Altered fingerprint recognition (AFR) is challenging for biometric verification in applications such as border control, forensics, and fiscal admission. Adversaries can deliberately modify ridge patterns to evade detection, so robust recognition of altered prints is essential. We present DeepAFRNet, a deep learning recognition model that matches and recognizes distorted fingerprint samples. The approach uses a VGG16 backbone to extract high-dimensional features and cosine similarity to compare embeddings. We evaluate on the SOCOFing Real-Altered subset with three difficulty levels (Easy, Medium, Hard). With strict thresholds, DeepAFRNet achieves accuracies of 96.7 percent, 98.76 percent, and 99.54 percent for the three levels. A threshold-sensitivity study shows that relaxing the threshold from 0.92 to 0.72 sharply degrades accuracy to 7.86 percent, 27.05 percent, and 29.51 percent, underscoring the importance of threshold selection in biometric systems. By using real altered samples and reporting per-level metrics, DeepAFRNet addresses limitations of prior work based on synthetic alterations or limited verification protocols, and indicates readiness for real-world deployments where both security and recognition resilience are critical.

Iva Popova Hamza A. A. Gardi ETIT - KIT, Germany IIIT at ETIT - KIT, Germany Abstract Credit card fraud remains a significant challenge due to class imbalance and fraudsters mimicking legitimate behavior. This study evaluates five machine learning models - Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, K - Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Multi - Lay er Perceptron (MLP) on a real - world dataset using undersampling, SMOTE, and a hybrid approach. Our models are evaluated on the original imbalanced test set to better reflect real - world performance. Results show that the hybrid method achieves the best bala nce between recall and precision, especially improving MLP and KNN performance. I ntroduction Financial fraud is a significant issue that has been continuously increasing over the past few years due to the ever - growing volume of online transactions conduc ted with credit cards. Credit card fraud (CCF) refers to a type of fraud in which an individual other than the cardholder unlawfully conducts transactions using a card that is stolen, lost, or otherwise misused [ 1 ]. CCF has resulted in billions of dollars in losses for banks and other online payment platforms. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), there were 449,076 reports of CCF in 2024, representing a 7.8% increase from the previous year [ 2 ]. Given this trend, new methods must be employed to c apture patterns and dependencies in the data.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract: With the widespread use of the internet, there is an increasing need to ensure the security and privacy of transmitted data. This has led to an intensified focus on the study of video steganography, which is a technique that hides data within a video cover to avoid detection. The effectiveness of any steganography method depends on its ability to embed data without altering the original video's quality while maintaining high efficiency. This paper proposes a new method to video steganography, which involves utilizing a Genetic Algorithm (GA) for identifying the Region of Interest (ROI) in the cover video. The ROI is the area in the video that is the most suitable for data embedding. The secret data is encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which is a widely accepted encryption standard, before being embedded into the cover video, utilizing up to 10% of the cover video. This process ensures the security and confidentiality of the embedded data. The performance metrics for assessing the proposed method are the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and the encoding and decoding time. The results show that the proposed method has a high embedding capacity and efficiency, with a PSNR ranging between 64 and 75 dBs, which indicates that the embedded data is almost indistinguishable from the original video.

Speech-to-text (STT) systems have a wide range of applications. They are available in many languages, albeit at different quality levels. Although Kurdish is considered a less-resourced language from a processing perspective, SST is available for some of the Kurdish dialects, for instance, Sorani (Central Kurdish). However, that is not applied to other Kurdish dialects, Badini and Hawrami, for example. This research is an attempt to address this gap. Bandin, approximately, has two million speakers, and STT systems can help their community use mobile and computer-based technologies while giving their dialect more global visibility. We aim to create a language model based on Badini's speech and evaluate its performance. To cover a conversational aspect, have a proper confidence level of grammatical accuracy, and ready transcriptions, we chose Badini kids' stories, eight books including 78 stories, as the textual input. Six narrators narrated the books, which resulted in approximately 17 hours of recording. We cleaned, segmented, and tokenized the input. The preprocessing produced nearly 15 hours of speech, including 19193 segments and 25221 words. We used Wav2Vec2-Large-XLSR-53 and Whisper-small to develop the language models. The experiments indicate that the transcriptions process based on the Wav2Vec2-Large-XLSR-53 model provides a significantly more accurate and readable output than the Whisper-small model, with 90.38% and 65.45% readability, and 82.67% and 53.17% accuracy, respectively.

Gender classification has emerged as a crucial aspect in various fields, including security, human-machine interaction, surveillance, and advertising. Nonetheless, the accuracy of this classification can be influenced by factors such as cosmetics and disguise. Consequently, our study is dedicated to addressing this concern by concentrating on gender classification using color images of the periocular region. The periocular region refers to the area surrounding the eye, including the eyelids, eyebrows, and the region between them. It contains valuable visual cues that can be used to extract key features for gender classification. This paper introduces a sophisticated Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that utilizes color image databases to evaluate the effectiveness of the periocular region for gender classification. To validate the model's performance, we conducted tests on two eye datasets, namely CVBL and (Female and Male). The recommended architecture achieved an outstanding accuracy of 99% on the previously unused CVBL dataset while attaining a commendable accuracy of 96% with a small number of learnable parameters (7,235,089) on the (Female and Male) dataset. To ascertain the effectiveness of our proposed model for gender classification using the periocular region, we evaluated its performance through an extensive range of metrics and compared it with other state-of-the-art approaches. The results unequivocally demonstrate the efficacy of our model, thereby suggesting its potential for practical application in domains such as security and surveillance.

