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Syed Muhammad Atif

Publications and source records attributed to Syed Muhammad Atif.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Evaluating Workflow Automation Efficiency Using n8n: A Small-Scale Business Case Study

Workflow automation has become increasingly accessible through low-code platforms, enabling small organizations and individuals to improve operational efficiency without extensive software development expertise. This study evaluates the performance impact of workflow automation using n8n through a small-scale business case study. A representative lead-processing workflow was implemented to automatically store data, send email confirmations, and generate real-time notifications. Experimental benchmarking was conducted by comparing 20 manual executions with 25 automated executions under controlled conditions. The results demonstrate a significant reduction in the average execution time from 185.35 seconds (manual) to 1.23 seconds (automated), corresponding to an approximately 151 times reduction in execution time. Additionally, manual execution exhibited an error rate of 5%, while automated execution achieved zero observed errors. The findings highlight the effectiveness of low-code automation in improving efficiency, reliability, and operational consistency for small-scale workflows.

cs.SE

Blind Ultrasound Image Enhancement via Self-Supervised Physics-Guided Degradation Modeling

Ultrasound (US) interpretation is hampered by multiplicative speckle, acquisition blur from the point-spread function (PSF), and scanner- and operator-dependent artifacts. Supervised enhancement methods assume access to clean targets or known degradations; conditions rarely met in practice. We present a blind, self-supervised enhancement framework that jointly deconvolves and denoises B-mode images using a Swin Convolutional U-Net trained with a \emph{physics-guided} degradation model. From each training frame, we extract rotated/cropped patches and synthesize inputs by (i) convolving with a Gaussian PSF surrogate and (ii) injecting noise via either spatial additive Gaussian noise or complex Fourier-domain perturbations that emulate phase/magnitude distortions. For US scans, clean-like targets are obtained via non-local low-rank (NLLR) denoising, removing the need for ground truth; for natural images, the originals serve as targets. Trained and validated on UDIAT~B, JNU-IFM, and XPIE Set-P, and evaluated additionally on a 700-image PSFHS test set, the method achieves the highest PSNR/SSIM across Gaussian and speckle noise levels, with margins that widen under stronger corruption. Relative to MSANN, Restormer, and DnCNN, it typically preserves an extra $\sim$1--4\,dB PSNR and 0.05--0.15 SSIM in heavy Gaussian noise, and $\sim$2--5\,dB PSNR and 0.05--0.20 SSIM under severe speckle. Controlled PSF studies show reduced FWHM and higher peak gradients, evidence of resolution recovery without edge erosion. Used as a plug-and-play preprocessor, it consistently boosts Dice for fetal head and pubic symphysis segmentation. Overall, the approach offers a practical, assumption-light path to robust US enhancement that generalizes across datasets, scanners, and degradation types.

eess.IV

Structured Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Traffic Flow Estimation of Large Cloud Networks

Network traffic matrix estimation is an ill-posed linear inverse problem: it requires to estimate the unobservable origin destination traffic flows, X, given the observable link traffic flows, Y, and a binary routing matrix, A, which are such that Y = AX. This is a challenging but vital problem as accurate estimation of OD flows is required for several network management tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel model for the network traffic matrix estimation problem which maps high-dimension OD flows to low-dimension latent flows with the following three constraints: (1) nonnegativity constraint on the estimated OD flows, (2) autoregression constraint that enables the proposed model to effectively capture temporal patterns of the OD flows, and (3) orthogonality constraint that ensures the mapping between low-dimensional latent flows and the corresponding link flows to be distance preserving. The parameters of the proposed model are estimated with a training algorithm based on Nesterov accelerated gradient and generally shows fast convergence. We validate the proposed traffic flow estimation model on two real backbone IP network datasets, namely Internet2 and G'EANT. Empirical results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models not only in terms of tracking the individual OD flows but also in terms of standard performance metrics. The proposed model is also found to be highly scalable compared to the existing state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.NI

Multi-Kernel Fusion for RBF Neural Networks

A simple yet effective architectural design of radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN) makes them amongst the most popular conventional neural networks. The current generation of radial basis function neural network is equipped with multiple kernels which provide significant performance benefits compared to the previous generation using only a single kernel. In existing multi-kernel RBF algorithms, multi-kernel is formed by the convex combination of the base/primary kernels. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-kernel RBFNN in which every base kernel has its own (local) weight. This novel flexibility in the network provides better performance such as faster convergence rate, better local minima and resilience against stucking in poor local minima. These performance gains are achieved at a competitive computational complexity compared to the contemporary multi-kernel RBF algorithms. The proposed algorithm is thoroughly analysed for performance gain using mathematical and graphical illustrations and also evaluated on three different types of problems namely: (i) pattern classification, (ii) system identification and (iii) function approximation. Empirical results clearly show the superiority of the proposed algorithm compared to the existing state-of-the-art multi-kernel approaches.

cs.LG

A Novel Compressed Sensing Technique for Traffic Matrix Estimation of Software Defined Cloud Networks

Traffic Matrix estimation has always caught attention from researchers for better network management and future planning. With the advent of high traffic loads due to Cloud Computing platforms and Software Defined Networking based tunable routing and traffic management algorithms on the Internet, it is more necessary as ever to be able to predict current and future traffic volumes on the network. For large networks such origin-destination traffic prediction problem takes the form of a large under-constrained and under-determined system of equations with a dynamic measurement matrix. In this work, we present our Compressed Sensing with Dynamic Model Estimation (CS-DME) architecture suitable for modern software defined networks. Our main contributions are: (1) we formulate an approach in which measurement matrix in the compressed sensing scheme can be accurately and dynamically estimated through a reformulation of the problem based on traffic demands. (2) We show that the problem formulation using a dynamic measurement matrix based on instantaneous traffic demands may be used instead of a stationary binary routing matrix which is more suitable to modern Software Defined Networks that are constantly evolving in terms of routing by inspection of its Eigen Spectrum using two real world datasets. (3) We also show that linking this compressed measurement matrix dynamically with the measured parameters can lead to acceptable estimation of Origin Destination (OD) Traffic flows with marginally poor results with other state-of-art schemes relying on fixed measurement matrices. (4) Furthermore, using this compressed reformulated problem, a new strategy for selection of vantage points for most efficient traffic matrix estimation is also presented through a secondary compression technique based on subset of link measurements.

cs.NI

Tri-Compress: A Cascaded Data Compression Framework for Smart Electricity Distribution Systems

Modern smart distribution system requires storage, transmission and processing of big data generated by sensors installed in electric meters. On one hand, this data is essentially required for intelligent decision making by smart grid but on the other hand storage, transmission and processing of that huge amount of data is also a challenge. Present approaches to compress this information have only relied on the traditional matrix decomposition techniques benefitting from low number of principal components to represent the entire data. This paper proposes a cascaded data compression technique that blends three different methods in order to achieve high compression rate for efficient storage and transmission. In the first and second stages, two lossy data compression techniques are used, namely Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Normalization; Third stage achieves further compression by using the technique of Sparsity Encoding (SE) which is a lossless compression technique but only having appreciable benefits for sparse data sets. Our simulation results show that the combined use of the 3 techniques achieves data compression ratio to be 15% higher than state of the art SVD for small, sparse datasets and up to 28% higher in large, non-sparse datasets with acceptable Mean Absolute Error (MAE).

eess.SP