Portrait of Benjamin Fung

Benjamin Fung

Associate Academic Member
Associate Professor, McGill University, School of Information Studies
McGill University University
Research Topics
AI for Software Engineering
Applied Machine Learning
Cybersecurity
Data Mining
Deep Learning
Information Retrieval
Misinformation
Privacy
Representation Learning
Website
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Biography

Benjamin Fung is a Canada Research Chair in Data Mining for Cybersecurity, as well as a full professor at the School of Information Studies and associate member of the School of Computer Science, McGill University.

Fung serves as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering and Sustainable Cities and Society. He received his PhD in computing science from Simon Fraser University in 2007.

Dr. Fung has over 150 refereed publications to his credit and and more than 14,000 citations (h-index 57) spanning the fields of data mining, machine learning, privacy, cybersecurity and building engineering. His findings in the fields of data mining for crime investigations and authorship analysis have been reported by the media worldwide.

Publications

Factors influencing consumer choice: a study of apparel and sustainable cues from Canadian and Indian consumers’ perspectives
Osmud Rahman
Benjamin Fung
Devender Kharb
2021-03-19
International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education (published)
doi.org
Enabling Technologies for Energy Cloud
Thar Intisar Baker
Zehua Guo
Ali Ismail Ali Awad
Shangguang Wang
Benjamin Fung
2021-03-05
J. Parallel Distributed Comput. (published)
doi.org
Enabling Secure Trustworthiness Assessment and Privacy Protection in Integrating Data for Trading Person-Specific Information
Rashid Hussain Khokhar
Farkhund Iqbal
Benjamin Fung
Jamal Bentahar
With increasing adoption of cloud services in the e-market, collaboration between stakeholders is easier than ever. Consumer stakeholders de… (see more)mand data from various sources to analyze trends and improve customer services. Data-as-a-service enables data integration to serve the demands of data consumers. However, the data must be of good quality and trustful for accurate analysis and effective decision making. In addition, a data custodian or provider must conform to privacy policies to avoid potential penalties for privacy breaches. To address these challenges, we propose a twofold solution: 1) we present the first information entropy-based trust computation algorithm, IEB_Trust, that allows a semitrusted arbitrator to detect the covert behavior of a dishonest data provider and chooses the qualified providers for a data mashup and 2) we incorporate the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) auction mechanism for the valuation of data providers’ attributes into the data mashup process. Experiments on real-life data demonstrate the robustness of our approach in restricting dishonest providers from participation in the data mashup and improving the efficiency in comparison to provenance-based approaches. Furthermore, we derive the monetary shares for the chosen providers from their information utility and trust scores over the differentially private release of the integrated dataset under their joint privacy requirements.
2021-02-01
IEEE transactions on engineering management (published)
doi.org
Automatic Fall Risk Detection based on Imbalanced Data
Yen-Hung Liu
Ye Liu
Patrick C. K. Hung
Farkhund Iqbal
Benjamin Fung
In recent years, the declining birthrate and aging population have gradually brought countries into an ageing society. Regarding accidents t… (see more)hat occur amongst the elderly, falls are an essential problem that quickly causes indirect physical loss. In this paper, we propose a pose estimation-based fall detection algorithm to detect fall risks. We use body ratio, acceleration and deflection as key features instead of using the body keypoints coordinates. Since fall data is rare in real-world situations, we train and evaluate our approach in a highly imbalanced data setting. We assess not only different imbalanced data handling methods but also different machine learning algorithms. After oversampling on our training data, the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm achieves the best performance. The F1 scores for three different classes, Normal, Fall, and Lying, are 1.00, 0.85 and 0.96, which is comparable to previous research. The experiment shows that our approach is more interpretable with the key feature from skeleton information. Moreover, it can apply in multi-people scenarios and has robustness on medium occlusion.
2021-01-01
IEEE Access (published)
doi.org
Image Dehazing in Disproportionate Haze Distributions
Shih-Chia Huang
Da-Wei Jaw
Wenli Li
Zhihui Lu
Sy-Yen Kuo
Benjamin Fung
Bo-Hao Chen
Thanisa Numnonda
Haze removal techniques employed to increase the visibility level of an image play an important role in many vision-based systems. Several t… (see more)raditional dark channel prior-based methods have been proposed to remove haze formation and thereby enhance the robustness of these systems. However, when the captured images contain disproportionate haze distributions, these methods usually fail to attain effective restoration in the restored image. Specifically, disproportionate haze distribution in an image means that the background region possesses heavy haze density and the foreground region possesses little haze density. This phenomenon usually occurs in a hazy image with a deep depth of field. In response, a novel hybrid transmission map-based haze removal method that specifically targets this situation is proposed in this work to achieve clear visibility restoration and effective information maintenance. Experimental results via both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of performing with higher efficacy when compared with other state-of-the-art methods, in respect to both background regions and foreground regions of restored test images captured in real-world environments.
2021-01-01
IEEE Access (published)
doi.org
A Novel and Dedicated Machine Learning Model for Malware Classification
Miles Q. Li
Benjamin Fung
Philippe Charland
Steven H. H. Ding
