Hybrid Federated and Split Learning for Privacy Preserving Clinical Prediction and Treatment Optimization

Collaborative clinical decision support is often constrained by governance and privacy rules that prevent pooling patient-level records across institutions. We present a hybrid privacy-preserving framework that combines Federated Learning (FL) and Split Learning (SL) to support decision-oriented healthcare modeling without raw-data sharing. The approach keeps feature-extraction trunks on clients while hosting prediction heads on a coordinating server, enabling shared representation learning and exposing an explicit collaboration boundary where privacy controls can be applied. Rather than assuming distributed training is inherently private, we audit leakage empirically using membership inference on cut-layer representations and study lightweight defenses based on activation clipping and additive Gaussian noise. We evaluate across three public clinical datasets under non-IID client partitions using a unified pipeline and assess performance jointly along four deployment-relevant axes: factual predictive utility, uplift-based ranking under capacity constraints, audited privacy leakage, and communication overhead. Results show that hybrid FL-SL variants achieve competitive predictive performance and decision-facing prioritization behavior relative to standalone FL or SL, while providing a tunable privacy-utility trade-off that can reduce audited leakage without requiring raw-data sharing. Overall, the work positions hybrid FL-SL as a practical design space for privacy-preserving healthcare decision support where utility, leakage risk, and deployment cost must be balanced explicitly.

Human-Centered Explainable AI for Security Enhancement: A Deep Intrusion Detection Framework

The increasing complexity and frequency of cyber-threats demand intrusion detection systems (IDS) that are not only accurate but also interpretable. This paper presented a novel IDS framework that integrated Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to enhance transparency in deep learning models. The framework was evaluated experimentally using the benchmark dataset NSL-KDD, demonstrating superior performance compared to traditional IDS and black-box deep learning models. The proposed approach combined Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for capturing temporal dependencies in traffic sequences. Our deep learning results showed that both CNN and LSTM reached 0.99 for accuracy, whereas LSTM outperformed CNN at macro average precision, recall, and F-1 score. For weighted average precision, recall, and F-1 score, both models scored almost similarly. To ensure interpretability, the XAI model SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) was incorporated, enabling security analysts to understand and validate model decisions. Some notable influential features were srv_serror_rate, dst_host_srv_serror_rate, and serror_rate for both models, as pointed out by SHAP. We also conducted a trust-focused expert survey based on IPIP6 and Big Five personality traits via an interactive UI to evaluate the system's reliability and usability. This work highlighted the potential of combining performance and transparency in cybersecurity solutions and recommends future enhancements through adaptive learning for real-time threat detection.

Bangla MedER: Multi-BERT Ensemble Approach for the Recognition of Bangla Medical Entity

Medical Entity Recognition (MedER) is an essential NLP task for extracting meaningful entities from the medical corpus. Nowadays, MedER-based research outcomes can remarkably contribute to the development of automated systems in the medical sector, ultimately enhancing patient care and outcomes. While extensive research has been conducted on MedER in English, low-resource languages like Bangla remain underexplored. Our work aims to bridge this gap. For Bangla medical entity recognition, this study first examined a number of transformer models, including BERT, DistilBERT, ELECTRA, and RoBERTa. We also propose a novel Multi-BERT Ensemble approach that outperformed all baseline models with the highest accuracy of 89.58%. Notably, it provides an 11.80% accuracy improvement over the single-layer BERT model, demonstrating its effectiveness for this task. A major challenge in MedER for low-resource languages is the lack of annotated datasets. To address this issue, we developed a high-quality dataset tailored for the Bangla MedER task. The dataset was used to evaluate the effectiveness of our model through multiple performance metrics, demonstrating its robustness and applicability. Our findings highlight the potential of Multi-BERT Ensemble models in improving MedER for Bangla and set the foundation for further advancements in low-resource medical NLP.