The 100 most-cited articles in IEEE Access, 2020

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on education. Premised on a narrative and framework for assessing AI identified from a preliminary analysis, the scope of the study was limited to the application and effects of AI in administration, instruction, and learning. A qualitative research approach, leveraging the use of literature review as a research design and approach was used and effectively facilitated the realization of the study purpose. Artificial intelligence is a field of study and the resulting innovations and developments that have culminated in computers, machines, and other artifacts having human-like intelligence characterized by cognitive abilities, learning, adaptability, and decision-making capabilities. The study ascertained that AI has extensively been adopted and used in education, particularly by education institutions, in different forms. AI initially took the form of computer and computer related technologies, transitioning to web-based and online intelligent education systems, and ultimately with the use of embedded…

Digital Twin technology is an emerging concept that has become the centre of attention for industry and, in more recent years, academia. The advancements in industry 4.0 concepts have facilitated its growth, particularly in the manufacturing industry. The Digital Twin is defined extensively but is best described as the effortless integration of data between a physical and virtual machine in either direction. The challenges, applications, and enabling technologies for Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and Digital Twins are presented. A review of publications relating to Digital Twins is performed, producing a categorical review of recent papers. The review has categorised them by research areas: manufacturing, healthcare and smart cities, discussing a range of papers that reflect these areas and the current state of research. The paper provides an assessment of the enabling technologies, challenges and open research for Digital Twins.

Python has become the programming language of choice for research and industry projects related to data science, machine learning, and deep learning. Since optimization is an inherent part of these research fields, more optimization related frameworks have arisen in the past few years. Only a few of them support optimization of multiple conflicting objectives at a time, but do not provide comprehensive tools for a complete multi-objective optimization task. To address this issue, we have developed pymoo, a multi-objective optimization framework in Python. We provide a guide to getting started with our framework by demonstrating the implementation of an exemplary constrained multi-objective optimization scenario. Moreover, we give a high-level overview of the architecture of pymoo to show its capabilities followed by an explanation of each module and its corresponding sub-modules. The implementations in our framework are customizable and algorithms can be modified/extended by supplying custom operators. Moreover, a variety of single, multi- and many-objective test problems are…

The k-means algorithm is generally the most known and used clustering method. There are various extensions of k-means to be proposed in the literature. Although it is an unsupervised learning to clustering in pattern recognition and machine learning, the k-means algorithm and its extensions are always influenced by initializations with a necessary number of clusters a priori. That is, the k-means algorithm is not exactly an unsupervised clustering method. In this paper, we construct an unsupervised learning schema for the k-means algorithm so that it is free of initializations without parameter selection and can also simultaneously find an optimal number of clusters. That is, we propose a novel unsupervised k-means (U-k-means) clustering algorithm with automatically finding an optimal number of clusters without giving any initialization and parameter selection. The computational complexity of the proposed U-k-means clustering algorithm is also analyzed. Comparisons between the proposed U-k-means and other existing methods are made. Experimental results and comparisons actually…

Digital twin can be defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision making. Recent advances in computational pipelines, multiphysics solvers, artificial intelligence, big data cybernetics, data processing and management tools bring the promise of digital twins and their impact on society closer to reality. Digital twinning is now an important and emerging trend in many applications. Also referred to as a computational megamodel, device shadow, mirrored system, avatar or a synchronized virtual prototype, there can be no doubt that a digital twin plays a transformative role not only in how we design and operate cyber-physical intelligent systems, but also in how we advance the modularity of multi-disciplinary systems to tackle fundamental barriers not addressed by the current, evolutionary modeling practices. In this work, we review the recent status of methodologies and techniques related to the construction of digital twins mostly from a modeling…

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic disease, which has already caused thousands of causalities and infected several millions of people worldwide. Any technological tool enabling rapid screening of the COVID-19 infection with high accuracy can be crucially helpful to the healthcare professionals. The main clinical tool currently in use for the diagnosis of COVID-19 is the Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which is expensive, less-sensitive and requires specialized medical personnel. X-ray imaging is an easily accessible tool that can be an excellent alternative in the COVID-19 diagnosis. This research was taken to investigate the utility of artificial intelligence (AI) in the rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. The aim of this paper is to propose a robust technique for automatic detection of COVID-19 pneumonia from digital chest X-ray images applying pre-trained deep-learning algorithms while maximizing the detection accuracy. A public database was created by the authors combining several public databases and also by…

Automated driving systems (ADSs) promise a safe, comfortable and efficient driving experience. However, fatalities involving vehicles equipped with ADSs are on the rise. The full potential of ADSs cannot be realized unless the robustness of state-of-the-art is improved further. This paper discusses unsolved problems and surveys the technical aspect of automated driving. Studies regarding present challenges, high-level system architectures, emerging methodologies and core functions including localization, mapping, perception, planning, and human machine interfaces, were thoroughly reviewed. Furthermore, many state-of-the-art algorithms were implemented and compared on our own platform in a real-world driving setting. The paper concludes with an overview of available datasets and tools for ADS development.

6G and beyond will fulfill the requirements of a fully connected world and provide ubiquitous wireless connectivity for all. Transformative solutions are expected to drive the surge for accommodating a rapidly growing number of intelligent devices and services. Major technological breakthroughs to achieve connectivity goals within 6G include: (i) a network operating at the THz band with much wider spectrum resources, (ii) intelligent communication environments that enable a wireless propagation environment with active signal transmission and reception, (iii) pervasive artificial intelligence, (iv) large-scale network automation, (v) an all-spectrum reconfigurable front-end for dynamic spectrum access, (vi) ambient backscatter communications for energy savings, (vii) the Internet of Space Things enabled by CubeSats and UAVs, and (viii) cell-free massive MIMO communication networks. In this roadmap paper, use cases for these enabling techniques as well as recent advancements on related topics are highlighted, and open problems with possible solutions are discussed, followed by a…

The Internet of Things (IoT)-centric concepts like augmented reality, high-resolution video streaming, self-driven cars, smart environment, e-health care, etc. have a ubiquitous presence now. These applications require higher data-rates, large bandwidth, increased capacity, low latency and high throughput. In light of these emerging concepts, IoT has revolutionized the world by providing seamless connectivity between heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The eventual aim of IoT is to introduce the plug and play technology providing the end-user, ease of operation, remotely access control and configurability. This paper presents the IoT technology from a bird's eye view covering its statistical/architectural trends, use cases, challenges and future prospects. The paper also presents a detailed and extensive overview of the emerging 5G-IoT scenario. Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks provide key enabling technologies for ubiquitous deployment of the IoT technology. These include carrier aggregation, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), massive-MIMO (M-MIMO), coordinated multipoint…

With the rapid development of the Internet of Everything (IoE), the number of smart devices connected to the Internet is increasing, resulting in large-scale data, which has caused problems such as bandwidth load, slow response speed, poor security, and poor privacy in traditional cloud computing models. Traditional cloud computing is no longer sufficient to support the diverse needs of today's intelligent society for data processing, so edge computing technologies have emerged. It is a new computing paradigm for performing calculations at the edge of the network. Unlike cloud computing, it emphasizes closer to the user and closer to the source of the data. At the edge of the network, it is lightweight for local, small-scale data storage and processing. This article mainly reviews the related research and results of edge computing. First, it summarizes the concept of edge computing and compares it with cloud computing. Then summarize the architecture of edge computing, keyword technology, security and privacy protection, and finally summarize the applications of edge computing.