: Malicious executables are comprised of functions that can be represented in assembly code. In the assembly code mining literature, many so… (see more)ftware reverse engineering tools have been created to disassemble executables, search function clones, and find vulnerabilities, among others. The development of a machine learning-based malware classification model that can simultaneously achieve excellent classification performance and provide insightful interpretation for the classification results remains to be a hot research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel and dedicated machine learning model for the research problem of malware classification. Our proposed model generates assembly code function clusters based on function representation learning and provides excellent interpretability for the classification results. It does not require a large or balanced dataset to train which meets the situation of real-life scenarios. Experiments show that our proposed approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art malware classification models and provides meaningful interpretation of classification results.
2021-01-01
International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (published)
doi.org
A Novel Neural Network-Based Malware Severity Classification System
Miles Q. Li
Benjamin Fung
2021-01-01
International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (published)
doi.org
A Novel Neural Network-Based Malware Severity Classification System
Miles Q. Li
Benjamin Fung
2021-01-01
International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (published)
doi.org
The Topic Confusion Task: A Novel Scenario for Authorship Attribution
Malik H. Altakrori
Jackie Cheung
Benjamin Fung
Authorship attribution is the problem of identifying the most plausible author of an anonymous text from a set of candidate authors. Researc… (see more)hers have investigated same-topic and cross-topic scenarios of authorship attribution, which differ according to whether unseen topics are used in the testing phase. However, neither scenario allows us to explain whether errors are caused by failure to capture authorship style, by the topic shift or by other factors. Motivated by this, we propose the topic confusion task, where we switch the author-topic config-uration between training and testing set. This setup allows us to probe errors in the attribution process. We investigate the accuracy and two error measures: one caused by the models’ confusion by the switch because the features capture the topics, and one caused by the features’ inability to capture the writing styles, leading to weaker models. By evaluating different features, we show that stylometric features with part-of-speech tags are less susceptible to topic variations and can increase the accuracy of the attribution process. We further show that combining them with word-level n - grams can outperform the state-of-the-art technique in the cross-topic scenario. Finally, we show that pretrained language models such as BERT and RoBERTa perform poorly on this task, and are outperformed by simple n -gram features.
2021-01-01
arXiv.org (preprint)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Toward Tweet-Mining Framework for Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information and Reporting
Farkhund Iqbal
Rabia Batool
Benjamin Fung
Saiqa Aleem
Ahmed Abbasi
Abdul Rehman Javed
The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research… (see more) has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams synthesizes event-specific information, e.g., a terrorist attack, and alerts law enforcement, emergency services, and media outlets. Specifically, the proposed framework, Tweet-to-Act (T2A), employs word embedding to transform tweets into a vector space model and then utilizes the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) to cluster tweets for the identification of incidents. To extract reliable and valuable information from a large dataset of short and informal tweets, the proposed framework employs sequence labeling with bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory based Recurrent Neural Networks (bLSTM-RNN). Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed framework, T2A, outperforms other state-of-the-art methods that use vector space modeling and distance calculation techniques, e.g., Euclidean and Cosine distance. T2A achieves an accuracy of 96% and an F1-score of 86.2% on real-life datasets.
2021-01-01
IEEE Access (published)
doi.org
Learning Inter-Modal Correspondence and Phenotypes From Multi-Modal Electronic Health Records
Kejing Yin
William K. Cheung
Benjamin Fung
Jonathan Poon
Non-negative tensor factorization has been shown a practical solution to automatically discover phenotypes from the electronic health record… (see more)s (EHR) with minimal human supervision. Such methods generally require an input tensor describing the inter-modal interactions to be pre-established; however, the correspondence between different modalities (e.g., correspondence between medications and diagnoses) can often be missing in practice. Although heuristic methods can be applied to estimate them, they inevitably introduce errors, and leads to sub-optimal phenotype quality. This is particularly important for patients with complex health conditions (e.g., in critical care) as multiple diagnoses and medications are simultaneously present in the records. To alleviate this problem and discover phenotypes from EHR with unobserved inter-modal correspondence, we propose the collective hidden interaction tensor factorization (cHITF) to infer the correspondence between multiple modalities jointly with the phenotype discovery. We assume that the observed matrix for each modality is marginalization of the unobserved inter-modal correspondence, which are reconstructed by maximizing the likelihood of the observed matrices. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world MIMIC-III dataset demonstrate that cHITF effectively infers clinically meaningful inter-modal correspondence, discovers phenotypes that are more clinically relevant and diverse, and achieves better predictive performance compared with a number of state-of-the-art computational phenotyping models.
2020-11-12
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Trends and Applications in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
Lida Rashidi
Benjamin Fung
Can Wang
2018-01-01
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (published)
doi.org