arXiv subjects

Muhammad Hamza

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad Hamza.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Tunable Conformal Graphene Growth on Oxide Nanotube scaffolds: Towards Superwettable Hierarchical 2D-3D Architectures

Hierarchical hybrid nanoarchitectures that integrate vertically oriented graphene nanowalls, GNWs, with metal oxide, MeOx, nanotube scaffolds offer versatile platform for smart surfaces, nanoelectronics, and electrochemical technologies. Herein we present rapid, dry, plasma-assisted fabrication route that enables direct and conformal growth of GNWs on mechanically robust MeOx nanoforests. The method combines supported single-crystalline organic nanowires as a 1D soft template with sequential plasma-enabled oxide deposition and GNW growth, all performed under mild temperature, power, and vacuum conditions. This approach yields an unprecedented 2D-3D hierarchical architecture consisting of tunable-thickness MeOx nanotubes uniformly decorated with radially oriented graphene nanosheets, forming re-entrant, multiscale surface. Resulting hierarchical roughness imparts fluorine-free, long-term omniphobicity, with contact angles exceeding 170 degree for water, bovine serum, and other complex fluids. GNWs dominate the wetting response across TiO2, Al2O3, and SiO2 nanotube scaffolds, effectively decoupling surface behavior from intrinsic oxide chemistry and maintaining robust repellency under UV irradiation and water condensation. Comprehensive SEM, TEM, XPS, angle-resolved NEXAFS, and Raman analyses elucidate growth mechanism and confirm preservation of the sp2 graphitic framework, together with controlled degree of edge functionalization. Overall, this work establishes universal, substrate-compatible, low-temperature, and scalable route for the fabrication of tunable graphene-metal oxide nano-microstructured multifunctional surfaces.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Curvature-Weighted Gradient Diversity: A Noise Measure for Geometry-Adaptive SGD Schedules

The standard convergence analysis of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) models gradient noise using a single variance term that treats all parameter directions equally, ignoring the fact that noise in high-curvature directions has less impact because learning rates are already constrained there. We introduce Curvature-Weighted Gradient Diversity (CWGD), a geometry-aware measure that weights per-sample gradient diversity by the inverse square root of the Hessian, providing a tighter proxy for the effective optimization noise. For strongly convex quadratic objectives with diagonal Hessians and isotropic noise, we prove that a CWGD-modulated cosine learning-rate schedule can reduce the asymptotic optimization error floor by up to a factor of two compared with standard cosine annealing. We implement this idea as CWGD-Cosine using a Hutchinson-based diagonal Hessian estimator that is exact for quadratic objectives. Across a range of condition numbers, batch sizes, and noise structures, CWGD-Cosine consistently achieves approximately 20% lower final optimization error than standard cosine annealing while incurring negligible overhead in the quadratic setting. We also identify and correct a degenerate curvature estimator, analyze the robustness of the proposed estimator, and explicitly discuss the limitations of the method, including Hessian staleness in non-convex optimization. These results establish CWGD as a principled geometry-aware measure of optimization noise and motivate future extensions to more general learning problems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Criticality-Constrained Iterative Pruning for Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks via Combined Importance Scoring

Deploying spiking neural networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic hardware demands aggressive synaptic pruning while preserving temporal computation integrity. Existing strategies either neglect neuronal criticality or rely on convex relaxations of the inherently combinatorial pruning problem whose fractional masks, upon binarisation, destroy accuracy at moderate-to-high sparsity. We present Criticality-Constrained Quadratic Pruning (CQP), a native PyTorch pipeline that fuses weight magnitude with surrogate-gradient criticality into an analytically exact importance metric, eliminating the rounding artefacts endemic to solver-based approaches. We formally characterise a continuous-relaxation trap wherein OSQP-solver fractional masks overshoot the intended sparsity by up to 12 percentage points (pp), precipitating a 44 pp accuracy collapse. We identify and remediate a zombie-weight failure mode in which Adam's first-moment tensors resurrect pruned synapses, violating the binary sparsity guarantee. An iterative schedule - prune, fine-tune with gradient masking, recompute criticality, and repeat - eliminates gradient staleness at high sparsity. A KL-divergence temporal analysis identifies a redundant simulation timestep, enabling a free 10% theoretical energy reduction without weight modification. On MNIST (60,000 training examples), CQP yields 95.6% accuracy at 90% sparsity versus 93.4% for magnitude pruning (+2.2 pp). A criticality-threshold sweep reveals an empirical criticality cliff: accuracy falls from 87.0% to 14.4% as the threshold reaches tau = 0.9, constituting a quantitative SNN-level analogue of the Critical Brain Hypothesis. Combined weight sparsification and temporal truncation yield a compound 73% reduction in per-inference energy at 70% sparsity, confirming the practical value of the proposed pipeline for neuromorphic deployment.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Toward Gripper-Integrated Active Electrosense for Pre-Contact Sensing in Underwater Soft Grippers