Agriculture plays a vital role in the economic growth of any country. With the increase of population, frequent changes in climatic conditions and limited resources, it becomes a challenging task to fulfil the food requirement of the present population. Precision agriculture also known as smart farming have emerged as an innovative tool to address current challenges in agricultural sustainability. The mechanism that drives this cutting edge technology is machine learning (ML). It gives the machine ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. ML together with IoT (Internet of Things) enabled farm machinery are key components of the next agriculture revolution. In this article, authors present a systematic review of ML applications in the field of agriculture. The areas that are focused are prediction of soil parameters such as organic carbon and moisture content, crop yield prediction, disease and weed detection in crops and species detection. ML with computer vision are reviewed for the classification of a different set of crop images in order to monitor the crop quality…

The unprecedented outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus, termed as COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO), has placed numerous governments around the world in a precarious position. The impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, earlier witnessed by the citizens of China alone, has now become a matter of grave concern for virtually every country in the world. The scarcity of resources to endure the COVID-19 outbreak combined with the fear of overburdened healthcare systems has forced a majority of these countries into a state of partial or complete lockdown. The number of laboratory-confirmed coronavirus cases has been increasing at an alarming rate throughout the world, with reportedly more than 3 million confirmed cases as of 30 April 2020. Adding to these woes, numerous false reports, misinformation, and unsolicited fears in regards to coronavirus, are being circulated regularly since the outbreak of the COVID-19. In response to such acts, we draw on various reliable sources to present a detailed review of all the major aspects associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition…

Machine learning methods have been remarkably successful for a wide range of application areas in the extraction of essential information from data. An exciting and relatively recent development is the uptake of machine learning in the natural sciences, where the major goal is to obtain novel scientific insights and discoveries from observational or simulated data. A prerequisite for obtaining a scientific outcome is domain knowledge, which is needed to gain explainability, but also to enhance scientific consistency. In this article, we review explainable machine learning in view of applications in the natural sciences and discuss three core elements that we identified as relevant in this context: transparency, interpretability, and explainability. With respect to these core elements, we provide a survey of recent scientific works that incorporate machine learning and the way that explainable machine learning is used in combination with domain knowledge from the application areas.

With the development of satellite technology, up to date imaging mode of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite can provide higher resolution SAR imageries, which benefits ship detection and instance segmentation. Meanwhile, object detectors based on convolutional neural network (CNN) show high performance on SAR ship detection even without land-ocean segmentation; but with respective shortcomings, such as the relatively small size of SAR images for ship detection, limited SAR training samples, and inappropriate annotations, in existing SAR ship datasets, related research is hampered. To promote the development of CNN based ship detection and instance segmentation, we have constructed a High-Resolution SAR Images Dataset (HRSID). In addition to object detection, instance segmentation can also be implemented on HRSID. As for dataset construction, under the overlapped ratio of 25%, 136 panoramic SAR imageries with ranging resolution from 1m to 5m are cropped to 800 × 800 pixels SAR images. To reduce wrong annotation and missing annotation, optical remote sensing imageries are…

In this survey paper, we systematically summarize existing literature on bearing fault diagnostics with deep learning (DL) algorithms. While conventional machine learning (ML) methods, including artificial neural network, principal component analysis, support vector machines, etc., have been successfully applied to the detection and categorization of bearing faults for decades, recent developments in DL algorithms in the last five years have sparked renewed interest in both industry and academia for intelligent machine health monitoring. In this paper, we first provide a brief review of conventional ML methods, before taking a deep dive into the state-of-the-art DL algorithms for bearing fault applications. Specifically, the superiority of DL based methods are analyzed in terms of fault feature extraction and classification performances; many new functionalities enabled by DL techniques are also summarized. In addition, to obtain a more intuitive insight, a comparative study is conducted on the classification accuracy of different algorithms utilizing the open source Case Western…

Although the Internet of Things (IoT) can increase efficiency and productivity through intelligent and remote management, it also increases the risk of cyber-attacks. The potential threats to IoT applications and the need to reduce risk have recently become an interesting research topic. It is crucial that effective Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) tailored to IoT applications be developed. Such IDSs require an updated and representative IoT dataset for training and evaluation. However, there is a lack of benchmark IoT and IIoT datasets for assessing IDSs-enabled IoT systems. This paper addresses this issue and proposes a new data-driven IoT/IIoT dataset with the ground truth that incorporates a label feature indicating normal and attack classes, as well as a type feature indicating the sub-classes of attacks targeting IoT/IIoT applications for multi-classification problems. The proposed dataset, which is named TON_IoT, includes Telemetry data of IoT/IIoT services, as well as Operating Systems logs and Network traffic of IoT network, collected from a realistic representation of a…

One of the key enablers of future wireless communications is constituted by massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which can improve the spectral efficiency by orders of magnitude. In existing massive MIMO systems, however, conventional phased arrays are used for beamforming. This method results in excessive power consumption and high hardware costs. Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been considered as one of the revolutionary technologies to enable energy-efficient and smart wireless communications, which is a two-dimensional structure with a large number of passive elements. In this paper, we develop a new type of high-gain yet low-cost RIS that bears 256 elements. The proposed RIS combines the functions of phase shift and radiation together on an electromagnetic surface, where positive intrinsic-negative (PIN) diodes are used to realize 2-bit phase shifting for beamforming. This radical design forms the basis for the world’s first wireless communication prototype using RIS having 256 two-bit elements. The prototype consists of modular hardware…

Due to digitization, a huge volume of data is being generated across several sectors such as healthcare, production, sales, IoT devices, Web, organizations. Machine learning algorithms are used to uncover patterns among the attributes of this data. Hence, they can be used to make predictions that can be used by medical practitioners and people at managerial level to make executive decisions. Not all the attributes in the datasets generated are important for training the machine learning algorithms. Some attributes might be irrelevant and some might not affect the outcome of the prediction. Ignoring or removing these irrelevant or less important attributes reduces the burden on machine learning algorithms. In this work two of the prominent dimensionality reduction techniques, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) are investigated on four popular Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, Decision Tree Induction, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes Classifier and Random Forest Classifier using publicly available Cardiotocography (CTG) dataset from…

Driven by the emergence of new compute-intensive applications and the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT), it is foreseen that the emerging 5G network will face an unprecedented increase in traffic volume and computation demands. However, end users mostly have limited storage capacities and finite processing capabilities, thus how to run compute-intensive applications on resource-constrained users has recently become a natural concern. Mobile edge computing (MEC), a key technology in the emerging fifth generation (5G) network, can optimize mobile resources by hosting compute-intensive applications, process large data before sending to the cloud, provide the cloud-computing capabilities within the radio access network (RAN) in close proximity to mobile users, and offer context-aware services with the help of RAN information. Therefore, MEC enables a wide variety of applications, where the real-time response is strictly required, e.g., driverless vehicles, augmented reality, robotics, and immerse media. Indeed, the paradigm shift from 4G to 5G could become a reality with the advent…

Contrastive Learning has recently received interest due to its success in self-supervised representation learning in the computer vision domain. However, the origins of Contrastive Learning date as far back as the 1990s and its development has spanned across many fields and domains including Metric Learning and natural language processing. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive literature review and we propose a general Contrastive Representation Learning framework that simplifies and unifies many different contrastive learning methods. We also provide a taxonomy for each of the components of contrastive learning in order to summarise it and distinguish it from other forms of machine learning. We then discuss the inductive biases which are present in any contrastive learning system and we analyse our framework under different views from various sub-fields of Machine Learning. Examples of how contrastive learning has been applied in computer vision, natural language processing, audio processing, and others, as well as in Reinforcement Learning are also presented. Finally, we…

In the past years, traditional pattern recognition methods have made great progress. However, these methods rely heavily on manual feature extraction, which may hinder the generalization model performance. With the increasing popularity and success of deep learning methods, using these techniques to recognize human actions in mobile and wearable computing scenarios has attracted widespread attention. In this paper, a deep neural network that combines convolutional layers with long short-term memory (LSTM) was proposed. This model could extract activity features automatically and classify them with a few model parameters. LSTM is a variant of the recurrent neural network (RNN), which is more suitable for processing temporal sequences. In the proposed architecture, the raw data collected by mobile sensors was fed into a two-layer LSTM followed by convolutional layers. In addition, a global average pooling layer (GAP) was applied to replace the fully connected layer after convolution for reducing model parameters. Moreover, a batch normalization layer (BN) was added after the GAP layer…

Due to the proliferation of ICT during the last few decades, there is an exponential increase in the usage of various smart applications such as smart farming, smart healthcare, supply-chain & logistics, business, tourism and hospitality, energy management etc. However, for all the aforementioned applications, security and privacy are major concerns keeping in view of the usage of the open channel, i.e., Internet for data transfer. Although many security solutions and standards have been proposed over the years to enhance the security levels of aforementioned smart applications, but the existing solutions are either based upon the centralized architecture (having single point of failure) or having high computation and communication costs. Moreover, most of the existing security solutions have focussed only on few aspects and fail to address scalability, robustness, data storage, network latency, auditability, immutability, and traceability. To handle the aforementioned issues, blockchain technology can be one of the solutions. Motivated from these facts, in this paper, we present a…

