On Thursday 17/11/2022, the master's thesis of the student (Lina Aqil Salman), majoring in (Computer Engineering), was discussed in the Discussion Hall (Hall No. 9) in the Control and Systems Engineering Department. The thesis title is

“Cybersecurity of Medical Image in Telemedicine System”.

The discussion committee consisted of:

1- Prof. Dr. Azad Raheem Kareem / Chairman

2- Asst. Prof. Dr. Alaa Mohamed Abdel-Hadi / Member

3- Asst. Prof. Dr. Ali Majeed Mahmoud / Member

4- Prof. Dr. Ashwaq Talib Hashem / Member and Supervisor

5- Asst. Prof. Ahmed Mudher Hassan / Member and Supervisor

Recently, telemedicine has become remarkably important due to the increased deployment and development of digital technologies which has led to the increased popularity of telemedicine usage. In this work, the proposed system employs hybrid image processing techniques to quarantine nearby organs and other tissues from the brain to improve the localization of the affected region. The predetermined region of the original image data is encrypted to reduce the encryption/decryption time and the computational complexity of processing the huge image data. The image processing techniques are used to divide the image into a region of interest (ROI) and a region of non-interest (RONI), and then the more important components of the ROI and Electronic Patient Record (EPR) are encrypted using a polynomial-based secret image sharing (SIS) and a chaotic map system. The remaining regions (the RONI) are compressed using a quad-tree technique for maintaining storage space and confidential transmission of medical image data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique can be used to protect against many more aggressive and ordered signal processing distortions. Furthermore, the proposed approach results in a high image quality regarding robustness in the experimental findings. Security analysis shows the original medical image and the encrypted image. Moreover, the encryption approach has a large enough key space to counteract attacks like brute force. The discussion was attended by the assistant head of the department for scientific affairs and postgraduate studies (Prof. Dr. Muhammad Yousef Hassan) and the assistant head of the department for administrative affairs (Prof. Dr. Hazem Ibrahim Ali). On this occasion, we congratulate the student (Lina Aqil Salman) for obtaining the master's degree and we wish her continued success.

The discussion of the master's thesis of the student (Zeena Abdullah Hammadi), majoring in (Computer Engineering), was conducted on Sunday, 10/23/20222, in the discussion hall (Hall No. 9) in the Department of Control and Systems Engineering. The thesis title is

“Comparison and Performance Enhancement of a Chaotic Interleaver for the Turbo Encoder Circuit”.

This discussion committee consisted of:

1- Prof. Dr. Moayad Sadiq Krouk / Chairman

2- Asst. Prof. Dr. Muhammad Emad Abdel Sattar / Member

3- Lect. Dr. Amir Musa Thuwaini / Member

4- Lect. Dr. Qusay Fadel Hassan / Member and Supervisor Nowadays,

many communication systems need to send data to each other to share information. The data transmission process seems to have errors due to a variety of factors such as interference, signal, and noise. These errors come from several sources and are called channel errors. Channel coding is used to protect data from these errors by adding certain bits to the bits of the transmitted data. The extra bits are used to detect and repair channel problems on the receiving side. Unfortunately errors in the channel usually occur in a graceful manner, which makes it difficult for the channel coding algorithms to track and correct them. Interleaving is used to scramble the data so that the effect of the error burst is minimized. There are many types of interleaving that show effective performance in correcting 1-D errors, but when a 2-D error type occurs, it is observed that interleaving of the chaotic type is the most efficient. The goal of the thesis is to design a single interleaver circuit that can work with different number of bits. So the system, which is designed, has more than one entry of bits and this is called multi-bit and the system is referred to as multi-standard. The purpose of this system is to build a universal interleaver architecture that works for 8, 16, and 24 bits rather than refactoring three systems. These arrays represent interleaver address index generators. Therefore, rather than having each size individually in its own design, this new design allows the system to easily handle more than one size of the matrix input to the system, which is referred to as a multi-criteria system. Messy interleaving (interleaving and deinterleaver) was generated using MATLAB and Simulink software. Simulink was implemented using the Xilinx ISE 14.7 design suite with MATLAB designing the system in this way. On this occasion, we congratulate the postgraduate student (Zeena Abdullah Hammadi) and we wish her continued success.  