Underwater manipulation often occurs under degraded visibility due to turbidity, glare, and gripper occlusion, limiting the reliability of vision-based perception during approach and grasping. In such settings, soft grippers are well suited for compliant interaction, but they typically lack an onboard pre-contact cue that can guide approach and closure when vision is unreliable. This extended abstract explores active electrosense as a lightweight sensing modality that can provide a proximity-like signal prior to contact by measuring perturbations of an applied electric field in conductive media. We instrument an octopus-inspired gripper with a discrete electrode layout and record multi-channel sensing voltages using off-the-shelf hardware. Simulation and tank experiments with a suspended conductive sphere show structured, object-dependent changes in the multi-electrode voltage readout relative to empty-water baselines, with detectability varying across excitation of 5 to 20 V and frequencies from 1 mHz to 1 kHz. These findings motivate systematic investigation of gripper-integrated electrosense as a complementary pre-contact cue for underwater soft manipulation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Smart UX-design for Rescue Operations Wearable - A Knowledge Graph Informed Visualization Approach for Information Retrieval in Emergency Situations

This paper presents a knowledge graph-informed smart UX-design approach for supporting information retrieval for a wearable, providing treatment recommendations during emergency situations to health professionals. This paper describes requirements that are unique to knowledge graph-based solutions, as well as the direct requirements of health professionals. The resulting implementation is provided for the project, which main goal is to improve first-aid rescue operations by supporting artificial intelligence in situation detection and knowledge graph representation via a contextual-based recommendation for treatment assistance.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Celebrity Profiling on Short Urdu Text using Twitter Followers' Feed

Social media has become an essential part of the digital age, serving as a platform for communication, interaction, and information sharing. Celebrities are among the most active users and often reveal aspects of their personal and professional lives through online posts. Platforms such as Twitter provide an opportunity to analyze language and behavior for understanding demographic and social patterns. Since followers frequently share linguistic traits and interests with the celebrities they follow, textual data from followers can be used to predict celebrity demographics. However, most existing research in this field has focused on English and other high-resource languages, leaving Urdu largely unexplored. This study applies modern machine learning and deep learning techniques to the problem of celebrity profiling in Urdu. A dataset of short Urdu tweets from followers of subcontinent celebrities was collected and preprocessed. Multiple algorithms were trained and compared, including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, Convolutional Neural Networks, and Long Short-Term Memory networks. The models were evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and cumulative rank (cRank). The best performance was achieved for gender prediction with a cRank of 0.65 and an accuracy of 0.65, followed by moderate results for age, profession, and fame prediction. These results demonstrate that follower-based linguistic features can be effectively leveraged using machine learning and neural approaches for demographic prediction in Urdu, a low-resource language.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

Leveraging Wireless Sensor Networks for Real-Time Monitoring and Control of Industrial Environments