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a viral disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The spread of COVID-19 seems to have a detrimental effect on the global economy and health. A positive chest X-ray of infected patients is a crucial step in the battle against COVID-19. Early results suggest that abnormalities exist in chest X-rays of patients suggestive of COVID-19. This has led to the introduction of a variety of deep learning systems and studies have shown that the accuracy of COVID-19 patient detection through the use of chest X-rays is strongly optimistic. Deep learning networks like convolutional neural networks (CNNs) need a substantial amount of training data. Because the outbreak is recent, it is difficult to gather a significant number of radiographic images in such a short time. Therefore, in this research, we present a method to generate synthetic chest X-ray (CXR) images by developing an Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (ACGAN) based model called CovidGAN. In addition, we demonstrate that the synthetic images produced from…

The focus of wireless research is increasingly shifting toward 6G as 5G deployments get underway. At this juncture, it is essential to establish a vision of future communications to provide guidance for that research. In this paper, we attempt to paint a broad picture of communication needs and technologies in the timeframe of 6G. The future of connectivity is in the creation of digital twin worlds that are a true representation of the physical and biological worlds at every spatial and time instant, unifying our experience across these physical, biological and digital worlds. New themes are likely to emerge that will shape 6G system requirements and technologies, such as: (i) new man-machine interfaces created by a collection of multiple local devices acting in unison; (ii) ubiquitous universal computing distributed among multiple local devices and the cloud; (iii) multi-sensory data fusion to create multi-verse maps and new mixed-reality experiences; and (iv) precision sensing and actuation to control the physical world. With rapid advances in artificial intelligence, it has the…

This paper provides a comprehensive study of Federated Learning (FL) with an emphasis on enabling software and hardware platforms, protocols, real-life applications and use-cases. FL can be applicable to multiple domains but applying it to different industries has its own set of obstacles. FL is known as collaborative learning, where algorithm(s) get trained across multiple devices or servers with decentralized data samples without having to exchange the actual data. This approach is radically different from other more established techniques such as getting the data samples uploaded to servers or having data in some form of distributed infrastructure. FL on the other hand generates more robust models without sharing data, leading to privacy-preserved solutions with higher security and access privileges to data. This paper starts by providing an overview of FL. Then, it gives an overview of technical details that pertain to FL enabling technologies, protocols, and applications. Compared to other survey papers in the field, our objective is to provide a more thorough summary of the…

The advent of the Industry 4.0 initiative has made it so that manufacturing environments are becoming more and more dynamic, connected but also inherently more complex, with additional inter-dependencies, uncertainties and large volumes of data being generated. Recent advances in Industrial Artificial Intelligence have showcased the potential of this technology to assist manufacturers in tackling the challenges associated with this digital transformation of Cyber-Physical Systems, through its data-driven predictive analytics and capacity to assist decision-making in highly complex, non-linear and often multistage environments. However, the industrial adoption of such solutions is still relatively low beyond the experimental pilot stage, as real environments provide unique and difficult challenges for which organizations are still unprepared. The aim of this paper is thus two-fold. First, a systematic review of current Industrial Artificial Intelligence literature is presented, focusing on its application in real manufacturing environments to identify the main enabling technologies…

Blockchain-based decentralized cryptocurrencies have drawn much attention and been widely-deployed in recent years. Bitcoin, the first application of blockchain, achieves great success and promotes more development in this field. However, Bitcoin encounters performance problems of low throughput and high transaction latency. Other cryptocurrencies based on proof-of-work also inherit the flaws, leading to more concerns about the scalability of blockchain. This paper attempts to cover the existing scaling solutions for blockchain and classify them by level. In addition, we make comparisons between different methods and list some potential directions for solving the scalability problem of blockchain.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic lung disease that occurs due to bacterial infection and is one of the top 10 leading causes of death. Accurate and early detection of TB is very important, otherwise, it could be life-threatening. In this work, we have detected TB reliably from the chest X-ray images using image pre-processing, data augmentation, image segmentation, and deep-learning classification techniques. Several public databases were used to create a database of 3500 TB infected and 3500 normal chest X-ray images for this study. Nine different deep CNNs (ResNet18, ResNet50, ResNet101, ChexNet, InceptionV3, Vgg19, DenseNet201, SqueezeNet, and MobileNet) were used for transfer learning from their pre-trained initial weights and were trained, validated and tested for classifying TB and non-TB normal cases. Three different experiments were carried out in this work: segmentation of X-ray images using two different U-net models, classification using X-ray images and that using segmented lung images. The accuracy, precision, sensitivity, F1-score and specificity of best performing…

Heart disease is one of the complex diseases and globally many people suffered from this disease. On time and efficient identification of heart disease plays a key role in healthcare, particularly in the field of cardiology. In this article, we proposed an efficient and accurate system to diagnosis heart disease and the system is based on machine learning techniques. The system is developed based on classification algorithms includes Support vector machine, Logistic regression, Artificial neural network, K-nearest neighbor, Naïve bays, and Decision tree while standard features selection algorithms have been used such as Relief, Minimal redundancy maximal relevance, Least absolute shrinkage selection operator and Local learning for removing irrelevant and redundant features. We also proposed novel fast conditional mutual information feature selection algorithm to solve feature selection problem. The features selection algorithms are used for features selection to increase the classification accuracy and reduce the execution time of classification system. Furthermore, the leave one…

According to the recent studies, malicious software (malware) is increasing at an alarming rate, and some malware can hide in the system by using different obfuscation techniques. In order to protect computer systems and the Internet from the malware, the malware needs to be detected before it affects a large number of systems. Recently, there have been made several studies on malware detection approaches. However, the detection of malware still remains problematic. Signature-based and heuristic-based detection approaches are fast and efficient to detect known malware, but especially signature-based detection approach has failed to detect unknown malware. On the other hand, behavior-based, model checking-based, and cloud-based approaches perform well for unknown and complicated malware; and deep learning-based, mobile devices-based, and IoT-based approaches also emerge to detect some portion of known and unknown malware. However, no approach can detect all malware in the wild. This shows that to build an effective method to detect malware is a very challenging task, and there is a…

Clean and environment-friendly energy harvesting are of prime interest today as it is one of the key enablers in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as accelerates social progress and enhances living standards. India, the second-most populous nation with a population of 1.353 billion, is one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels in the world which is responsible for global warming. An ever-increasing population is projected until 2050, and consequently, the energy demand in the upcoming decades will be co-accelerated by the rapid industrial growth. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) with the support of National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog is working to achieve the Indian Government's target of attaining 175 GW through renewable energy resources. Many Indian states are currently increasing their renewable energy capacity in an objective to meet future energy demand. The review paper discusses in-depth about the three Indian states, namely Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, which pioneers the renewable energy production in India.…

Autonomous mobile robots are becoming more prominent in recent time because of their relevance and applications to the world today. Their ability to navigate in an environment without a need for physical or electro-mechanical guidance devices has made it more promising and useful. The use of autonomous mobile robots is emerging in different sectors such as companies, industries, hospital, institutions, agriculture and homes to improve services and daily activities. Due to technology advancement, the demand for mobile robot has increased due to the task they perform and services they render such as carrying heavy objects, monitoring, search and rescue missions, etc. Various studies have been carried out by researchers on the importance of mobile robot, its applications and challenges. This survey paper unravels the current literatures, the challenges mobile robot is being faced with. A comprehensive study on devices/sensors and prevalent sensor fusion techniques developed for tackling issues like localization, estimation and navigation in mobile robot are presented as well in which…

Internet of Things (IoT) and smart computing technologies have revolutionized every sphere of 21stcentury humans. IoT technologies and the data driven services they offer were beyond imagination just a decade ago. Now, they surround us and influence a variety of domains such as automobile, smart home, healthcare, etc. In particular, the Agriculture and Farming industries have also embraced this technological intervention. Smart devices are widely used by a range of people from farmers to entrepreneurs. These technologies are used in a variety of ways, from finding real-time status of crops and soil moisture content to deploying drones to assist with tasks such as applying pesticide spray. However, the use of IoT and smart communication technologies introduce a vast exposure to cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities in smart farming environments. Such cyber attacks have the potential to disrupt the economies of countries that are widely dependent on agriculture. In this paper, we present a holistic study on security and privacy in a smart farming ecosystem. The paper outlines a…

Diabetes, also known as chronic illness, is a group of metabolic diseases due to a high level of sugar in the blood over a long period. The risk factor and severity of diabetes can be reduced significantly if the precise early prediction is possible. The robust and accurate prediction of diabetes is highly challenging due to the limited number of labeled data and also the presence of outliers (or missing values) in the diabetes datasets. In this literature, we are proposing a robust framework for diabetes prediction where the outlier rejection, filling the missing values, data standardization, feature selection, K-fold cross-validation, and different Machine Learning (ML) classifiers (k-nearest Neighbour, Decision Trees, Random Forest, AdaBoost, Naive Bayes, and XGBoost) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) were employed. The weighted ensembling of different ML models is also proposed, in this literature, to improve the prediction of diabetes where the weights are estimated from the corresponding Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) of the ML model. AUC is chosen as the performance metric, which…

