The Machine INtelligence Development (MIND) Lab at the American University of Beirut (AUB) aims at providing state of the art solutions in the field of Artificial Intelligence with a focus on machine learning theory and applications. The lab has recently established a new identity, grew in size, and saw great progress in cutting-edge research in two main domains: Natural Language Processing and Context-Aware Sensing.
As we begin a new year, we are extremely proud of the diligence and perseverance that our lab has shown despite the challenges that oversaw the world and Lebanon the past year. Our students were able to push cutting-edge research, produce publications, compete in local and global challenges, and share their expertise with the world through open-source solutions and invited talks.
2020 Research Manifesto
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Our NLP focused team has explored a wide range of challenges, from conversational systems and Arabic as a low-resource language to studying human reading comprehension.
Gilbert Badaro, our lab’s newest Ph.D. graduate, has investigated multiple link prediction approaches and different natural language processing variations in order to try to link a large lexical Arabic Resource, SAMA, to English WordNet. In his work, he used a machine learning approach and developed training data using existing small-scale Arabic WordNet. His latest article is important because it provides publicly a large-scale sentiment lexical resource for Arabic, ArSenL 2.0, to enable more accurate sentiment mining models. It also presents a benchmark dataset to be used by other researchers in the field interested in automatically evaluating approaches for Arabic WordNet expansion.
Obeida ElJundi has focused on exploring human reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is not the result of one single process as was thought before the 1970s. Rather, psychologists realized that a combination of several complex cognitive processes is involved. Traditional NLP algorithms used nowadays (e.g., RNN) cover some aspects of the reading comprehension cognitive processes, such as attention and forgetting, but render other aspects unaccounted for. Obeida has been looking into studying how the human brain reads and comprehends written text will help reveal what is missing and improve the overall performance of NLP.
Wissam Antoun has recently defended his thesis on Arabic Transformers for NLU and chatbots. This year, he trained the first Arabic BERT model, AraBERT, alongside his colleague, Fady Baly. Wissam is now planning to explore newer and better models for language understanding and generation, and he is off to a great start! Wissam and Fady have started 2021 by releasing 10 new Arabic Transformer Models (AraGPT2, AraELECTRA & AraBERTv2) on AUB Mind Lab and Hugging Face Github repositories.
Nataly Dalal has worked on designing lifelong learning for chatbots in customer support, thus allowing them to continuously learn and accumulate knowledge on their own from support forums posted on the web. Lifelong learning aims at producing chatbots that are more accurate, robust, and human-like.
Christian Hokayem has focused the bulk of his research on conversational automated negotiation agents. With the goal of improving user experience in an automated sales setting, he investigated what empathy is and tried to find a way to incorporate it into agents’ language generation and decision-making models. In his work, he formulated the problem as a multi-objective reinforcement learning problem and taught the bot to maximize user experience (represented by sentiment) and sales price.
Tarek Naous, our newest master’s student, has started with research focused on enabling empathetic behavior in conversational agents for the Arabic Language with the global aim of making human-machine interactions more similar to human-human interactions. In 2020, he was able to release a dataset of empathetic conversations in Arabic and propose a neural-based model for generating empathetic responses. His work was published in WANLP 2020 and is currently in progress for further development, where the challenge is improving performance given the limited dataset size we have.
Context-Aware Sensing
With a focus on overcoming the challenge of learning from limited labeled data, our work in context-aware sensing has been versatile, ranging from applications of healthcare, such as traumatic brain injuries and epilepsy prediction, to power load forecasting and human activity recognition.
Reem Mahmoud’s research interest is in personalized Machine Learning, which branches into problems of learning with little labeled data and advancing traditional transfer learning methods. This past year, she has looked into overcoming challenges of catastrophic forgetting in pre-trained neural networks on time-series applications, such as human activity recognition. Her work looked into improving performance on target tasks with limited training data while preserving performance on source tasks from the pre-trained model. This work, titled “Multi-Objective Learning to Overcome Catastrophic Forgetting in Time-series Applications,” has been recently submitted to the journal of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data.
Marc Djandji has focused his research for the past year on improving the performance of deep learning models when trained with limited labeled training examples. He has specifically investigated the problem under the application of short-term load forecasting. His work looks into scalable multi-task learning methods.
This year, Alaa Khaddaj had completed an internship at Signal Kinetics (MIT Media Lab) under the supervision of Prof. Fadel Adib, where they developed an apparatus that can detect contaminated food or counterfeit products. The system used a generative model (variational autoencoder) to generalize to new unseen environments and a transfer learning scheme to learn from multiple experiments simultaneously. Alaa’s other line of research was to develop a domain adaptation model that can generalize a classifier between two similar domains that have some differences. For his final year project, his team developed an intelligent question-answering system for customer support. This work has been submitted as a journal paper.
