Hammad Afzal

Dr. Hammad Afzal

National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad 44000, Pakistan
orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

18Years (2009-Present)

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

Representative Publications

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5 February 2020 in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
KUkaleem ullah
kaleem ullah
IRImran Rashid
Imran Rashid
HAHammad Afzal
Hammad Afzal
MIMian Muhammad Waseem Iqbal
Mian Muhammad Waseem Iqbal
YBYawar Abbas Bangash
Yawar Abbas Bangash
HAHaider Abbas
Haider Abbas
The Signalling System No. 7 (SS7) is used in GSM/ UMTS telecommunication technologies for signalling and management of communication. It was designed on the concept of private boundary walled technology having mutual trust between few national/ multinational operators with no inherent security controls in 1970s. Deregulation, expansion, and merger of telecommunication technology with data networks have vanquished the concept of boundary walls hence increasing the number of service providers, entry points, and interfaces to the SS7 network, which made it vulnerable to serious attacks. The SS7 exploits can be used by attackers to intercept messages, track a subscriber’s location, tape/ redirect calls, adversely affect disaster relief operations, drain funds of individuals from banks in combination with other methods and send billions of spam messages. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the SS7 attacks with detailed methods to execute attacks, methods to enter the SS7 core network, and recommends safeguards against the SS7 attacks. It also provides a machine learning based framework to detect anomalies in the SS7 network which is compared with rule based filtering. It further presents a conceptual model for the defense of network.

31 October 2022 in Healthcare
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
AFAnum Fatima
Anum Fatima
ISImran Shafi
Imran Shafi
HAHammad Afzal
Hammad Afzal
Isabel De La Torre DíezIsabel De La Torre Díez
Isabel De La Torre Díez
MARIA LOURDES del Rio-SolaMARIA LOURDES del Rio-Sola
MARIA LOURDES del Rio-Sola
IAImran Ashraf
Imran Ashraf
Artificial intelligence has been widely used in the field of dentistry in recent years. The present study highlights current advances and limitations in integrating artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning in subfields of dentistry including periodontology, endodontics, orthodontics, restorative dentistry, and oral pathology. This article aims to provide a systematic review of current clinical applications of artificial intelligence within different fields of dentistry. The preferred reporting items for systematic reviews (PRISMA) statement was used as a formal guideline for data collection. Data was obtained from research studies for 2009–2022. The analysis included a total of 55 papers from Google Scholar, IEEE, PubMed, and Scopus databases. Results show that artificial intelligence has the potential to improve dental care, disease diagnosis and prognosis, treatment planning, and risk assessment. Finally, this study highlights the limitations of the analyzed studies and provides future directions to improve dental care.

27 December 2018 in IEEE Access
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
RYRaza Yunus
Raza Yunus
OAOmar Arif
Omar Arif
HAHammad Afzal
Hammad Afzal
MAMuhammad Faisal Amjad
Muhammad Faisal Amjad
HAHaider Abbas
Haider Abbas
RNRaheel Nawaz
Raheel Nawaz
There has been a rapid increase in dietary ailments during last few decades, caused by unhealthy food routine. Mobile-based dietary assessment systems that can record real time images of meal and analyze it for nutritional content can be very handy and improve the dietary habits, and therefore, result in healthy life. This paper proposes a novel system to automatically estimate food attributes such as ingredients and nutritional value by classifying the input image of food. Our method employs different deep learning models for accurate food identification. In addition to image analysis, attributes and ingredients are estimated by extracting semantically related words from a huge corpus of text, collected over the Internet. We performed experiments with a dataset comprising 100 classes, averaging 1000 images for each class to acquire top 1 classification rate of up to 85 percent. An extension of a benchmark dataset Food-101 is also created to include sub-continental foods. Results show that our proposed system is equally efficient on basic Food- 101 dataset and its extension for sub-continental foods. The proposed system is implemented as a mobile app that has its application in healthcare sector.

13 December 2022 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
ANAleena Nadeem
Aleena Nadeem
MNMuhammad Naveed
Muhammad Naveed
Muhammad IslamMuhammad Islam
Muhammad Islam
HAHammad Afzal
Hammad Afzal
Tanveer AhmadTanveer Ahmad
Tanveer Ahmad
KKKi-Il Kim
Ki-Il Kim
In today’s world, mental health diseases have become highly prevalent, and depression is one of the mental health problems that has become widespread. According to WHO reports, depression is the second-leading cause of the global burden of diseases. In the proliferation of such issues, social media has proven to be a great platform for people to express themselves. Thus, a user’s social media can speak a great deal about his/her emotional state and mental health. Considering the high pervasiveness of the disease, this paper presents a novel framework for depression detection from textual data, employing Natural Language Processing and deep learning techniques. For this purpose, a dataset consisting of tweets was created, which were then manually annotated by the domain experts to capture the implicit and explicit depression context. Two variations of the dataset were created, on having binary and one ternary labels, respectively. Ultimately, a deep-learning-based hybrid Sequence, Semantic, Context Learning (SSCL) classification framework with a self-attention mechanism is proposed that utilizes GloVe (pre-trained word embeddings) for feature extraction; LSTM and CNN were used to capture the sequence and semantics of tweets; finally, the GRUs and self-attention mechanism were used, which focus on contextual and implicit information in the tweets. The framework outperformed the existing techniques in detecting the explicit and implicit context, with an accuracy of 97.4 for binary labeled data and 82.9 for ternary labeled data. We further tested our proposed SSCL framework on unseen data (random tweets), for which an F1-score of 94.4 was achieved. Furthermore, in order to showcase the strengths of the proposed framework, we validated it on the “News Headline Data set” for sarcasm detection, considering a dataset from a different domain. It also outmatched the performance of existing techniques in cross-domain validation.

1 November 2017 in Expert Systems with Applications
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Mehreen AhmedMehreen Ahmed
Mehreen Ahmed
ARAsma Ghulam Rasool
Asma Ghulam Rasool
HAHammad Afzal
Hammad Afzal
ISImran Siddiqi
Imran Siddiqi

28 June 2023 in Diagnostics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
ISImran Shafi
Imran Shafi
AFAnum Fatima
Anum Fatima
HAHammad Afzal
Hammad Afzal
Isabel De La Torre DíezIsabel De La Torre Díez
Isabel De La Torre Díez
VLVivian Lipari
Vivian Lipari
Imran AshrafImran Ashraf
Imran Ashraf
Artificial intelligence has made substantial progress in medicine. Automated dental imaging interpretation is one of the most prolific areas of research using AI. X-ray and infrared imaging systems have enabled dental clinicians to identify dental diseases since the 1950s. However, the manual process of dental disease assessment is tedious and error-prone when diagnosed by inexperienced dentists. Thus, researchers have employed different advanced computer vision techniques, and machine- and deep-learning models for dental disease diagnoses using X-ray and near-infrared imagery. Despite the notable development of AI in dentistry, certain factors affect the performance of the proposed approaches, including limited data availability, imbalanced classes, and lack of transparency and interpretability. Hence, it is of utmost importance for the research community to formulate suitable approaches, considering the existing challenges and leveraging findings from the existing studies. Based on an extensive literature review, this survey provides a brief overview of X-ray and near-infrared imaging systems. Additionally, a comprehensive insight into challenges faced by researchers in the dental domain has been brought forth in this survey. The article further offers an amalgamative assessment of both performances and methods evaluated on public benchmarks and concludes with ethical considerations and future research avenues.