Blockchain and other Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have evolved significantly in the last years and their use has been suggested for numerous applications due to their ability to provide transparency, redundancy and accountability. In the case of blockchain, such characteristics are provided through public-key cryptography and hash functions. However, the fast progress of quantum computing has opened the possibility of performing attacks based on Grover's and Shor's algorithms in the near future. Such algorithms threaten both public-key cryptography and hash functions, forcing to redesign blockchains to make use of cryptosystems that withstand quantum attacks, thus creating which are known as post-quantum, quantum-proof, quantum-safe or quantum-resistant cryptosystems. For such a purpose, this article first studies current state of the art on post-quantum cryptosystems and how they can be applied to blockchains and DLTs. Moreover, the most relevant post-quantum blockchain systems are studied, as well as their main challenges. Furthermore, extensive comparisons are provided…

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has taken the world by surprise, forcing lockdowns and straining public health care systems. COVID-19 is known to be a highly infectious virus, and infected individuals do not initially exhibit symptoms, while some remain asymptomatic. Thus, a non-negligible fraction of the population can, at any given time, be a hidden source of transmissions. In response, many governments have shown great interest in smartphone contact tracing apps that help automate the difficult task of tracing all recent contacts of newly identified infected individuals. However, tracing apps have generated much discussion around their key attributes, including system architecture, data management, privacy, security, proximity estimation, and attack vulnerability. In this article, we provide the first comprehensive review of these much-discussed tracing app attributes. We also present an overview of many proposed tracing app examples, some of which have been deployed countrywide, and discuss the concerns users have reported regarding their usage. We close by outlining potential…

In recent years, with the rapid development of Internet technology, online shopping has become a mainstream way for users to purchase and consume. Sentiment analysis of a large number of user reviews on e-commerce platforms can effectively improve user satisfaction. This paper proposes a new sentiment analysis model-SLCABG, which is based on the sentiment lexicon and combines Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and attention-based Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU). In terms of methods, the SLCABG model combines the advantages of sentiment lexicon and deep learning technology, and overcomes the shortcomings of existing sentiment analysis model of product reviews. The SLCABG model combines the advantages of the sentiment lexicon and deep learning techniques. First, the sentiment lexicon is used to enhance the sentiment features in the reviews. Then the CNN and the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) network are used to extract the main sentiment features and context features in the reviews and use the attention mechanism to weight. And finally classify the weighted sentiment features.…

A smart factory is a highly digitized and connected production facility that relies on smart manufacturing. Additionally, artificial intelligence is the core technology of smart factories. The use of machine learning and deep learning algorithms has produced fruitful results in many fields like image processing, speech recognition, fault detection, object detection, or medical sciences. With the increment in the use of smart machinery, the faults in the machinery equipment are expected to increase. Machinery fault detection and diagnosis through various deep learning algorithms has increased day by day. Many types of research have been done and published using both open-source and closed-source datasets, implementing the deep learning algorithms. Out of many publicly available datasets, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) bearing dataset has been widely used to detect and diagnose machinery bearing fault and is accepted as a standard reference for validating the models. This paper summarizes the recent works which use the CWRU bearing dataset in machinery fault detection and…

Given the ubiquity of handwritten documents in human transactions, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of documents have invaluable practical worth. Optical character recognition is a science that enables to translate various types of documents or images into analyzable, editable and searchable data. During last decade, researchers have used artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to automatically analyze handwritten and printed documents in order to convert them into electronic format. The objective of this review paper is to summarize research that has been conducted on character recognition of handwritten documents and to provide research directions. In this Systematic Literature Review (SLR) we collected, synthesized and analyzed research articles on the topic of handwritten OCR (and closely related topics) which were published between year 2000 to 2019. We followed widely used electronic databases by following pre-defined review protocol. Articles were searched using keywords, forward reference searching and backward reference searching in order to search all the…

Power grids are transforming into flexible, smart, and cooperative systems with greater dissemination of distributed energy resources, advanced metering infrastructure, and advanced communication technologies. Short-term electric load forecasting for individual residential customers plays a progressively crucial role in the operation and planning of future grids. Compared to the aggregated electrical load at the community level, the prediction of individual household electric loads is legitimately challenging because of the high uncertainty and volatility involved. Results from previous studies show that prediction using machine learning and deep learning models is far from accurate, and there is still room for improvement. We herein propose a deep learning framework based on a combination of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM). The proposed hybrid CNN-LSTM model uses CNN layers for feature extraction from the input data with LSTM layers for sequence learning. The performance of our developed framework is comprehensively compared to…

COVID-19 outbreak has put the whole world in an unprecedented difficult situation bringing life around the world to a frightening halt and claiming thousands of lives. Due to COVID-19's spread in 212 countries and territories and increasing numbers of infected cases and death tolls mounting to 5,212,172 and 334,915 (as of May 22 2020), it remains a real threat to the public health system. This paper renders a response to combat the virus through Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some Deep Learning (DL) methods have been illustrated to reach this goal, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), and Long/Short Term Memory (LSTM). It delineates an integrated bioinformatics approach in which different aspects of information from a continuum of structured and unstructured data sources are put together to form the user-friendly platforms for physicians and researchers. The main advantage of these AI-based platforms is to accelerate the process of diagnosis and treatment of the COVID-19 disease. The most recent related publications and medical reports…

Search and rescue (SAR) operations can take significant advantage from supporting autonomous or teleoperated robots and multi-robot systems. These can aid in mapping and situational assessment, monitoring and surveillance, establishing communication networks, or searching for victims. This paper provides a review of multi-robot systems supporting SAR operations, with system-level considerations and focusing on the algorithmic perspectives for multi-robot coordination and perception. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first survey paper to cover (i) heterogeneous SAR robots in different environments, (ii) active perception in multi-robot systems, while (iii) giving two complementary points of view from the multi-agent perception and control perspectives. We also discuss the most significant open research questions: shared autonomy, sim-to-real transferability of existing methods, awareness of victims' conditions, coordination and interoperability in heterogeneous multi-robot systems, and active perception. The different topics in the survey are put in the context of the…

Pervasive growth and usage of the Internet and mobile applications have expanded cyberspace. The cyberspace has become more vulnerable to automated and prolonged cyberattacks. Cyber security techniques provide enhancements in security measures to detect and react against cyberattacks. The previously used security systems are no longer sufficient because cybercriminals are smart enough to evade conventional security systems. Conventional security systems lack efficiency in detecting previously unseen and polymorphic security attacks. Machine learning (ML) techniques are playing a vital role in numerous applications of cyber security. However, despite the ongoing success, there are significant challenges in ensuring the trustworthiness of ML systems. There are incentivized malicious adversaries present in the cyberspace that are willing to game and exploit such ML vulnerabilities. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges that ML techniques face in protecting cyberspace against attacks, by presenting a literature on ML techniques for cyber security…

Electric energy forecasting domain attracts researchers due to its key role in saving energy resources, where mainstream existing models are based on Gradient Boosting Regression (GBR), Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). These models encounter high-level of non-linearity between input data and output predictions and limited adoptability in real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, energy forecasting domain demands more robustness, higher prediction accuracy and generalization ability for real-world implementation. In this paper, we achieve the mentioned tasks by developing a hybrid sequential learning-based energy forecasting model that employs Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) into a unified framework for accurate energy consumption prediction. The proposed framework has two major phases: (1) data refinement and (2) training, where the data refinement phase applies preprocessing strategies over raw data. In the training phase, CNN features are extracted from input dataset and fed in to GRU, that…

Machine learning (ML) based forecasting mechanisms have proved their significance to anticipate in perioperative outcomes to improve the decision making on the future course of actions. The ML models have long been used in many application domains which needed the identification and prioritization of adverse factors for a threat. Several prediction methods are being popularly used to handle forecasting problems. This study demonstrates the capability of ML models to forecast the number of upcoming patients affected by COVID-19 which is presently considered as a potential threat to mankind. In particular, four standard forecasting models, such as linear regression (LR), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), support vector machine (SVM), and exponential smoothing (ES) have been used in this study to forecast the threatening factors of COVID-19. Three types of predictions are made by each of the models, such as the number of newly infected cases, the number of deaths, and the number of recoveries in the next 10 days. The results produced by the study proves it a…

Bayesian optimisation is a statistical method that efficiently models and optimises expensive “black-box” functions. This review considers the application of Bayesian optimisation to experimental design, in comparison to existing Design of Experiments (DOE) methods. Solutions are surveyed for a range of core issues in experimental design including: the incorporation of prior knowledge, high dimensional optimisation, constraints, batch evaluation, multiple objectives, multi-fidelity data, and mixed variable types.