This research proposes an extensive technique for monitoring and controlling the industrial parameters using Internet of Things (IoT) technology based on wireless communication. We proposed a system based on NRF transceivers to establish a strong Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), enabling transfer of real-time data from multiple sensors to a central setup that is driven by ARDUINO microcontrollers. Different key parameters, crucial for industrial setup such as temperature, humidity, soil moisture and fire detection, are monitored and displayed on an LCD screen, enabling factory administration to oversee the industrial operations remotely over the internet. Our proposed system bypasses the need for physical presence for monitoring by addressing the shortcomings of conventional wired communication systems. Other than monitoring, there is an additional feature to remotely control these parameters by controlling the speed of DC motors through online commands. Given the rising incidence of industrial fires over the worldwide between 2020 and 2024 due to an array of hazards, this system with dual functionality boosts the overall operational efficiency and safety. This overall integration of IoT and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) reduces the potential risks linked with physical monitoring, providing rapid responses in emergency scenarios, including the activation of firefighting equipment. The results show that innovations in wireless communication perform an integral part in industrial process automation and safety, paving the way to more intelligent and responsive operating environments. Overall, this study highlights the potential for change of IoT-enabled systems to revolutionize monitoring and control in a variety of industrial applications, resulting in increased productivity and safety.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

Person Identification from Egocentric Human-Object Interactions using 3D Hand Pose

Human-Object Interaction Recognition (HOIR) and user identification play a crucial role in advancing augmented reality (AR)-based personalized assistive technologies. These systems are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes, human-centric environments such as aircraft cockpits, aerospace maintenance, and surgical procedures. This research introduces I2S (Interact2Sign), a multi stage framework designed for unobtrusive user identification through human object interaction recognition, leveraging 3D hand pose analysis in egocentric videos. I2S utilizes handcrafted features extracted from 3D hand poses and per forms sequential feature augmentation: first identifying the object class, followed by HOI recognition, and ultimately, user identification. A comprehensive feature extraction and description process was carried out for 3D hand poses, organizing the extracted features into semantically meaningful categories: Spatial, Frequency, Kinematic, Orientation, and a novel descriptor introduced in this work, the Inter-Hand Spatial Envelope (IHSE). Extensive ablation studies were conducted to determine the most effective combination of features. The optimal configuration achieved an impressive average F1-score of 97.52% for user identification, evaluated on a bimanual object manipulation dataset derived from the ARCTIC and H2O datasets. I2S demonstrates state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a lightweight model size of under 4 MB and a fast inference time of 0.1 seconds. These characteristics make the proposed framework highly suitable for real-time, on-device authentication in security-critical, AR-based systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Unveiling the Skills and Responsibilities of Serverless Practitioners: An Empirical Investigation

Enterprises are increasingly adopting serverless computing to enhance scalability, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. However, this shift introduces new responsibilities and necessitates a distinct set of skills for practitioners. This study aims to identify and organize the industry requirements for serverless practitioners by conducting a qualitative analysis of 141 job advertisements from seven countries. We developed comprehensive taxonomies of roles, responsibilities, and skills, categorizing 19 responsibilities into four themes: software development, infrastructure and operations, professional development and leadership, and software business. Additionally, we identified 28 hard skills mapped into seven themes and 32 soft skills mapped into eight themes, with the six most demanded soft skills being communication proficiency, continuous learning and adaptability, collaborative teamwork, problem-solving and analytical skills, leadership excellence, and project management. Our findings contribute to understanding the organizational structures and training requirements for effective serverless computing adoption.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a solution to the high latency and suboptimal Quality of Experience (QoE) associated with Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). By processing data near the source, MEC reduces the need to send information to distant data centers, resulting in faster response times and lower latency. This paper explores the differences between MEC and traditional cloud computing, emphasizing architecture, data flow, and resource allocation. Key technologies like Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are discussed for their role in achieving scalability and flexibility. Additionally, security and privacy challenges are addressed, underscoring the need for robust frameworks. We conclude with an examination of various edge computing applications and suggest future research directions to enhance the effectiveness and adoption of MEC in the evolving technological landscape.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Human AI Collaboration in Software Engineering: Lessons Learned from a Hands On Workshop

