Acadia Honours Summer Research Award (HSRA)
Congratulations, Rosemary Etu-Efeotor, for being granted the Acadia Honours Summer Research Award (HSRA)! Rosemary joined our CILS lab this summer. She is conducting research on improving early Alzheimer's disease detection using explainable AI and convolutional neural networks applied to MRI data. Her work focuses on developing accurate and transparent AI tools to support healthcare decision-making. Very excited to welcome you to the Lab :).
BEST POSTER AWARD - HASSEN GADACHA
Congratulations to Hassen Gadacha for his best poster award at the IEEE SYSCON conference. His work was on “Explaining 3D CNN Decisions for Alzheimer’s MRI Classification: A SHAP-Based Analysis of Preprocessing Bias”. This work was carried out during his Mitacs Globalink Research Internship at the CILS Lab during the summer 2025.
Canadian AI Conference - Mohamed Khattab
Congratulations to Mohamed Khattab, Master's student at CILS lab, for presenting an extended abstract, "Pure Leveled CKKS for CNN Inference" at the 39th Canadian AI Conference in Vancouver on May 28th.
He formalized where leveled CKKS fails on deep residual networks without bootstrapping, and derived the exact exhaustion bound.
WELCOMING MITACS GRI STUDENTS!
Our MITACS GRI students arrived on campus! Welcome to Acadia University and to the CILS Lab, Yassine Ezzaouia and Ahmed Sabbeh. The students started working on Privacy Preserving ML using Federated Learning and Differential Privacy on medical datasets.
CILS Students Showcase Honours Thesis and Project Research
Here is the work completed by three CILS students this term:
Saif Miskin, co-supervised with Dr. Melanie Coombs from Biology, worked on “AI-based tool for real time peptide cytotoxicity prediction on Breast Cancer cells”
Brendan Toscano, worked on “Machine Learning Evaluation of Generative AI Debugging Feedback Plausibility for Introductory Python Programming”
Mohammod Ehsanul Haque, worked on “A SMOTE-based approach for minority attack detection in intrusion detection systems”
A strong set of projects spanning AI in healthcare, software engineering, and cybersecurity. Thanks to all students for their effort and presentations. We wish you all the best in what comes next :)
CILS Lab at IEEE SYSCON 2026 – Halifax
Proud moment for our CILS lab this week at IEEE SYSCON 2026 in Halifax! Our students showcased some impressive research:
Mohammod Ehsanul Haque: A SMOTE-Based Approach for Minority Attack Detection in Intrusion Detection Systems
Jay Patel: Keras-Based Grammatical Evolution for CNN Architecture Search
Mohamed Khattab: Memory-Efficient Quantization-Aware Optimization for FHE-Based Mammogram Classification
Rosemary Etu-Efeotor alongside Mitacs GRI '25 student Hassen Gadacha: Explaining 3D CNN Decisions for Alzheimer's MRI Classification: A SHAP-Based Analysis of Preprocessing Bias.
CILS LAB DAY - JANUARY 2026
CILS Lab Day on January 22 featured six engaging student presentations showcasing innovative research in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, healthcare, and machine learning. Topics included Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning, AI-powered Apple Breeding, MRI-based early Dementia detection, AI-driven Intrusion Detection Systems, LLM hint generation assessment, and Interpretability-Oriented Neural Architecture Search. The event provided an excellent opportunity for students to share their ongoing work and foster research discussions within the CILS community