The growing interest and recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) have actively contributed to an increase in research and development of new methods to estimate the states of electrified vehicle batteries. Data-driven approaches, such as ML, are becoming more popular for estimating the state of charge (SOC) and state of health (SOH) due to greater availability of battery data and improved computing power capabilities. This paper provides a survey of battery state estimation methods based on ML approaches such as feedforward neural networks (FNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), support vector machines (SVM), radial basis functions (RBF), and Hamming networks. Comparisons between methods are shown in terms of data quality, inputs and outputs, test conditions, battery types, and stated accuracy to give readers a bigger picture view of the ML landscape for SOC and SOH estimation. Additionally, to provide insight into how to best approach with the comparison of different neural network structures, an FNN and long short-term memory (LSTM) RNN are…

Nowadays, 5G is in its initial phase of commercialization. The 5G network will revolutionize the existing wireless network with its enhanced capabilities and novel features. 5G New Radio (5G NR), referred to as the global standardization of 5G, is presently under the 3rdGeneration Partnership Project (3GPP) and can be operable over the wide range of frequency bands from less than 6GHz to mmWave (100GHz). 3GPP mainly focuses on the three major use cases of 5G NR that are comprised of Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communication (uRLLC), Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC), Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB). For meeting the targets of 5G NR, multiple features like scalable numerology, flexible spectrum, forward compatibility, and ultra-lean design are added as compared to the LTE systems. This paper presents a brief overview of the added features and key performance indicators of 5G NR. The issues related to the adaptation of higher modulation schemes and inter-RAT handover synchronization are well addressed in this paper. With the consideration of these challenges, a…

The new development trends including Internet of Things (IoT), smart city, enterprises digital transformation and world's digital economy are at the top of the tide. The continuous growth of data storage pressure drives the rapid development of the entire storage market on account of massive data generated. By providing data storage and management, cloud storage system becomes an indispensable part of the new era. Currently, the governments, enterprises and individual users are actively migrating their data to the cloud. Such a huge amount of data can create magnanimous wealth. However, this increases the possible risk, for instance, unauthorized access, data leakage, sensitive information disclosure and privacy disclosure. Although there are some studies on data security and privacy protection, there is still a lack of systematic surveys on the subject in cloud storage system. In this paper, we make a comprehensive review of the literatures on data security and privacy issues, data encryption technology, and applicable countermeasures in cloud storage system. Specifically, we first…

The strengthening of electric energy security and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions have gained enormous momentum in previous decades. The integration of large-scale intermittent renewable energy resources (RER) like wind energy into the existing electricity grids has increased significantly in the last decade. However, this integration poses many operational and control challenges that hamper the reliable and stable operation of the grids. This article aims to review the reported challenges caused by the integration of wind energy and the proposed solutions methodologies. Among the various challenges, the generation uncertainty, power quality issues, angular and voltage stability, reactive power support, and fault ride-through capability are reviewed and discussed. Besides, socioeconomic, environmental, and electricity market challenges due to the grid integration of wind power are also investigated. Many of the solutions used and proposed to mitigate the impact of these challenges, such as energy storage systems, wind energy policy, and grid codes, are also reviewed and…

Automatic assessing the location and extent of liver and liver tumor is critical for radiologists, diagnosis and the clinical process. In recent years, a large number of variants of U-Net based on Multi-scale feature fusion are proposed to improve the segmentation performance for medical image segmentation. Unlike the previous works which extract the context information of medical image via applying the multi-scale feature fusion, we propose a novel network named Multi-scale Attention Net (MA-Net) by introducing self-attention mechanism into our method to adaptively integrate local features with their global dependencies. The MA-Net can capture rich contextual dependencies based on the attention mechanism. We design two blocks: Position-wise Attention Block (PAB) and Multi-scale Fusion Attention Block (MFAB). The PAB is used to model the feature interdependencies in spatial dimensions, which capture the spatial dependencies between pixels in a global view. In addition, the MFAB is to capture the channel dependencies between any feature map by multi-scale semantic feature fusion. We…

When will automated vehicles come onto the market? This question has puzzled the automotive industry and society for years. The technology and its implementation have made rapid progress over the last decade, but the challenge of how to prove the safety of these systems has not yet been solved. Since a market launch without proof of safety would neither be accepted by society nor by legislators, much time and many resources have been invested into safety assessment in recent years in order to develop new approaches for an efficient assessment. This paper therefore provides an overview of various approaches, and gives a comprehensive survey of the so-called scenario-based approach. The scenario-based approach is a promising method, in which individual traffic situations are typically tested by means of virtual simulation. Since an infinite number of different scenarios can theoretically occur in real-world traffic, even the scenario-based approach leaves the question unanswered as to how to break these down into a finite set of scenarios, and find those which are representative in…

Fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks will almost certainly operate in the high-bandwidth, underutilized millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency spectrum, which offers the potentiality of high-capacity wireless transmission of multi-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) data rates. Despite the enormous available bandwidth potential, mmWave signal transmissions suffer from fundamental technical challenges like severe path loss, sensitivity to blockage, directivity, and narrow beamwidth, due to its short wavelengths. To effectively support system design and deployment, accurate channel modeling comprising several 5G technologies and scenarios is essential. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of several emerging technologies for 5G systems, such as massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies, multiple access technologies, hybrid analog-digital precoding and combining, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), cell-free massive MIMO, and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technologies. These technologies induce distinct propagation characteristics and…

Brain tumor is a deadly disease and its classification is a challenging task for radiologists because of the heterogeneous nature of the tumor cells. Recently, computer-aided diagnosis-based systems have promised, as an assistive technology, to diagnose the brain tumor, through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In recent applications of pre-trained models, normally features are extracted from bottom layers which are different from natural images to medical images. To overcome this problem, this study proposes a method of multi-level features extraction and concatenation for early diagnosis of brain tumor. Two pre-trained deep learning models i.e. Inception-v3 and DensNet201 make this model valid. With the help of these two models, two different scenarios of brain tumor detection and its classification were evaluated. First, the features from different Inception modules were extracted from pre-trained Inception-v3 model and concatenated these features for brain tumor classification. Then, these features were passed to softmax classifier to classify the brain tumor. Second,…

Detecting COVID-19 early may help in devising an appropriate treatment plan and disease containment decisions. In this study, we demonstrate how transfer learning from deep learning models can be used to perform COVID-19 detection using images from three most commonly used medical imaging modes X-Ray, Ultrasound, and CT scan. The aim is to provide over-stressed medical professionals a second pair of eyes through intelligent deep learning image classification models. We identify a suitableConvolutional Neural Network(CNN) model through initial comparative study of several popular CNN models. We then optimize the selected VGG19 model for the image modalities to show how the models can be used for the highly scarce and challenging COVID-19 datasets. We highlight the challenges (including dataset size and quality) in utilizing current publicly available COVID-19 datasets for developing useful deep learning models and how it adversely impacts the trainability of complex models. We also propose an image pre-processing stage to create a trustworthy image dataset for developing and testing…

The nature of stock market movement has always been ambiguous for investors because of various influential factors. This study aims to significantly reduce the risk of trend prediction with machine learning and deep learning algorithms. Four stock market groups, namely diversified financials, petroleum, non-metallic minerals and basic metals from Tehran stock exchange, are chosen for experimental evaluations. This study compares nine machine learning models (Decision Tree, Random Forest, Adaptive Boosting (Adaboost), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Logistic Regression and Artificial Neural Network (ANN)) and two powerful deep learning methods (Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Long short-term memory (LSTM). Ten technical indicators from ten years of historical data are our input values, and two ways are supposed for employing them. Firstly, calculating the indicators by stock trading values as continuous data, and secondly converting indicators to binary data before using. Each prediction model is…