This paper investigates the dynamics of human AI collaboration in software engineering, focusing on the use of ChatGPT. Through a thematic analysis of a hands on workshop in which 22 professional software engineers collaborated for three hours with ChatGPT, we explore the transition of AI from a mere tool to a collaborative partner. The study identifies key themes such as the evolving nature of human AI interaction, the capabilities of AI in software engineering tasks, and the challenges and limitations of integrating AI in this domain. The findings show that while AI, particularly ChatGPT, improves the efficiency of code generation and optimization, human oversight remains crucial, especially in areas requiring complex problem solving and security considerations. This research contributes to the theoretical understanding of human AI collaboration in software engineering and provides practical insights for effectively integrating AI tools into development processes. It highlights the need for clear role allocation, effective communication, and balanced AI human collaboration to realize the full potential of AI in software engineering.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Understanding Cost Dynamics of Serverless Computing: An Empirical Study

The advent of serverless computing has revolutionized the landscape of cloud computing, offering a new paradigm that enables developers to focus solely on their applications rather than managing and provisioning the underlying infrastructure. These applications involve integrating individual functions into a cohesive workflow for complex tasks. The pay-per-use model and nontransparent reporting by cloud providers make it difficult to estimate serverless costs, imped-ing informed business decisions. Existing research studies on serverless compu-ting focus on performance optimization and state management, both from empir-ical and technical perspectives. However, the state-of-the-art shows a lack of em-pirical investigations on the understanding of the cost dynamics of serverless computing over traditional cloud computing. Therefore, this study delves into how organizations anticipate the costs of adopting serverless. It also aims to com-prehend workload suitability and identify best practices for cost optimization of serverless applications. To this end, we conducted a qualitative (interviews) study with 15 experts from 8 companies involved in the migration and development of serverless systems. The findings revealed that, while serverless computing is highly suitable for unpredictable workloads, it may not be cost-effective for cer-tain high-scale applications. The study also introduces a taxonomy for comparing the cost of adopting serverless versus traditional cloud.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

The Journey to Serverless Migration: An Empirical Analysis of Intentions, Strategies, and Challenges

Serverless is an emerging cloud computing paradigm that facilitates developers to focus solely on the application logic rather than provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure. The inherent characteristics such as scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency of serverless computing, attracted many companies to migrate their legacy applications toward this paradigm. However, the stateless nature of serverless requires careful migration planning, consideration of its subsequent implications, and potential challenges. To this end, this study investigates the intentions, strategies, and technical and organizational challenges while migrating to a serverless architecture. We investigated the migration processes of 11 systems across diverse domains by conducting 15 in-depth interviews with professionals from 11 organizations. we also presented a detailed discussion of each migration case. Our findings reveal that large enterprises primarily migrate to enhance scalability and operational efficiency, while smaller organizations intend to reduce the cost. Furthermore, organizations use a domain-driven design approach to identify the use case and gradually migrate to serverless using a strangler pattern. However, migration encounters technical challenges i.e., testing event-driven architecture, integrating with the legacy system, lack of standardization, and organizational challenges i.e., mindset change and hiring skilled serverless developers as a prominent. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive understanding that can guide future implementations and advancements in the context of serverless migration.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Misuse of Antibiotics in Poultry Threatens Pakistan Communitys Health

A survey was conducted from February 2022 to May 2022 on the usage of antibiotics at a poultry farm in different areas of Multan, Punjab Pakistan. A well-organized questionnaire was used for the collection of data. Sixty poultry farms were surveyed randomly in the Multan district. All of these Farms were using antibiotics. Antibiotics are commonly used for the treatment of diseases. Some are used as preventive medicine and a few are used as growth promotors. neomycin, erythromycin, oxytetracycline, streptomycin, and colistin are the broad-spectrum antibiotics that are being used commercially. Enrofloxacin and Furazolidone are the common antibiotics that are being used in Studies these days. The class of Fluoroquinolones is commonly used in poultry farms. Thirty-three patterns of antibiotic usage were observed at poultry farms. multi-drug practices were also observed on various farms. In this study, 25% of antibiotics are prescribed by the veterans while more than 90 % were acquired from the veterinary store. This study provides information about the antibiotics which are commonly being used in the study location district Multan. It is expected that the finding of this survey will be helpful in the development of new strategies against the misuse of antibiotics on farms.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2023

