Under joint supervision with Julich Institute (Forschungszentrum Jülich) in Germany

Student Farah Mohammad Abdullatif, who is a student in the Master in Data Sciences and Business Analytics in the Faculty of Graduate Studies, defended her thesis entitled:

“AConvolutional Neural Network Framework for the Identification ofIndividual Neuronal Biomarkers based on Functional Brain Connectivityusing Magnetoencephalography

Her thesis had a joint supervision between Arab American University represented by Dr. Ahmad Hasasneh from the Faculty of Graduated Studies, the Natural Sciences, Engineering and IT Department and Julich Institute in Germany represented by Dr. Jürgen Damrs from the Neurosciences and Medicine Department. Her thesis is about using modern topics in artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze and classify human brain signals.

The student focused on building and designing a system that works to determine the ID of the person based on the human brain prints, using the supervised deep machine learning model that depends on the Siamese Neural Networks that works with the Convolutional Neural Networks in order toextract the features needed for the classification process.

The study explained how the neural scientists were able to defined many individuals through what is known as the brain prints depending on the functional and structural connectivity of the brain, the researcher used the Magnetoencephalography (MEG) that was processed in Julich Institute in Germany as she visited the institute to complete this task and then she trained the supervised machine learning algorithm and got results of over 97% in accuracy in determining the ID of the person. She explained that the results of the deep machine learning model results are better than the results of algorithm of Support Vector Machine.

This study is the first of its kind that uses the deep machine learning model algorithms to identify individual neurobiological markers, based on functional brain connectivity and using MEG.

At the end of the defence, the committee of the two supervisors, Dr. Ahmad Hasasneh- from Arab American University and Dr. Jürgen Damrs- from Julich Institute in Germany, the internal examiner Dr. Majdi Odeh- from Arab American University and the external examiner Dr. Labib Arfeh- from Palestine Ahliya University decided to grant the student the Master’s degree.

The researcher Farah Abdullatif got a PhD scholarship among PGSB and will be joining her studies soon to continue her researches in this field and the supervision on her PhD dissertation will be joint between Arab American University and Julich Institute.