The frequency of extreme events (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods) and man-made attacks (cyber and physical attacks) has increased dramatically in recent years. These events have severely impacted power systems ranging from long outage times to major equipment (e.g., substations, transmission lines, and power plants) destructions. This calls for developing control and operation methods and planning strategies to improve grid resilience against such events. The first step toward this goal is to develop resilience metrics and evaluation methods to compare planning and operation alternatives and to provide techno-economic justifications for resilience enhancement. Although several power system resilience definitions, metrics, and evaluation methods have been proposed in the literature, they have not been universally accepted or standardized. This paper provides a comprehensive and critical review of current practices of power system resilience metrics and evaluation methods and discusses future directions and recommendations to contribute to the development of universally…

Feature selection (FS) is one of the important tasks of data preprocessing in data analytics. The data with a large number of features will affect the computational complexity, increase a huge amount of resource usage and time consumption for data analytics. The objective of this study is to analyze relevant and significant features of huge network traffic to be used to improve the accuracy of traffic anomaly detection and to decrease its execution time. Information Gain is the most feature selection technique used in Intrusion Detection System (IDS) research. This study uses Information Gain, ranking and grouping the features according to the minimum weight values to select relevant and significant features, and then implements Random Forest (RF), Bayes Net (BN), Random Tree (RT), Naive Bayes (NB) and J48 classifier algorithms in experiments on CICIDS-2017 dataset. The experiment results show that the number of relevant and significant features yielded by Information Gain affects significantly the improvement of detection accuracy and execution time. Specifically, the Random Forest…

Intelligent systems are wanting for cities to cope with limited spaces and resources across the world. As a result, smart cities emerged mainly as a result of highly innovative ICT industries and markets, and additionally, they have started to use novel solutions taking advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and cloud computing technologies to establish a profound connection between each component and layer of a city. Several key technologies congregate to build a working smart city considering human requirements. Even though the smart city concept is an advanced solution for today's cities, recently, more living spaces should be discovered, and the concept of a smart city could be moved to these alternative living spaces, namely floating cities. The concept of a floating city emerged as a novel solution due to rising sea levels and land scarcity in order to provide alternative living spaces for humanity. In this article, our main research question is to raise awareness on the current state of smart city concepts across the world by understanding the key future trends,…

The state-of-the-art machine learning approaches are based on classical von Neumann computing architectures and have been widely used in many industrial and academic domains. With the recent development of quantum computing, researchers and tech-giants have attempted new quantum circuits for machine learning tasks. However, the existing quantum computing platforms are hard to simulate classical deep learning models or problems because of the intractability of deep quantum circuits. Thus, it is necessary to design feasible quantum algorithms for quantum machine learning for noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices. This work explores variational quantum circuits for deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, we reshape classical deep reinforcement learning algorithms like experience replay and target network into a representation of variational quantum circuits. Moreover, we use a quantum information encoding scheme to reduce the number of model parameters compared to classical neural networks. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first proof-of-principle…

This paper presents research challenges on security and privacy issues in the field of green IoT-based agriculture. We start by describing a four-tier green IoT-based agriculture architecture and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with smart agriculture. Then, we provide a classification of threat models against green IoT-based agriculture into five categories, including, attacks against privacy, authentication, confidentiality, availability, and integrity properties. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving technologies for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. In addition, we analyze the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions as well as consensus algorithms for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the security and privacy of green IoT-based agriculture.

Predicting crop yield based on the environmental, soil, water and crop parameters has been a potential research topic. Deep-learning-based models are broadly used to extract significant crop features for prediction. Though these methods could resolve the yield prediction problem there exist the following inadequacies: Unable to create a direct non-linear or linear mapping between the raw data and crop yield values; and the performance of those models highly relies on the quality of the extracted features. Deep reinforcement learning provides direction and motivation for the aforementioned shortcomings. Combining the intelligence of reinforcement learning and deep learning, deep reinforcement learning builds a complete crop yield prediction framework that can map the raw data to the crop prediction values. The proposed work constructs a Deep Recurrent Q-Network model which is a Recurrent Neural Network deep learning algorithm over the Q-Learning reinforcement learning algorithm to forecast the crop yield. The sequentially stacked layers of Recurrent Neural network is fed by the data…

New advances in electronic commerce systems and communication technologies have made the credit card the potentially most popular method of payment for both regular and online purchases; thus, there is significantly increased fraud associated with such transactions. Fraudulent credit card transactions cost firms and consumers large financial losses every year, and fraudsters continuously attempt to find new technologies and methods for committing fraudulent transactions. The detection of fraudulent transactions has become a significant factor affecting the greater utilization of electronic payment. Thus, there is a need for efficient and effective approaches for detecting fraud in credit card transactions. This paper proposes an intelligent approach for detecting fraud in credit card transactions using an optimized light gradient boosting machine (OLightGBM). In the proposed approach, a Bayesian-based hyperparameter optimization algorithm is intelligently integrated to tune the parameters of a light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM). To demonstrate the effectiveness of our…

Intrusion detection system (IDS) plays an important role in network security by discovering and preventing malicious activities. Due to the complex and time-varying network environment, the network intrusion samples are submerged into a large number of normal samples, which leads to insufficient samples for model training and detection results with a high false detection rate. According to the problem of data imbalance, we propose a network intrusion detection algorithm combined hybrid sampling with deep hierarchical network. Firstly, we use the one-side selection (OSS) to reduce the noise samples in majority category, and then increase the minority samples by Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE). In this way, a balanced dataset can be established to make the model fully learn the features of minority samples and greatly reduce the model training time. Secondly, we use convolution neural network (CNN) to extract spatial features and Bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) to extract temporal features, which forms a deep hierarchical network model. The proposed…

Deep learning (DL) algorithms are considered as a methodology of choice for remote-sensing image analysis over the past few years. Due to its effective applications, deep learning has also been introduced for automatic change detection and achieved great success. The present study attempts to provide a comprehensive review and a meta-analysis of the recent progress in this subfield. Specifically, we first introduce the fundamentals of deep learning methods which are frequently adopted for change detection. Secondly, we present the details of the meta-analysis conducted to examine the status of change detection DL studies. Then, we focus on deep learning-based change detection methodologies for remote sensing images by giving a general overview of the existing methods. Specifically, these deep learning-based methods were classified into three groups; fully supervised learning-based methods, fully unsupervised learning-based methods and transfer learning-based techniques. As a result of these investigations, promising new directions were identified for future research. This study will…

The utilization of renewable energy sources (RESs) has become significant throughout the world, especially over the last two decades. Although high-level RESs penetration reduces negative environmental impact compared to conventional fossil fuel-based energy generation, control issues become more complex as the system inertia is significantly decreased due to the absence of conventional synchronous generators. Some other technical issues, high uncertainties, low fault ride through capability, high fault current, low generation reserve, and low power quality, arise due to RESs integration. Renewable energy like solar and wind are highly uncertain due to the intermittent nature of wind and sunlight. Cutting edge technologies including different control strategies, optimization techniques, energy storage devices, and fault current limiters are employed to handle those issues. This paper summarizes several challenges in the integration process of high-level RESs to the existing grid. The respective solutions to each challenge are presented and discussed. A comprehensive list of…

Intrusion detection can identify unknown attacks from network traffics and has been an effective means of network security. Nowadays, existing methods for network anomaly detection are usually based on traditional machine learning models, such as KNN, SVM, etc. Although these methods can obtain some outstanding features, they get a relatively low accuracy and rely heavily on manual design of traffic features, which has been obsolete in the age of big data. To solve the problems of low accuracy and feature engineering in intrusion detection, a traffic anomaly detection model BAT is proposed. The BAT model combines BLSTM (Bidirectional Long Short-term memory) and attention mechanism. Attention mechanism is used to screen the network flow vector composed of packet vectors generated by the BLSTM model, which can obtain the key features for network traffic classification. In addition, we adopt multiple convolutional layers to capture the local features of traffic data. As multiple convolutional layers are used to process data samples, we refer BAT model as BAT-MC. The softmax classifier…

Nowadays billions of smart devices or things are present in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, such as homes, hospitals, factories, and vehicles, all around the world. As a result, the number of interconnected devices is continuously and rapidly growing. These devices communicate with each other and with other services using various communication protocols for the transportation of sensor or event data. These protocols enable applications to collect, store, process, describe, and analyze data to solve a variety of problems. IoT also aims to provide secure, bi-directional communication between interconnected devices, such as sensors, actuators, microcontrollers or smart appliances, and corresponding cloud services. In this paper we analyze the growth of M2M protocol research (MQTT, AMQP, and CoAP) over the past 20 years, and show how the growth in MQTT research stands out from the rest. We also gather relevant application areas of MQTT, as the most widespread M2M/IoT protocol, by performing a detailed literature search in major digital research archives. Our quantitative…