The master's thesis of the student Zahra Ali Wahid, specialized in Mechatronics Engineering, was discussed on Monday 24/10/2022 at Hall No. 9 in the Department of Control and Systems Engineering. Her research was entitled: Adaptive Control of Exoskeleton System The discussion committee consisted of:

1. Prof. Dr. Salim Khalifa Kazim / Chairman.

2. Asst. Prof. Shaimaa Mahmoud Mahdi / Member.

3. Asst. Prof. Dr. Iyad Qasim Hussein / Member.

4. Prof. Dr. Amjad Jalil Hamidi / Member and Supervisor

Physiotherapy exoskeleton devices have been recently developed to assist people in rehabilitation of weak movement in their limbs and to replace the use of Physiotherapist. This study addresses the control motion for types of exoskeleton systems dedicated for movement of lower limb (knee-limb) and upper limb (elbow-limb) to assist in their rehabilitation. Three control schemes have been designed for each exoskeleton limb device. These are Sliding Mode Control (SMC), Backstepping Sliding Mode Control (BSMC), and Adaptive Backstepping Sliding Mode Control (ABSMC). The latter controller has been developed to cope with uncertainties in device parameters. The simulation results showed that the three proposed microcontrollers can successfully perform good trajectory tracking. However, the controlled system based on BSMC has better dynamic performance than that based on SMC by 43.0693% for control. Moreover, ABSMC has better performance than SMC and BSMC by 76.3419%, the ABSMC could keep the estimated coefficients bounded, which ensures the stability of the controlled system uncertainties of system parameters. On this occasion, we congratulate the student Zahra Ali Wahid and wish her continued success.

Dr. Zeina Khalil Abdul Amir, a lecturer in the Department of Control and Systems Engineering, gave a lecture entitled (The Effect of Fear, Antipredator, Refuge, Age Stages and Disease on the Dynamics of Some Ecosystems) related to her dissertation for which she received a doctorate from the University of Baghdad / Faculty of Science. Three mathematical models were proposed for the study. The first model consists of a food chain representing a prey and predator model and the effect of anti-predation behavior which appears due to the prey fear of the predator with a predation function of (Holling-type-II) between the prey and the first predator and the function (Lotka-Volterra) between the first predator and the second predator. A refuge for prey and a harvest for the first predator were also proposed. In the second model, an epidemiological ecosystem with age stages, harvesting and shelter for prey only was proposed. The disease is of the type (SIS) that spreads only among young prey through contact infection and from an external source. Transmission of infectious disease between prey was prescribed in writing and the predation function was of the type (Lotka-Volterra). The third model includes two preys and one predator with age stages which divided the predator into young predators and a mature predator since the young predators are unable to reproduce and hunt. The mature predator preys on the first prey with a predation function of the type (Holling-II) and preys on the second prey with a predation of the type (Holling-IV). Anti-predation behavior and collective defense factors were formulated. Numerical simulation was used to study the overall DNAM of all the models proposed above with two sets of parameter values and two sets of different elementary points for each of the three systems not only to confirm the theoretical results obtained, but also to show the variance effects of each parameter on the proposed model. Results:

• The first model: death, harvest and fear affect the stability of this ecosystem.

• The second model: the rate of growth, harvest, death and the amount of transformation of food have a direct impact on the stability of this ecosystem.

• The third model: Growth rate, predation rate, satiety and death rate have an important impact on the stability of this system. The seminar was attended by the Assistant Head of the Department for Scientific Affairs and Graduate Studies Prof. Dr. Mohamed Yousef Hassan.