Identifying influential nodes in complex networks is a critical task with a wide range of applications across different domains. However, existing approaches often face trade-offs between accuracy and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose 1D-CGS, a lightweight and effective hybrid model that integrates the speed of one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-CNN) with the topological representation power of GraphSAGE for efficient node ranking. The model uses a lightweight input representation built on two straightforward and significant topological features: node degree and average neighbor degree. These features are processed through 1D convolutions to extract local patterns, followed by GraphSAGE layers to aggregate neighborhood information. Experimental evaluations on twelve real world networks demonstrate that 1D-CGS significantly outperforms traditional centrality measures and recent deep learning models in ranking accuracy, while operating in very fast runtime. The proposed model achieves an average improvement of 4.73% in Kendall's Tau correlation and 7.67% in Jaccard Similarity over the best performing deep learning baselines. It also achieves an average Monotonicity Index (MI) score 0.99 and produces near perfect rank distributions, indicating highly unique and discriminative rankings. Furthermore, all experiments confirm that 1D-CGS operates in a highly reasonable time, running significantly faster than existing deep learning methods, making it suitable for large scale applications.

While Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models have been widely used for diabetes prediction, the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for structured numerical data is still not well explored. In this study, we test the effectiveness of LLMs in predicting diabetes using zero-shot, one-shot, and three-shot prompting methods. We conduct an empirical analysis using the Pima Indian Diabetes Database (PIDD). We evaluate six LLMs, including four open-source models: Gemma-2-27B, Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Llama-3.2-2B. We also test two proprietary models: GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2.0. In addition, we compare their performance with three traditional machine learning models: Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We use accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score as evaluation metrics. Our results show that proprietary LLMs perform better than open-source ones, with GPT-4o and Gemma-2-27B achieving the highest accuracy in few-shot settings. Notably, Gemma-2-27B also outperforms the traditional ML models in terms of F1-score. However, there are still issues such as performance variation across prompting strategies and the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. This study shows that LLMs can be useful for medical prediction tasks and encourages future work on prompt engineering and hybrid approaches to improve healthcare predictions.

The aim of this study is to assess the impact of information technology (IT) on university graduates in terms of employment development, which will aid in economic issues. This study uses a descriptive research methodology and a quantitative approach to understand variables. The focus of this study is to ascertain how graduates of Kurdistan regional universities might use IT to secure employment and significantly contribute to the nation's economic revival. The sample size was established by the use of judgmental sampling procedure and consisted of 314 people. The researcher prepared the questionnaire to collect data, and then SPSS statistical software, version 22, and Excel 2010 were used to modify, compile, and tabulate the results. The study's outcome showed that information technology is incredibly inventive, has a promising future, and makes life much easier for everyone. It also proved that a deep academic understanding of information technology and its constituent parts helps graduates of Kurdistan Regional University find suitable careers. More importantly, though, anyone looking for work or a means of support will find great benefit from possessing credentials and understanding of IT. The study's final finding was that information technology has actively advanced the country's economy. Not only is IT helping to boost youth employment, but it is also turning into a worthwhile investment for economic growth.

Hawrami, a dialect of Kurdish, is classified as an endangered language as it suffers from the scarcity of data and the gradual loss of its speakers. Natural Language Processing projects can be used to partially compensate for data availability for endangered languages/dialects through a variety of approaches, such as machine translation, language model building, and corpora development. Similarly, NLP projects such as text classification are in language documentation. Several text classification studies have been conducted for Kurdish, but they were mainly dedicated to two particular dialects: Sorani (Central Kurdish) and Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish). In this paper, we introduce various text classification models using a dataset of 6,854 articles in Hawrami labeled into 15 categories by two native speakers. We use K-nearest Neighbor (KNN), Linear Support Vector Machine (Linear SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), and Decision Tree (DT) to evaluate how well those methods perform the classification task. The results indicate that the Linear SVM achieves a 96% of accuracy and outperforms the other approaches.

Data pre-processing is a significant step in machine learning to improve the performance of the model and decreases the running time. This might include dealing with missing values, outliers detection and removing, data augmentation, dimensionality reduction, data normalization and handling the impact of confounding variables. Although it is found the steps improve the accuracy of the model, but they might hinder the explainability of the model if they are not carefully considered especially in medicine. They might block new findings when missing values and outliers removal are implemented inappropriately. In addition, they might make the model unfair against all the groups in the model when making the decision. Moreover, they turn the features into unitless and clinically meaningless and consequently not explainable. This paper discusses the common steps of the data preprocessing in machine learning and their impacts on the explainability and interpretability of the model. Finally, the paper discusses some possible solutions that improve the performance of the model while not decreasing its explainability.