Mosbah Aouad has worked on developing deep learning models for short-term load forecasting for residential houses, where the challenge is to deal with the high non-linearities present in the load data. To build a sensitive model to varying load patterns and large peaks in the data, he designed an attention mechanism to augment a sequence-to-sequence network to capture these variations. On the other side, his thesis work has focused on biomedical image analysis with the aim of predicting the survival rate of penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI) patients from brain CT scans analysis. He is designing a representation learning approach that captures relevant features reflecting the severity of pTBIs from CT scan analysis directly.
Open-source Solutions, Competitions & Other Activities
Beyond the efforts in research, we are proud of the efforts our team has put into sharing and pushing their expertise through participating in competitions, open-sourcing solutions, and delivering talks.
Here are some of our highlights from 2020:
-
- We launched our AUB MIND Lab’s Github Repository and a brand new website for the group.
- Amir Hussein, Rim Achour, and Fady Baly ranked 1st place at QICC Cybersecurity contest in Fake News Detection task.
- Alaa Khaddaj won Best Paper Award at IEEE ICIoT 2020.
- Obeida ElJundi and his work on hULMonA were featured in WIRED Middle East
- AraBERT by our alumnus, Wissam Antoun, and Fady Baly has been featured in MIT Technology Review Arabia
- Marc Djandji, Fady Baly, and Wissam Antoun ranked 2nd Place at 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT 4) in Hate and Offensive speech detection tasks – Marseille, France 2020
- Wissam Antoun invited by IWAN Research Group at King Saud University to deliver a talk titled “AraBERT: Pretraining, fine-tuning, applications and demo (In Arabic),” September 2020.
- Wissam Antoun invited by PyData Khobar Meetup to deliver a talk titled “AraBERT: Pretraining, use cases and future improvements,” May 2020.
2020 Graduates
-
- Dalia Jaber – M.E. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
- Wissam Antoun – M.E. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
- Amir Hussein – M.E. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
- Alaa Khaddaj – B.E. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
- Gilbert Badaro – Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
- Raslan Kain – M.E. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
2020 List of Publications
Journal Papers
-
- R. Mahmoud, H. Hajj, F. Karameh, “A Systematic Approach to Multi-Task Learning from Time-series Data” Elsevier Applied Soft Computing, Vol. 96 (2020), 106586.
- G. Badaro, H. Hajj, N. Habash, “A Link Prediction Approach for Accurately Mapping a Large-Scale Arabic Lexical Resource to English WordNet,” ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP), 19, no. 6 (2020): 1-38.
- N. Abbas, S. Sharafeddine, H. Hajj, and Z. Dawy, “Price-Aware Traffic Splitting in D2D HetNets with Cost-Energy-QoE Tradeoffs,” Computer Networks, vol. 172, p. 107169, 2020.
- A. Hussein, M. Djandji, R. Mahmoud, M. Dhabi, H. Hajj, “Augmenting Deep Learning with Adversarial Training for Robust Prediction of Epilepsy Seizures” ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, June 2020, Article 18.
- S. Taleb, A. Yeretzian, R. A. Jabr, and H. Hajj. “Optimization of building form to reduce incident solar radiation.” Journal of Building Engineering 28 (2020): 101025.
Conference Papers
-
- W. Antoun, F. Baly, H. Hajj, “AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding.” In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, with a Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection, pp. 9-15. 2020.
- T. Naous, C. Hokayem, H. Hajj, “Empathy-driven Arabic Conversational Chatbot,” Proceedings of the Fifth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, December 2020, Barcelona, Spain (Online), pp 5-68.
- S. Taleb, A. Yeretzian, R. Jabr, H. Hajj, “Energy Optimization of Climate Adapted Buildings in an Urban Context: The Case of Subtropical Climate”, 35th PLEA Conference: Planning Post Carbon Cities, 1-3 September 2020 A Coruña, Spain.
- M. Djandji, F. Baly, W. Antoun, H. Hajj. “Multi-Task Learning using AraBert for Offensive Language Detection.” In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, with a Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection, pp. 97-101. 2020.
- O. ElJundi, M. Dhaybi, K. Mokadam, H. Hajj, and D. Asmar, “Resources and End-to-End Neural Network Models for Arabic Image Captioning,” In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications – Volume 5: VISAPP, 233-241, 2020, Valletta, Malta.
- A. Khaddaj, H. Hajj, “Representation Learning for Adversarial Domain Adaptation in Text Classification,” In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Informatics, IoT, and Enabling Technologies (ICIoT’20), Qatar, Feb 2-5, 2020. [Winner of best paper award]
- A. Maarouf, N. El Droubi, R. Morcel, H. Hajj, M. Saghir, and H. Akkary. “Optimized Distribution of an Accelerated Convolutional Neural Network across Multiple FPGAs.” In 2020 IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), pp. 235-235. IEEE, 2020.
