Can CNNs Accurately Classify Human Emotions? A Deep-Learning Facial Expression Recognition Study

Emotional Artificial Intelligences are currently one of the most anticipated developments of AI. If successful, these AIs will be classified as one of the most complex, intelligent nonhuman entities as they will possess sentience, the primary factor that distinguishes living humans and mechanical machines. For AIs to be classified as "emotional," they should be able to empathize with others and classify their emotions because without such abilities they cannot normally interact with humans. This study investigates the CNN model's ability to recognize and classify human facial expressions (positive, neutral, negative). The CNN model made for this study is programmed in Python and trained with preprocessed data from the Chicago Face Database. The model is intentionally designed with less complexity to further investigate its ability. We hypothesized that the model will perform better than chance (33.3%) in classifying each emotion class of input data. The model accuracy was tested with novel images. Accuracy was summarized in a percentage report, comparative plot, and confusion matrix. Results of this study supported the hypothesis as the model had 75% accuracy over 10,000 images (data), highlighting the possibility of AIs that accurately analyze human emotions and the prospect of viable Emotional AIs.

A Novel Supervised Deep Learning Solution to Detect Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Edge Systems using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

Cybersecurity attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and pose a growing threat to individuals, and private and public sectors. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are one of the most harmful of these threats in today's internet, disrupting the availability of essential services. This project presents a novel deep learning-based approach for detecting DDoS attacks in network traffic using the industry-recognized DDoS evaluation dataset from the University of New Brunswick, which contains packet captures from real-time DDoS attacks, creating a broader and more applicable model for the real world. The algorithm employed in this study exploits the properties of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and common deep learning algorithms to build a novel mitigation technique that classifies benign and malicious traffic. The proposed model preprocesses the data by extracting packet flows and normalizing them to a fixed length which is fed into a custom architecture containing layers regulating node dropout, normalization, and a sigmoid activation function to out a binary classification. This allows for the model to process the flows effectively and look for the nodes that contribute to DDoS attacks while dropping the "noise" or the distractors. The results of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in detecting DDOS attacks, achieving an accuracy of .9883 on 2000 unseen flows in network traffic, while being scalable for any network environment.