Protecting the privacy of personal information, including emotions, is essential, and organizations must comply with relevant regulations to ensure privacy. Unfortunately, some organizations do not respect these regulations, or they lack transparency, leaving human privacy at risk. These privacy violations often occur when unauthorized organizations misuse machine learning (ML) technology, such as facial expression recognition (FER) systems. Therefore, researchers and practitioners must take action and use ML technology for social good to protect human privacy. One emerging research area that can help address privacy violations is the use of adversarial ML for social good. Evasion attacks, which are used to fool ML systems, can be repurposed to prevent misused ML technology, such as ML-based FER, from recognizing true emotions. By leveraging adversarial ML for social good, we can prevent organizations from violating human privacy by misusing ML technology, particularly FER systems, and protect individuals’ personal and emotional privacy. In this work, we propose an approach called Chaining of Adversarial ML Attacks (CAA) to create a robust attack that fools misused technology and prevents it from detecting true emotions. To validate our proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments using various evaluation metrics and baselines. Our results show that CAA significantly contributes to emotional privacy preservation, with the fool rate of emotions increasing proportionally to the chaining length. In our experiments, the fool rate increases by 48% in each subsequent chaining stage of the chaining targeted attacks (CTA) while keeping the perturbations imperceptible (ε = 0.0001).

Engineering education is constantly evolving to keep up with the latest technological developments and meet the changing needs of the engineering industry. One promising development in this field is the use of generative artificial intelligence technology, such as the ChatGPT conversational agent. ChatGPT has the potential to offer personalized and effective learning experiences by providing students with customized feedback and explanations, as well as creating realistic virtual simulations for hands-on learning. However, it is important to also consider the limitations of this technology. ChatGPT and other generative AI systems are only as good as their training data and may perpetuate biases or even generate and spread misinformation. Additionally, the use of generative AI in education raises ethical concerns such as the potential for unethical or dishonest use by students and the potential unemployment of humans who are made redundant by technology. While the current state of generative AI technology represented by ChatGPT is impressive but flawed, it is only a preview of what is to come. It is important for engineering educators to understand the implications of this technology and study how to adapt the engineering education ecosystem to ensure that the next generation of engineers can take advantage of the benefits offered by generative AI while minimizing any negative consequences.

Deep Learning (DL) algorithms have shown wonders in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as language-to-language translation, spam filtering, fake-news detection, and comprehension understanding. However, research has shown that the adversarial vulnerabilities of deep learning networks manifest themselves when DL is used for NLP tasks. Most mitigation techniques proposed to date are supervised—relying on adversarial retraining to improve the robustness—which is impractical. This work introduces a novel, unsupervised detection methodology for detecting adversarial inputs to NLP classifiers. In summary, we note that minimally perturbing an input to change a model’s output—a major strength of adversarial attacks—is a weakness that leaves unique statistical marks reflected in the cumulative contribution scores of the input. Particularly, we show that the cumulative contribution score, called CF-score, of adversarial inputs is generally greater than that of the clean inputs. We thus propose Con-Detect—a Contribution based Detection method—for detecting adversarial attacks against NLP classifiers. Con-Detect can be deployed with any classifier without having to retrain it. We experiment with multiple attackers—Text-bugger, Text-fooler, PWWS—on several architectures—MLP, CNN, LSTM, Hybrid CNN-RNN, BERT—trained for different classification tasks—IMDB sentiment classification, fake-news classification, AG news topic classification—under different threat models—Con-Detect-blind attacks, Con-Detect-aware attacks, and Con-Detect-adaptive attacks—and show that Con-Detect can reduce the attack success rate (ASR) of different attacks from 100% to as low as 0% for the best cases and =70% for the worst case. Even in the worst case, we note a 100% increase in the required number of queries and a 50% increase in the number of words perturbed, suggesting that Con-Detect is hard to evade.

Arabic Natural Language Processing for Qur’anic Research: A Systematic Review

A document by Adnan Qayyum . Click on the document to view its contents.

COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. At the time of writing, more than 2.8 million people have tested positive. Infections have been growing exponentially and tremendous efforts are being made to fight the disease. In this paper, we attempt to systematise ongoing data science activities in this area. As well as reviewing the rapidly growing body of recent research, we survey public datasets and repositories that can be used for further work to track COVID-19 spread and mitigation strategies. As part of this, we present a bibliometric analysis of the papers produced in this short span of time. Finally, building on these insights, we highlight common challenges and pitfalls observed across the surveyed works.