Niusha Shafiabady

Prof. Dr. Niusha Shafiabady

orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

5Years (2022-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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10 May 2023 in PLOS ONE
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Niusha ShafiabadyNiusha Shafiabady
Niusha Shafiabady
NHNick Hadjinicolaou
Nick Hadjinicolaou
Fareed Ud DinFareed Ud Din
Fareed Ud Din
Binayak BhandariBinayak Bhandari
Binayak Bhandari
RWRobert M. X. Wu
Robert M. X. Wu
James VakilianJames Vakilian
James Vakilian
Since the pandemic organizations have been required to build agility to manage risks, stakeholder engagement, improve capabilities and maturity levels to deliver on strategy. Not only is there a requirement to improve performance, a focus on employee engagement and increased use of technology have surfaced as important factors to remain competitive in the new world. Consideration of the strategic horizon, strategic foresight and support structures is required to manage critical factors for the formulation, execution and transformation of strategy. Strategic foresight and Artificial Intelligence modelling are ways to predict an organizations future agility and potential through modelling of attributes, characteristics, practices, support structures, maturity levels and other aspects of future change. The application of this can support the development of required new competencies, skills and capabilities, use of tools and develop a culture of adaptation to improve engagement and performance to successfully deliver on strategy. In this paper we apply an Artificial Intelligence model to predict an organizations level of future agility that can be used to proactively make changes to support improving the level of agility. We also explore the barriers and benefits of improved organizational agility. The research data was collected from 44 respondents in public and private Australian industry sectors. These research findings together with findings from previous studies identify practices and characteristics that contribute to organizational agility for success. This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse of these principles, practices, attributes and characteristics that will help overcome some of the barriers for organizations with limited resources to build a framework and culture of agility to deliver on strategy in a changing world.

30 October 2025 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
NHNadeesha Dilhani Hettikankanamage
Nadeesha Dilhani Hettikankanamage
Niusha ShafiabadyNiusha Shafiabady
Niusha Shafiabady
FCFiona Maree Chatteur
Fiona Maree Chatteur
RWRobert Wu
Robert Wu
Fareed Ud DinFareed Ud Din
Fareed Ud Din
Jianlong ZhouJianlong Zhou
Jianlong Zhou
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved immense progress in recent years across a wide array of application domains, with biomedical imaging and sensing emerging as particularly impactful areas. However, the integration of AI in safety-critical fields, particularly biomedical domains, continues to face a major challenge of explainability arising from the opacity of complex prediction models. Overcoming this obstacle falls within the realm of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), which is widely acknowledged as an essential aspect for successfully implementing and accepting AI techniques in practical applications to ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability in the decision-making processes and mitigate potential biases. This article provides a systematic cross-domain review of XAI techniques applied to quantitative prediction tasks, with a focus on their methodological relevance and potential adaptation to biomedical imaging and sensing. To achieve this, following PRISMA guidelines, we conducted an analysis of 44 Q1 journal articles that utilised XAI techniques for prediction applications across different fields where quantitative databases were used, and their contributions to explaining the predictions were studied. As a result, 13 XAI techniques were identified for prediction tasks. Shapley Additive eXPlanations (SHAP) was identified in 35 out of 44 articles, reflecting its frequent computational use for feature-importance ranking and model interpretation. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), Partial Dependence Plots (PDPs), and Permutation Feature Index (PFI) ranked second, third, and fourth in popularity, respectively. The study also recognises theoretical limitations of SHAP and related model-agnostic methods, such as their additive and causal assumptions, which are particularly critical in heterogeneous biomedical data. Furthermore, a synthesis of the reviewed studies reveals that while many provide computational evaluation of explanations, none include structured human–subject usability validation, underscoring an important research gap for clinical translation. Overall, this study offers an integrated understanding of quantitative XAI techniques, identifies methodological and usability gaps for biomedical adaptation, and provides guidance for future research aimed at safe and interpretable AI deployment in biomedical imaging and sensing.

24 April 2024 in PLOS ONE
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Niusha ShafiabadyNiusha Shafiabady
Niusha Shafiabady
NHNick Hadjinicolaou
Nick Hadjinicolaou
NHNadeesha Dilhani Hettikankanamage
Nadeesha Dilhani Hettikankanamage
EMEhsan MohammadiSavadkoohi
Ehsan MohammadiSavadkoohi
RWRobert M. X. Wu
Robert M. X. Wu
James VakilianJames Vakilian
James Vakilian
Since the pandemic started, organisations have been actively seeking ways to improve their organisational agility and resilience (regility) and turn to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to gain a deeper understanding and further enhance their agility and regility. Organisations are turning to AI as a critical enabler to achieve these goals. AI empowers organisations by analysing large data sets quickly and accurately, enabling faster decision-making and building agility and resilience. This strategic use of AI gives businesses a competitive advantage and allows them to adapt to rapidly changing environments. Failure to prioritise agility and responsiveness can result in increased costs, missed opportunities, competition and reputational damage, and ultimately, loss of customers, revenue, profitability, and market share. Prioritising can be achieved by utilising eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques, illuminating how AI models make decisions and making them transparent, interpretable, and understandable. Based on previous research on using AI to predict organisational agility, this study focuses on integrating XAI techniques, such as Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), in organisational agility and resilience. By identifying the importance of different features that affect organisational agility prediction, this study aims to demystify the decision-making processes of the prediction model using XAI. This is essential for the ethical deployment of AI, fostering trust and transparency in these systems. Recognising key features in organisational agility prediction can guide companies in determining which areas to concentrate on in order to improve their agility and resilience.