This study aims to explore the current status, potential applications, and future directions of blockchain technology in supply chain management. A literature survey, along with an analytical review, of blockchain-based supply chain research was conducted to better understand the trajectory of related research and shed light on the benefits, issues, and challenges in the blockchain-supply-chain paradigm. A selected corpus comprising 106 review articles was analyzed to provide an overview of the use of blockchain and smart contracts in supply chain management. The diverse industrial applications of these technologies in various sectors have increasingly received attention by researchers, engineers, and practitioners. Four major issues: traceability and transparency, stakeholder involvement and collaboration, supply chain integration and digitalization, and common frameworks on blockchain-based platforms, are critical for future orientation. Traditional supply chain activities involve several intermediaries, trust, and performance issues. The potential of blockchain can be leveraged…

Supply chains are evolving into automated and highly complex networks and are becoming an important source of potential benefits in the modern world. At the same time, consumers are now more interested in food product quality. However, it is challenging to track the provenance of data and maintain its traceability throughout the supply chain network. The traditional supply chains are centralized and they depend on a third party for trading. These centralized systems lack transparency, accountability and auditability. In our proposed solution, we have presented a complete solution for blockchain-based Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chain. It leverages the key features of blockchain and smart contracts, deployed over ethereum blockchain network. Although blockchain provides immutability of data and records in the network, it still fails to solve some major problems in supply chain management like credibility of the involved entities, accountability of the trading process and traceability of the products. Therefore, there is a need of a reliable system that ensures…

Fifth-generation (5G) telecommunication systems are expected to meet the world market demands of accessing and delivering services anywhere and anytime. The Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) systems are able to satisfy the requests of anywhere and anytime connections by offering wide-area coverage and ensuring service availability, continuity, and scalability. In this work, we review the 3GPP NTN features and their potential for satisfying the user expectations in 5G & beyond networks. The state of the art, current 3GPP research activities, and open issues are summarized to highlight the importance of NTN over the wireless communication landscape. Future research directions are also identified to assess the role of NTN in 5G and beyond systems.

Software-Defined Network (SDN) has been developed to reduce network complexity through control and manage the whole network from a centralized location. Today, SDN is widely implemented in many data center's network environments. Nevertheless, emerging technology itself can lead to many vulnerabilities and threats which are still challenging for manufacturers to address it. Therefore, deploying Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) to monitor malicious activities is a crucial part of the network architecture. Although the centralized view of the SDN network creates new opportunities for the implementation of IDSs, the performance of these detection techniques relies on the quality of the training datasets. Unfortunately, there are no publicly available datasets that can be used directly for anomaly detection systems applied in SDN networks. The majority of the published studies use non-compatible and outdated datasets, such as the KDD'99 dataset. This manuscript aims to generate an attack-specific SDN dataset and it is publicly available to the researchers. To the best of our…

There is an increasing interest and research effort focused on the analysis, design and implementation of distributed control systems for AC, DC and hybrid AC / DC microgrids. It is claimed that distributed controllers have several advantages over centralised control schemes, e.g., improved reliability, flexibility, controllability, black start operation, robustness to failure in the communication links, etc. In this work, an overview of the state-of-the-art of distributed cooperative control systems for isolated microgrids is presented. Protocols for cooperative control such as linear consensus, heterogeneous consensus and finite-time consensus are discussed and reviewed in this paper. Distributed cooperative algorithms for primary and secondary control systems, including (among others issues) virtual impedance, synthetic inertia, droop-free control, stability analysis, imbalance sharing, total harmonic distortion regulation, are also reviewed and discussed in this survey. Tertiary control systems, e.g., for economic dispatch of electric energy, based on cooperative control…

The very first infected novel coronavirus case (COVID-19) was found in Hubei, China in Dec. 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has spread over 214 countries and areas in the world, and has significantly affected every aspect of our daily lives. At the time of writing this article, the numbers of infected cases and deaths still increase significantly and have no sign of a well-controlled situation, e.g., as of 13 July 2020, from a total number of around 13.1 million positive cases, 571,527 deaths were reported in the world. Motivated by recent advances and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data in various areas, this paper aims at emphasizing their importance in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak and preventing the severe effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We firstly present an overview of AI and big data, then identify the applications aimed at fighting against COVID-19, next highlight challenges and issues associated with state-of-the-art solutions, and finally come up with recommendations for the communications to effectively control the COVID-19 situation. It is…

Melanoma is a type of skin cancer with a high mortality rate. The different types of skin lesions result in an inaccurate diagnosis due to their high similarity. Accurate classification of the skin lesions in their early stages enables dermatologists to treat the patients and save their lives. This paper proposes a model for a highly accurate classification of skin lesions. The proposed model utilized the transfer learning and pre-trained model with GoogleNet. The model parameters are used as initial values, and then these parameters will be modified through training. The latest well-known public challenge dataset, ISIC 2019, is used to test the ability of the proposed model to classify different kinds of skin lesions. The proposed model successfully classified the eight different classes of skin lesions, namely, melanoma, melanocytic nevus, basal cell carcinoma, actinic keratosis, benign keratosis, dermatofibroma, vascular lesion, and Squamous cell carcinoma. The achieved classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision percentages are 94.92%, 79.8%, 97%, and…

Emotional state recognition of a speaker is a difficult task for machine learning algorithms which plays an important role in the field of speech emotion recognition (SER). SER plays a significant role in many real-time applications such as human behavior assessment, human-robot interaction, virtual reality, and emergency centers to analyze the emotional state of speakers. Previous research in this field is mostly focused on handcrafted features and traditional convolutional neural network (CNN) models used to extract high-level features from speech spectrograms to increase the recognition accuracy and overall model cost complexity. In contrast, we introduce a novel framework for SER using a key sequence segment selection based on redial based function network (RBFN) similarity measurement in clusters. The selected sequence is converted into a spectrogram by applying the STFT algorithm and passed into the CNN model to extract the discriminative and salient features from the speech spectrogram. Furthermore, we normalize the CNN features to ensure precise recognition performance and…

Accurately detecting Parkinson's disease (PD) at an early stage is certainly indispensable for slowing down its progress and providing patients the possibility of accessing to disease-modifying therapy. Towards this end, the premotor stage in PD should be carefully monitored. An innovative deep-learning technique is introduced to early uncover whether an individual is affected with PD or not based on premotor features. Specifically, to uncover PD at an early stage, several indicators have been considered in this study, including Rapid Eye Movement and olfactory loss, Cerebrospinal fluid data, and dopaminergic imaging markers. A comparison between the proposed deep learning model and twelve machine learning and ensemble learning methods based on relatively small data including 183 healthy individuals and 401 early PD patients shows the superior detection performance of the designed model, which achieves the highest accuracy, 96.45% on average. Besides detecting the PD, we also provide the feature importance on the PD detection process based on the Boosting method.

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of lithium-ion batteries can reduce the risk of battery failure by predicting the end of life. In this paper, we propose novel RUL prediction techniques based on long short-term memory (LSTM). To estimate RUL even in the presence of capacity regeneration phenomenon, we consider multiple measurable data from battery management system such as voltage, current and temperature charging profiles whose patterns vary as aging. Unlike the traditional LSTM prediction that matches input layer with output layer as one-to-one structure, we leverage many-to-one structure to be flexible for various input types and to substantially reduce the number of parameters for better generalization. Using the NASA lithium-ion battery datasets, we verify the accuracy of the proposed LSTM-based RUL prediction. The experimental results show that the proposed single-channel LSTM model improves the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) by 39.2% compared to the baseline LSTM model. Furthermore, the proposed multi-channel LSTM model significantly improves the MAPE, e.g., by…

PM2.5 is one of the most important pollutants related to air quality, and the increase of its concentration will aggravate the threat to people's health. Therefore, the prediction of surface PM2.5 concentration is of great significance to human health protection. In this study, A hybrid CNN-LSTM model is developed by combining the convolutional neural network (CNN) with the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network for forecasting the next 24h PM2.5 concentration in Beijing, which makes full use of their advantages that CNN can effectively extract the features related to air quality and the LSTM can reflect the long term historical process of input time series data. The air quality data of the last 7days and the PM2.5 concentration of the next day are first set as the input and output of the model due to the periodicity, respectively. Subsequently four models namely univariate LSTM model, multivariate LSTM model, univariate CNN-LSTM model and multivariate CNN-LSTM model, are established for PM2.5 concentration prediction. Finally, mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square…