- W. Antoun, F. Baly, R. Achour, A. Hussein, H. Hajj, “State of the Art Models for Fake News Detection Tasks,” In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Informatics, IoT, and Enabling Technologies (ICIoT’20), Qatar, Feb 2-5, 2020.
To discover our lab and potential opportunities, visit our site or stay up to date with our news on LinkedIn and Twitter.
I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success in your business. Zuma78
Launching a website is indeed a smart move to make your name in the industry. Many owner are doing their business through their websites only and do not have any physical outlet. But I would suggest if you are making then be sure the website has all the relevant information and is useful for customers. I was recently looking for help with nursing assignment to finish my project and got so confused that there were thousands of websites and they all were useless until I found the professional nursing assistant writers. And I wish I had known them before so it will my a lot of time. Anyway looking forward to seeing your website as well.
gk88 sân chơi giải trí trực tuyến hàng đầu, đa dạng sản phẩm và đầy hấp dẫn. Chúng tôi mang đến trải nghiệm mượt mà, dịch vụ chuyên nghiệp và bảo mật tuyệt đối. Khám phá ngay gk88 để tận hưởng sự khác biệt.
Thanks for sharing nice information with us. i like your post and all you share with us is uptodate and quite informative, i would like to bookmark the page so i can come here again to read you, as you have done a wonderful job. Roma99
I simply wanted to thank you a lot more for your amazing website you have developed here. It can be full of useful tips for those who are actually interested in this specific subject, primarily this very post. Your all so sweet in addition to thoughtful of others and reading the blog posts is a great delight in my opinion. And thats a generous present! Dan and I usually have enjoyment making use of your recommendations in what we need to do in the near future. Our checklist is a distance long and tips will certainly be put to excellent use. BBW love doll
This article was written by a real thinking writer without a doubt. I agree many of the with the solid points made by the writer. I’ll be back day in and day for further new updates. tangkasnet
Banyak pemain yang mencari situs togel online yang bisa menawarkan kebutuhan taruhan paling menjanjikan. Kami dikenal sebagai situs toto resmi yang menghadirkan permainan togel dengan pembayaran hadiah terbesar. Dengan berbagai inovasi dan kecanggihan teknologi dihadirkan untuk memastikan pemain dapatkan kemudahan bertaruh. Togel menjadi salah satu jenis game terbaik yang menawarkan berbagai keseruan sekaligus keuntungan hadiah togel terbesar. Para bettor bisa merasakan pengalaman bermain dengan sangat memuaskan karena fitur serta fasilitas sudah disediakan dengan sangat lengkap. Dengan adanya perkembangan teknologi yang semakin canggih pastinya memungkinkan untuk seluruh pemain merasakan bertaruh secara fleksibel. Hanya dengan bermodalkan kecil akan mendapatkan hadiah keuntungan terbesar.
situs togel
Banyak pemain yang mencari situs togel online yang bisa menawarkan kebutuhan taruhan paling menjanjikan. Kami dikenal sebagai situs toto resmi yang menghadirkan permainan togel dengan pembayaran hadiah terbesar. Dengan berbagai inovasi dan kecanggihan teknologi dihadirkan untuk memastikan pemain dapatkan kemudahan bertaruh. Togel menjadi salah satu jenis game terbaik yang menawarkan berbagai keseruan sekaligus keuntungan hadiah togel terbesar. Para bettor bisa merasakan pengalaman bermain dengan sangat memuaskan karena fitur serta fasilitas sudah disediakan dengan sangat lengkap. Dengan adanya perkembangan teknologi yang semakin canggih pastinya memungkinkan untuk seluruh pemain merasakan bertaruh secara fleksibel. Hanya dengan bermodalkan kecil akan mendapatkan hadiah keuntungan terbesar.
situs togel
789BET nổi bật với sự kết hợp hoàn hảo giữa chất lượng dịch vụ và tính năng siêu ưu việt. Nhà cái không những mang đến một nền tảng cá cược trực tuyến dễ sử dụng mà còn cung cấp đa dạng các trò chơi chất như nước cất.
Website: https://789betp4.com/
thanks this is good blog. Collares de lujo Gran Canaria
Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here…
Thank you very much for this useful article. I like it. Casa vacacional en Las Palmas
How many chapters and essays will there be that can write content as well as you? which I still can’t find ดาวน์โหลด all bet
Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here… 开云体育
Thank you for taking the time to publish this information very useful! 乐鱼体育
Link this so nice PUTIN138
Great article Lot’s of information to Read…Great Man Keep Posting and update to People..Thanks Natural Mounjaro
Buying an apartment in Faqra can be a great investment, especially if you’re looking for a peaceful retreat with easy access to ski resorts and nature. If you’re considering it, you may want to explore the options available when you Buy apartments in in Faqra, as the area offers a mix of luxurious properties and more affordable choices. It’s important to consider factors like proximity to the ski slopes, local amenities, and potential for future growth. I’d recommend checking out new developments and working with a reputable real estate agent who knows the area well.
