Center for Computational & Data Sciences, IUB

🎉 Academic Achievement Announcement 🎉
Congratulations to Ish*ta Sur Apan on an exciting academic milestone!

Ish*ta, a full-time Research Assistant at the Center for Computational & Data Sciences (CCDS), has been accepted into the fully funded PhD program at University of South Florida! She will be joining the prestigious Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, where her doctoral research will focus on Artificial Intelligence in Cyber-Physical System Security.

Previously, she completed her undergraduate studies at University of Dhaka and worked as a Software Engineer at Streams Tech Ltd and ASA International Management Services Ltd.

This accomplishment reflects years of dedication, perseverance, and passion for research and innovation. Please join us in congratulating her on this well-deserved success and wishing her continued excellence in her academic and professional journey ahead!

🎉 Academic Achievement Announcement 🎉
We are delighted to share the admission success of Md Akil Raihan Iftee, (website: https://mdakilraihaniftee.github.io/ ) a Research Assistant at the Center for Computational & Data Sciences (CCDS) and a CSE graduate from KUET.
This year, Iftee received multiple fully funded offers, including 5 from the USA, 1 from Canada, and 1 from Australia, along with additional future opportunities.
Offers received:
🇺🇸 USA:
1. Rochester Institute of Technology, New York — Fully Funded PhD (Accepted)
2. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York — Fully Funded PhD
3. University of Tennessee, Knoxville — PhD Offer
4. Clemson University, South Carolina — Admission (Partial Funding)
5. Florida Atlantic University, Florida — (A direct PhD Position Offer from a Professor's lab)
🇨🇦 Canada:
6. University of Calgary — Fully Funded MSc (Thesis-Based)
🇦🇺 Australia:
7. Curtin University — Fully Funded PhD offer (via CCDS collaborator Dr Sajib Mistry’s Lab)
Additionally, a professor from Pennsylvania State University has offered him a fully funded PhD position for Spring/Fall 2027 in his lab.

Iftee has decided to pursue his PhD at Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, where he will work under Dr Matthew Wright (Professor and Chair of Cybersecurity). His research will focus on Agentic AI for Deepfake Detection, (Project: https://defake.app/about ) contributing to cutting-edge advancements in AI security. He got his US VISA today.

Please join us in congratulating Md Akil Raihan Iftee ( https://www.facebook.com/md.akil.raihan.iftee/ ) on this remarkable milestone and wishing him continued success in his journey ahead.

We are glad to inform you that 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐩𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐂𝐂𝐃𝐒 have been accepted in the 𝐀𝐂𝐋 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 (𝑹𝒂𝒏𝒌: 𝑨* & 𝑹𝒂𝒏𝒌 #1 𝑵𝑳𝑷 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆) 🎉🎉. Let us congratulate the RAs 𝑴𝒅 𝑭𝒂𝒉𝒊𝒎, 𝑴𝒊𝒓 𝑺𝒂𝒛𝒛𝒂𝒕 𝑯𝒐𝒔𝒔𝒂𝒊𝒏, 𝑨𝑲𝑴 𝑴𝒐𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒖𝒓 𝑹𝒂𝒉𝒎𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒂𝒛𝒖𝒎𝒅𝒆𝒓, and the supervisors. This year, ACL received 12,148 submissions and accepted 19% of the submissions as Main papers and 18% as Findings.

Paper 1: 𝐁𝐀𝐍𝐇𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐗: 𝐓𝐨𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐇𝐀𝐭𝐞 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐃𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐚 𝐔𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐄𝐗𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 [ACL 2026 Main Conference]
Online safety in low-resource languages hinges not only on accurate hate speech detection but also on transparent, culturally grounded explanations. Yet prior works in Bangla largely focus on hate classification, while overlooking interpretability. We address this gap by introducing BANHADEX, the first hate explainability dataset in Bangla with human-annotated labels. BANHADEX contains 19,203 YouTube comments spanning April 2024–June 2025, annotated for binary hate classification with seven fine-grained hate categories, seven target groups, and concise explanations for each sample.

Paper 2: 𝐄𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐚 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 [ACL Findings 2026]
Recent advancements in LLMs and LVLMs (Large Vision Language Models) have enabled general-purpose systems to demonstrate promising capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, including those in the medical domain. However, their evaluation has predominantly focused on high-resource languages, leaving low-resource contexts like Bangla underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce BanglaMedVQA, a multilingual Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset comprising clinically validated image–question–answer pairs. We rigorously evaluate SOTA LVLMs using strategies. Our results reveal a clear performance disparity: models perform well on generalized visual tasks but struggle with fine-grained diagnostic reasoning, achieving surprisingly low accuracy in specialized categories.

🎉 Academic Achievement Announcement 🎉

Congratulations to Armun Alam on a remarkable academic achievement!

Armun, an IUB CSE graduate who serves as a Research Assistant at the Center for Computational & Data Sciences (CCDS), has been admitted to the fully funded MSc program at McGill University under Mila (Quebec AI Institute), one of the top AI research institutes in the world and the birthplace of groundbreaking innovations, including introducing word embeddings in neural nets, denoising autoencoders, and GANs. This is an exceptional accomplishment, especially considering McGill’s global reputation as the 27th-ranked university in the world and the #1 university in Canada according to the QS World University Rankings. His research will primarily focus on applying AI, particularly multimodal learning, to advance dental research, aiming to integrate diverse data sources for more accurate analysis, diagnosis, and innovation in the healthcare field.