Feature Attention Network (FA-Net): A Deep-Learning Based Approach for Underwater Single Image Enhancement

Underwater image processing and analysis have been a hotspot of study in recent years, as more emphasis has been focused to underwater monitoring and usage of marine resources. Compared with the open environment, underwater image encountered with more complicated conditions such as light abortion, scattering, turbulence, nonuniform illumination and color diffusion. Although considerable advances and enhancement techniques achieved in resolving these issues, they treat low-frequency information equally across the entire channel, which results in limiting the network's representativeness. We propose a deep learning and feature-attention-based end-to-end network (FA-Net) to solve this problem. In particular, we propose a Residual Feature Attention Block (RFAB), containing the channel attention, pixel attention, and residual learning mechanism with long and short skip connections. RFAB allows the network to focus on learning high-frequency information while skipping low-frequency information on multi-hop connections. The channel and pixel attention mechanism considers each channel's different features and the uneven distribution of haze over different pixels in the image. The experimental results shows that the FA-Net propose by us provides higher accuracy, quantitatively and qualitatively and superiority to previous state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Summarize the Past to Predict the Future: Natural Language Descriptions of Context Boost Multimodal Object Interaction Anticipation

We study object interaction anticipation in egocentric videos. This task requires an understanding of the spatio-temporal context formed by past actions on objects, coined action context. We propose TransFusion, a multimodal transformer-based architecture. It exploits the representational power of language by summarizing the action context. TransFusion leverages pre-trained image captioning and vision-language models to extract the action context from past video frames. This action context together with the next video frame is processed by the multimodal fusion module to forecast the next object interaction. Our model enables more efficient end-to-end learning. The large pre-trained language models add common sense and a generalisation capability. Experiments on Ego4D and EPIC-KITCHENS-100 show the effectiveness of our multimodal fusion model. They also highlight the benefits of using language-based context summaries in a task where vision seems to suffice. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 40.4% in relative terms in overall mAP on the Ego4D test set. We validate the effectiveness of TransFusion via experiments on EPIC-KITCHENS-100. Video and code are available at https://eth-ait.github.io/transfusion-proj/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Software Requirements Engineering Healthcare Implementation Maturity Model (SRE-HIMM) for Global Health-Care Information System

The fundamental objective of this research work is to develop a Software Requirement Engineering Healthcare Implementation Maturity Model (SRE-HIMM) that will assist healthcare organizations to effectively evaluate and implement HIS development process. The model was developed based on the systematic literature review (SLR) approach and Empirical results. The 53 primary studies were extracted using the SLR approach and CSFs, CBs, and best practices were identified form the extracted primary studies. The identified success factors and barriers were further ranked using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) approach. Furthermore, I have adopted the critical success factors (CSFs) and critical barriers (CBs) instead of PAs and available Maturity models i.e., CMMI for the development of (SRE-HIMM). The identified CSFs and CBs were classified into five maturity levels based on the CMMI, IMM, and SOVRM. The empirical investigation was conducted HIS experts to evaluate the findings of SLR. Further, a case study was conducted with the company to evaluate the effectiveness of SRE-HIMM which shows satisfactory results.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Smart Healthcare System Implementation Challenges: A stakeholder perspective

The smart healthcare system has gained significant attention for the improvement of the customary healthcare system. The system is comprised of several key stakeholders that make the whole ecosystem successful. However, these stakeholders offer considerable challenges that need much research to address for making the system acceptable and reliable. Furthermore, very few studies examine the key challenges from the perspective of stakeholders of the smart healthcare system. The objective of this research study is to identify the key challenges associated with each stakeholder of the smart healthcare system. We have identified 27 challenges associated with eight key stakeholders of smart healthcare reported in the state-of-the-art literature. Further, a quantitative survey was conducted and the data from 85 respondents were collected in order to assess the significance of challenges in the real-world smart healthcare system. The collected data from the respondents were further analyzed using the smart-PSL (3.0). The results indicated that all the identified challenges associated with each stakeholder negatively influence the smart healthcare system.

cs.CY↗