New Engineering MSIS Faculty at Northeastern’s Miami Campus
Ahmed Abdeen Hamed joined the College of Engineering in fall 2024 as an assistant teaching professor for the MS in information systems program at the Miami campus. He is an expert in biomedical research and data science. His research on “Detection of ChatGPT Fake Science With the XFakeSci Learning Algorithm” was recently published in Nature Scientific Reports.
With more than 20 years of experience in biomedical research as well as data science, and data mining and analysis, Ahmed Abdeen Hamed has joined the College of Engineering as an assistant teaching professor for the MS in information systems program. He is based at Northeastern’s newest campus in Miami.
Hamed is the first College of Engineering teaching faculty member at the Miami campus. He is currently teaching Application Engineering and Development and Data Science Engineering Methods and Tools. He also will teach Theory and Practical Applications of AI Generative Modeling in the spring semester.
Hamed’s research has focused on drug repositioning by repurposing or combining existing drugs to address health crises like COVID-19 and breast cancer. More recently, however, he has developed AI algorithms to bring efficiencies to online scientific literature searches, while also flagging potentially false information. He created xFakeSci, a novel learning algorithm able to distinguish between ChatGPT-generated articles and authentic scientific papers. His algorithm was published in a paper, “Detection of ChatGPT Fake Science With the XFakeSci Learning Algorithm,” in Nature Scientific Reports in July 2024.
XFakeSci springs from his experiences while researching potential drug treatments for COVID-19, which he completed while working as an assistant professor of AI and data science at Norwich University. As he conducted online searches for scientific information, he noticed a pattern that concerned him.
“I was seeing many papers being retracted,” Hamed says. “This, to me, was an alert. Even a little amount of misinformation could steer a researcher in the wrong direction.”
He decided to explore methods for flagging inauthentic online research. The advent of ChatGPT in 2022 made his pursuit all the more urgent, as the chatbot appeared to easily produce scientific literature that appeared authentic. Hamed’s algorithm is trained to spot inaccuracies and is nearly twice as successful as more common data-mining techniques. Currently, it can detect up to 94% of inauthentic information.
“The important element to address was how ChatGPT is going to affect the mining and discoveries of literature for researchers who are wholeheartedly depending on authenticity,” Hamed says.
Despite encountering fake information online, Hamed’s research on COVID-19 drug treatments resulted in three papers, “The Anatomy of the SARS-CoV-2 Biomedical Literature: Introducing the CovidX Network Algorithm for Drug Repurposing Recommendation,” published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research; “COVID-19 Drug Repurposing: A Network-Based Framework for Exploring Biomedical Literature and Clinical Trials for Possible Treatments,” which appeared in Pharmaceutics; and “Mining Literature-Based Knowledge Graph for Predicting Combination Therapeutics: A COVID-19 Use Case,” presented at the IEEE International Conference on Knowledge Graph.
He also applied drug repositioning approaches discovered during this work to new research on drug treatments for breast cancer. In November 2024, he will present a paper, “Accelerating Complex Disease Treatment Through Network Medicine and GenAI: A Case Study on Drug Repurposing for Breast Cancer” at the IEEE International Conference on Medical Artificial Intelligence in China. Another paper is in the peer-review process.
Since 2000, Hamed has worked in both industry and academia, beginning his career at AT&T Canada. He has worked as a researcher at International Institute of Molecular Mechanisms and Machines PAS (iMol) in Poland and held teaching or research positions at Arizona State University, Indiana University, the University of Vermont, and Binghamton University.
In 2016, he was a scientific knowledge engineer at Merck, and was promoted to a senior applied computer scientist. During that time, he developed an algorithm related to online research that was patented as “Systems and Methods for Providing a Specificity-based Network Analysis Algorithm for Searching and Ranking Therapeutic Molecules.”
While he enjoyed his time at Merck, he wanted to conduct research more broadly and returned to academia.
Hamed says he welcomed the opportunity to join the College of Engineering, noting that “I have always admired Northeastern,” and has kept up with the university’s growth because of “strong connections to several colleagues.”
“It was always on my radar,” Hamed adds.
As Hamed moves forward in the fall semester at the Miami campus, he is working to secure grant funding that would enable him to support student researchers, including PhD students.