In addition to this outstanding success, Armun has also been awarded a full scholarship from Uppsala University in Sweden (ranked within top 100), an honor granted to only 2% of applicants.

Please join us in congratulating Armun for such an inspiring milestone and a well-deserved recognition of his hard work and dedication.

🎉 Academic Achievement Announcement 🎉

We are pleased to announce that Adrita Khan, Research Assistant at the Center for Computational & Data Science (CCDS), has received two notable academic admission offers for postgraduate study with full funding scholarship.

Adrita has been accepted to the prestigious Master’s program in Sciences of the Universe and Space Technologies (M1) at PSL University, Paris (Ranked within top 40).

In addition, she has been selected for the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy (BCGS) Scholarship Program, a competitive program jointly administered by the Universities of Bonn and Cologne to pursue a Master’s in Astrophysics at the University of Bonn (Ranked within top 100).

These achievements reflect her strong academic preparation and continued commitment to research in physics, astronomy, and data science. The CCDS community congratulates her on these accomplishments and wishes her every success in the next stage of her academic journey.
Please join us in congratulating Adrita Khan on her achievements.

The article by Farzana Islam, titled "A Proposed Participatory Framework for Explainable AI in mHealth: Integrating User and Stakeholder Requirements", is a direct outcome of Farzana's MSc in Computer Science thesis work at IUB. The research was supervised by Dr. Ashraful Islam, current Director of CCDS, and co-supervised by Prof. Dr. M. Ashraful Amin, Founder Director of CCDS and Prof. Dr. Moinul Zaber from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK.

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in healthcare, questions around transparency, ethics, and real-world applicability are gaining urgency – particularly in developing countries, where most existing frameworks fail to reflect local realities. From differences in diet and health indicators to disparities in access and infrastructure, the Global South presents challenges that are often overlooked in mainstream digital health research.

Against this backdrop, a young Bangladeshi researcher is contributing to a critical gap in the field. Farzana Islam, an MSc graduate in Computer Science from IUB and affiliated with IUB’s Center for Computational & Data Sciences (CCDS), has published a study in the prestigious 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 (𝐉𝐌𝐈𝐑) that proposes a participatory framework for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in mobile health (mHealth). Her work seeks to ensure that AI-driven health solutions are not only technologically advanced but also ethical, understandable, inclusive, and relevant to the communities they are designed to serve.

Read more: https://iub.ac.bd/news-and-events/news-archive/2026-March/69c2504feed54fd1a62bdd75

🎉 Great news to share!
Our paper titled “Training-Free Layer Selection for Partial Fine-Tuning of Language Models” has been accepted for publication in the Information Sciences journal (Elsevier, Q1 – Computer Science, Information Systems, Percentage Rank: 91.9%, Impact Factor: 6.8, H-index: 243) 🚀📚

✍️ Authors:
Aldrin Kabya Biswas, Md Fahim, Md Tahmid Hasan Fuad, Akm Moshiur Rahman Mazumder, Amin Ahsan Ali, AKM Mahbubur Rahman

In this work, the authors propose a training-free, layer-wise partial fine-tuning approach for language models using cosine similarity between representative tokens across layers 🧠. The method identifies inter-layer relationships through a single forward pass and selectively fine-tunes layers while keeping others frozen.

🔍 The proposed approach achieves competitive performance compared to full fine-tuning, with an average 1.5× training speedup and a 75% reduction in trainable parameters, and outperforms all comparative baselines on 14 out of 16 datasets.

👏 Congratulations to all the authors and collaborators on this excellent achievement!

🏆 Celebrate AI Innovation Talent Hunt 2025! 🤖

Which of our participants designed the winning movie recommendation system? Find out at the ceremony!

Join us for the Prize Giving Ceremony of the AI Innovation Talent Hunt 2025!

We are delighted to invite you to celebrate the remarkable creativity, hard work, and outstanding technical achievements of our talented participants in Artificial Intelligence.

📅Date: December 4, 2025
🕥Time: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
📍Venue: Lecture Gallery of SETS (BC5002)

Your presence will greatly encourage the participants and add honor to this special program.

Organized By: Center for Computational & Data Sciences (CCDS)

Supported By: IEEE Computer Society IUB Student Branch Chapter

Sponsored By: MarriageChime and SimpliSolve LLC (USA)

Register now to book your seat, because they're limited!

🔗 https://forms.gle/1qNuhZrgtf7u27L27

We look forward to honoring the future of AI innovation!

We are thrilled to announce that our paper “R-MMA: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Recurrent Adapters for Few-Shot and Cross-Domain Generalization” has been accepted at WACV 2026, one of the premier conferences in Computer Vision (CORE Rank A). Congratulations to Md Fahim and Mir Sazzat Hossain (Research Assistants, CCDS). 🎉🔥

This work introduces R-MMA, a lightweight and highly parameter-efficient adapter designed to enhance few-shot and cross-domain generalization in Vision-Language Models, such as CLIP. R-MMA aligns and refines frozen encoder features through a unified attention-driven representation, achieving state-of-the-art performance across base-to-novel, cross-dataset, and domain generalization benchmarks.

Congratulations to all co-authors, collaborators, and supervisors 🎊🎊