

Using blockchain as a decentralized backend infrastructure has grabbed the attention of many startups entrepreneurs and developers. Blockchain records transactions permanently and protects them from undesirable tampering. It provides a reliable tamper-proof database which can be considered as a trustable source for tracking the previous system stat...

With the advent of blockchain technology, some management tasks of IoT networks can be moved from central systems to distributed validation authorities. Cloud-centric blockchain implementations for IoT have shown satisfactory performance. However, some features of blockchain are not necessary for IoT. For instance, a competitive consensus. This res...

Blockchain is the promising technology of recent years, which has attracted remarkable attention in both academic studies and practical industrial applications. The smart contract is a programmable transaction that can perform a sophisticated task, execute automatically, and store on the blockchain. The smart contract is the key component of the bl...

A promise of mHealth is its capacity to facilitate the consumption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data using mobile devices, which is central to promoting remote healthcare delivery. Our ongoing project, called SOPHRA, in collaboration with the City Hospital in Saskatoon, Canada, focuses on supporting care providers (e.g., physicians) in the col...

The number of social media users and the amount of available digital information on them is growing exponentially. This explosive rise in the accessible data on social media may cause confusion for users and leads to unpleasant experience since the overwhelming number of various choices makes finding the items of interest too difficult. As an effec...

The Semantic Web, an extension of the current web, provides a common framework that makes data machine understandable and also allows data to be shared and reused across various applications. Resource Description Framework (RDF), a graph-based data model for describing things (entities), facilitates data integration. Due to the explosion of the amo...

In recent years, the advancement in modern technologies has experienced an explosion of huge data sets being captured and recorded in different fields, but also given rise to concerns the security and protection of data storage, transmission, processing, and access to data. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions in a secur...

Nowadays, the cloud hosts the majority of IoT virtualizations. This approach depends on an active Internet connection. The question that emerges is how we can move those virtualizations to the edge of IoT networks without losing the power and flexibility from the cloud but fulfilling the requirements of constrained and pervasive environments. This...

Many studies have been done to improve the performance of centrally controlled business processes and enhance the integration between different parties of these collaborations. However, the most serious issues of collaborative business processes remained unsolved in these studies – lack of trust and divided data on various confidential ledgers. Blo...

Abstract—Using blockchain as a decentralized backend infrastructure has been attracting many startups entrepreneurs’ and developers’ attention. Blockchain records transactions permanently and protects them from undesirable tampering. It provides a reliable tamper-proof database which can be considered as a trustable resource for tracking previous s...

Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing exponential scalability. This scalability introduces new challenges regarding management of IoT networks. The question that emerges is how we can trust the constrained infrastructure that shortly is expected to be formed by millions of 'things.' The answer is not to trust. This research introduces Amatista,...

In recent years, the advancement in modern technologies has experienced an explosion of huge data sets being captured and recorded in different fields, but also given rise to concerns the security and protection of data storage, transmission, processing, and access to data. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions in a secur...

Two required features of a data monetization platform are query and retrieval of the metadata of the resources to be monetized. Centralized platforms rely on the maturity of traditional NoSQL database systems to support these features. These databases for example MongoDB allows for very efficient query and retrieval of data it stores. However, cent...

The increasing variety of programming languages available to computer programmers has led to the discussion of what language(s) should be learned. A key point in the choice of a programming language is the availability of support from experienced programmers. In this paper, we explore the use of graph theory in recommending programming languages to...

Current networking integrates common "Things" to the Web, creating the Internet of Things (IoT). The considerable number of heterogeneous Things that can be part of an IoT network demands an efficient management of resources. With the advent of Fog computing, some IoT management tasks can be distributed toward the edge of the constrained networks,...

Until now, most systems for Internet of Things (IoT) management, have been designed in a Cloud-centric manner, getting benefits from the unified platform that the Cloud offers. However, a Cloud-centric infrastructure mainly achieves static sensor and data streaming systems, which do not support the direct configuration management of IoT components....