9 May 2025 in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
EMEhsan Mohammadisavadkoohi
Ehsan Mohammadisavadkoohi
Niusha ShafiabadyNiusha Shafiabady
Niusha Shafiabady
JVJames Vakilian
James Vakilian
Classification is a fundamental aspect of leveraging big data for decision-making across domains such as engineering, medicine, economics, and beyond. This systematic review explores the application of quantum machine learning (QML) to address the classification challenges. Despite the rising popularity of QML, challenges persist regarding its practical efficacy and applicability relative to classical methods. This study seeks to classify and analyse the application of QML across diverse domains. Employing a systematic methodology, a total of 23 research articles were chosen after applying rigorous selection criteria between the years 2013 to 2023. At first, 520 research articles were identified, and narrowed down to 296 papers, the abstracts of the papers have been read, 61 full-text papers have been studied, and ultimately 23 papers have been selected for review. A methodological approach was employed, involving the selection of relevant papers from reputable databases, evaluation of these papers, and the subsequent derivation of insights into the performance of QML in practical classification applications. Findings indicate that QML classifiers mostly achieved superior performance compared to conventional methods across accuracy, high-dimensional data management, and computational efficiency. However, challenges remain, including the limitations of noisy quantum hardware and the requirement for hybrid and innovative quantum algorithms. Analysis of current trends reveals significant progress in hybrid quantum-classical computational methods. To conclude, this analysis reveals QML’s revolutionary capabilities while noting its current shortcomings. This study provides a thorough overview for researchers investigating QML’s application to real-world classification problems, and it offers guidelines for future research endeavors.

7 October 2022 in JMIR Aging
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
JOJohn Oates
John Oates
Niusha ShafiabadyNiusha Shafiabady
Niusha Shafiabady
RARachel Ambagtsheer
Rachel Ambagtsheer
JBJustin Beilby
Justin Beilby
CSChris Seiboth
Chris Seiboth
EDElsa Dent
Elsa Dent
Background: A commonly used method for measuring frailty is the accumulation of deficits expressed as a frailty index (FI). FIs can be readily adapted to many databases, as the parameters to use are not prescribed but rather reflect a subset of extracted features (variables). Unfortunately, the structure of many databases does not permit the direct extraction of a suitable subset, requiring additional effort to determine and verify the value of features for each record and thus significantly increasing cost. Objective: Our objective is to describe how an artificial intelligence (AI) optimization technique called partial genetic algorithms can be used to refine the subset of features used to calculate an FI and favor features that have the least cost of acquisition. Methods: This is a secondary analysis of a residential care database compiled from 10 facilities in Queensland, Australia. The database is comprised of routinely collected administrative data and unstructured patient notes for 592 residents aged 75 years and over. The primary study derived an electronic frailty index (eFI) calculated from 36 suitable features. We then structurally modified a genetic algorithm to find an optimal predictor of the calculated eFI (0.21 threshold) from 2 sets of features. Partial genetic algorithms were used to optimize 4 underlying classification models: logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, and support vector machines. Results: Among the underlying models, logistic regression was found to produce the best models in almost all scenarios and feature set sizes. The best models were built using all the low-cost features and as few as 10 high-cost features, and they performed well enough (sensitivity 89%, specificity 87%) to be considered candidates for a low-cost frailty screening test. Conclusions: In this study, a systematic approach for selecting an optimal set of features with a low cost of acquisition and performance comparable to the eFI for detecting frailty was demonstrated on an aged care database. Partial genetic algorithms have proven useful in offering a trade-off between cost and accuracy to systematically identify frailty.

21 October 2023
Verified
Conference Paper
Open access
YLYiqiao Li
Yiqiao Li
Jianlong ZhouJianlong Zhou
Jianlong Zhou
YDYifei Dong
Yifei Dong
Niusha ShafiabadyNiusha Shafiabady
Niusha Shafiabady
Fang ChenFang Chen
Fang Chen
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven their efficacy in a variety of real-world applications, but their underlying mechanisms remain a mystery. To address this challenge and enable reliable decision-making, many GNN explainers have been proposed in recent years. However, these methods often encounter limitations, including their dependence on specific instances, lack of generalizability to unseen graphs, producing potentially invalid explanations, and yielding inadequate fidelity. To overcome these limitations, we, in this paper, introduce the Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (ACGAN) into the field of GNN explanation and propose a new GNN explainer dubbed ACGAN-GNNExplainer. Our approach leverages a generator to produce explanations for the original input graphs while incorporating a discriminator to oversee the generation process, ensuring explanation fidelity and improving accuracy. Experimental evaluations conducted on both synthetic and real-world graph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to other existing GNN explainers.