I’m impressed, I have to admit. Genuinely rarely can i encounter a weblog that’s both educative and entertaining, and without a doubt, you could have hit the nail about the head. Your notion is outstanding; the catch is an element that inadequate persons are speaking intelligently about. I’m very happy we stumbled across this in my seek out something concerning this. kuningtoto
I’m thankful for the knowledge I’ve gained from your website. สมัคร เล่น หวย ลาว
Love to read it,Waiting For More new Update and I Already Read your Recent Post its Great Thanks. Salt Trick
GK88 khong chi cung cap trai nghiem giai tri ma con co nhieu chuong trinh khuyen mai hap dan.
Thanks for picking out the time to discuss this, I feel great about it and love studying more on this topic. It is extremely helpful for me. Thanks for such a valuable help again. 먹튀폴리스
HCM66 được mệnh danh là tập đoàn cá cược lớn nhất khu vực Á Châu. Không chỉ cung cấp nhiều sản phẩm cá cược như thể thao, game bài, bắn cá, nổ hũ, đá gà, xổ số,… HCM66 còn rất phóng khoáng khi cung cấp hàng loạt chương trình khuyến mãi đến thành viên của mình.
Thank you for taking the time to publish this information very useful! سایت شرط بندی فارسی
Nice post mate, keep up the great work, just shared this with my friendz bank of montreal DANAGG
Thanks for sharing, this is a fantastic article post. Really thank you! Awesome.
You can also read our DANAGG to become a successful gamers in Indonesia.
Believe it or not, it is the type of information I’ve long been trying to find. It matches to my requirements a lot. Thank you for writing this information. female rose toys
Great posting, moved in front plus saved as a favorite your web blog. I actually can’t put it off to read simple things extra out of you actually. สล็อตเว็บตรง
thanks for this usefull article, waiting for this article like this again. AT99
Thanks for sharing this useful information! Hope that you will continue with this kind of stuff you are doing
You can also check Joker123 App
Thanks for creating a resource that’s both useful and engaging. ฮานอย ปกติ
If your friend does not answer, you can leave a video message. You can Pay Per Click or the Pay Per Impression. sbobet
Thank you for sharing such valuable information! I really appreciate the effort you put into this, and I hope you continue providing such helpful insights!
You can also check Taya365
Thanks for sharing this useful information! Hope that you will continue with this kind of stuff you are doing
You can also check PH365 Login
Thank you for sharing such valuable information! I really appreciate the effort you put into this, and I hope you continue providing such helpful insights!
You can also check Link Free Credit
I truly appreciate the useful details you’ve provided! Keep up the great work—I’m excited to see more of this kind of content!
You can also check Free Credit
During this website, you will see this shape, i highly recommend you learn this review. mangasee
If you’re looking for dependable mobile repair Dubai services, you’ve come to the right place. This vibrant city offers a variety of skilled technicians who specialize in fixing a wide range of mobile devices. Whether you’re facing screen cracks, battery issues, software glitches, or other technical problems, you can find experienced professionals ready to help.
Many of these services provide quick turnaround times, allowing you to have your device back in hand without a long wait. Plus, a number of repair shops are conveniently located throughout Dubai, making it easy to find one that’s nearby.
यह समझौता फरवरी में हस्ताक्षरित किया गया था
शक्ति न्यूज़ अल्मोड़ा
hey there and thank you for your info – I’ve certainly picked up something new from right here. I did however expertise several technical points using this web site, since I experienced to reload the site many times previous to I could get it to load correctly. I had been wondering if your web hosting is OK? Not that I’m complaining, but sluggish loading instances times will sometimes affect your placement in google and can damage your high-quality score if advertising and marketing with Adwords. Anyway I am adding this RSS to my email and could look out for a lot more of your respective fascinating content. Make sure you update this again very soon.. SKY88
Such a beautiful way to describe two different things at a time. I never considered that this topic could be so deep until reading yours! I want to draw attention that we are also seeking your guidance on Tiger Eye Ring as we work on it. If you have any information or suggestions about the topic, please send us your feedback. We are eagerly waiting for your further blog.
I have been checking out a few of your stories and i must say nice stuff. I will surely bookmark your website situs judi bola online
Nice post. I discover something harder on different blogs everyday. It will always be stimulating to learn to read content from other writers and rehearse a little at their store. I’d would rather apply certain with all the content in my small blog regardless of whether you don’t mind. Natually I’ll supply you with a link on the web blog. Many thanks sharing. ungutoto