Load forecasting is a pivotal part of the power utility companies. To provide load-shedding free and uninterrupted power to the consumer, decision-makers in the utility sector must forecast the future demand for electricity with a minimum error percentage. Load prediction with less percentage of error can save millions of dollars to the utility companies. There are numerous Machine Learning (ML) techniques to amicably forecast electricity demand, among which the hybrid models show the best result. Two or more than two predictive models are amalgamated to design a hybrid model, each of which provides improved performances by the merit of individual algorithms. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art of electric load forecasting technologies and presents recent works pertaining to the combination of different ML algorithms into two or more methods for the construction of hybrid models. A comprehensive study of each single and multiple load forecasting model is performed with an in-depth analysis of their advantages, disadvantages, and functions. A comparison between their…

With the emergence of industry 4.0, the oil and gas (O&G) industry is now considering a range of digital technologies to enhance productivity, efficiency, and safety of their operations while minimizing capital and operating costs, health and environment risks, and variability in the O&G project life cycles. The deployment of emerging technologies allows O&G companies to construct digital twins (DT) of their assets. Considering DT adoption, the O&G industry is still at an early stage with implementations limited to isolated and selective applications instead of industry-wide implementation, limiting the benefits from DT implementation. To gain the full potential of DT and related technological adoption, a comprehensive understanding of DT technology, the current status of O&G-related DT research activities, and the opportunities and challenges associated with the deployment of DT in the O&G industry are of paramount importance. In order to develop this understanding, this paper presents a literature review of DT within the context of the O&G industry. The paper follows a systematic…

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a new kind of digital technology that increases its attention across academia, government, and industry sectors and covers a wide range of applications like agriculture, energy, medical, transportation, etc. The traditional power systems with physical equipment as a core element are more integrated with information and communication technology, which evolves into the Cyber-Physical Power System (CPPS). The CPPS consists of a physical system tightly integrated with cyber systems (control, computing, and communication functions) and allows the two-way flows of electricity and information for enabling smart grid technologies. Even though the digital technologies monitoring and controlling the electric power grid more efficiently and reliably, the power grid is vulnerable to cybersecurity risk and involves the complex interdependency between cyber and physical systems. Analyzing and resolving the problems in CPPS needs the modelling methods and systematic investigation of a complex interaction between cyber and physical systems. The conventional way of…

Smart wearables collect and analyze data, and in some scenarios make a smart decision and provide a response to the user and are finding more and more applications in our daily life. In this paper, we comprehensively survey the most recent and important research works conducted in the area of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) and classify the wearables into four major clusters: (i) health, (ii) sports and daily activity, (iii) tracking and localization, and (iv) safety. The fundamental differences of the algorithms associated within each cluster are grouped and analyzed and the research challenges and open issues in each cluster are discussed. This survey reveals that although Cellular IoT (CIoT) has many advantages and can bring enormous applications to IoT wearables, it has been rarely studied by the researchers. This article also addresses the opportunities and challenges related to implementing CIoT-enabled wearables.

An outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease (i.e., COVID-19) has been recorded in Wuhan, China since late December 2019, which subsequently became pandemic around the world. Although COVID-19 is an acutely treated disease, it can also be fatal with a risk of fatality of 4.03% in China and the highest of 13.04% in Algeria and 12.67% Italy (as of 8th April 2020). The onset of serious illness may result in death as a consequence of substantial alveolar damage and progressive respiratory failure. Although laboratory testing, e.g., using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), is the golden standard for clinical diagnosis, the tests may produce false negatives. Moreover, under the pandemic situation, shortage of RT-PCR testing resources may also delay the following clinical decision and treatment. Under such circumstances, chest CT imaging has become a valuable tool for both diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 patients. In this study, we propose a weakly supervised deep learning strategy for detecting and classifying COVID-19 infection from CT images. The proposed method…

Internet of everything (IoE)-based smart services are expected to gain immense popularity in the future, which raises the need for next-generation wireless networks. Although fifth-generation (5G) networks can support various IoE services, they might not be able to completely fulfill the requirements of novel applications. Sixth-generation (6G) wireless systems are envisioned to overcome 5G network limitations. In this article, we explore recent advances made toward enabling 6G systems. We devise a taxonomy based on key enabling technologies, use cases, emerging machine learning schemes, communication technologies, networking technologies, and computing technologies. Furthermore, we identify and discuss open research challenges, such as artificial-intelligence-based adaptive transceivers, intelligent wireless energy harvesting, decentralized and secure business models, intelligent cell-less architecture, and distributed security models. We propose practical guidelines including deep Q-learning and federated learning-based transceivers, blockchain-based secure business models,…

Federated learning is a newly emerged distributed machine learning paradigm, where the clients are allowed to individually train local deep neural network (DNN) models with local data and then jointly aggregate a global DNN model at the central server. Vehicular edge computing (VEC) aims at exploiting the computation and communication resources at the edge of vehicular networks. Federated learning in VEC is promising to meet the ever-increasing demands of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in intelligent connected vehicles (ICV). Considering image classification as a typical AI application in VEC, the diversity of image quality and computation capability in vehicular clients potentially affects the accuracy and efficiency of federated learning. Accordingly, we propose a selective model aggregation approach, where “fine” local DNN models are selected and sent to the central server by evaluating the local image quality and computation capability. Regarding the implementation of model selection, the central server is not aware of the image quality and computation capability in…

Increasing use of renewable energy sources, liberalized energy markets and most importantly, the integrations of various monitoring, measuring and communication infrastructures into modern power system network offer the opportunity to build a resilient and efficient grid. However, it also brings about various threats of instabilities and security concerns in form of cyberattack, voltage instability, power quality (PQ) disturbance among others to the complex network. The need for efficient methodologies for quicker identification and detection of these problems have always been a priority to energy stakeholders over the years. In recent times, machine learning techniques (MLTs) have proven to be effective in numerous applications including power system studies. In the literature, various MLTs such as artificial neural networks (ANN), Decision Tree (DT), support vector machines (SVM) have been proposed, resulting in effective decision making and control actions in the secured and stable operations of the power system. Given this growing trend, this paper presents a comprehensive…

Android applications are developing rapidly across the mobile ecosystem, but Android malware is also emerging in an endless stream. Many researchers have studied the problem of Android malware detection and have put forward theories and methods from different perspectives. Existing research suggests that machine learning is an effective and promising way to detect Android malware. Notwithstanding, there exist reviews that have surveyed different issues related to Android malware detection based on machine learning. We believe our work complements the previous reviews by surveying a wider range of aspects of the topic. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of Android malware detection approaches based on machine learning. We briefly introduce some background on Android applications, including the Android system architecture, security mechanisms, and classification of Android malware. Then, taking machine learning as the focus, we analyze and summarize the research status from key perspectives such as sample acquisition, data preprocessing, feature selection, machine learning…

Heart disease, one of the major causes of mortality worldwide, can be mitigated by early heart disease diagnosis. A clinical decision support system (CDSS) can be used to diagnose the subjects' heart disease status earlier. This study proposes an effective heart disease prediction model (HDPM) for a CDSS which consists of Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) to detect and eliminate the outliers, a hybrid Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique-Edited Nearest Neighbor (SMOTE-ENN) to balance the training data distribution and XGBoost to predict heart disease. Two publicly available datasets (Statlog and Cleveland) were used to build the model and compare the results with those of other models (naive bayes (NB), logistic regression (LR), multilayer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), and random forest (RF)) and of previous study results. The results revealed that the proposed model outperformed other models and previous study results by achieving accuracies of 95.90% and 98.40% for Statlog and Cleveland datasets,…

In the last decades, fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have become increasingly attractive to medical applications due to their unique properties such as small size, biocompatibility, immunity to electromagnetic interferences, high sensitivity and multiplexing capability. FBGs have been employed in the development of surgical tools, assistive devices, wearables, and biosensors, showing great potentialities for medical uses. This paper reviews the FBG-based measuring systems, their principle of work, and their applications in medicine and healthcare. Particular attention is given to sensing solutions for biomechanics, minimally invasive surgery, physiological monitoring, and medical biosensing. Strengths, weaknesses, open challenges, and future trends are also discussed to highlight how FBGs can meet the demands of next-generation medical devices and healthcare system.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming an integral part of our life and also multiple industries. We expect to see the number of IoT connected devices explosively grows and will reach hundreds of billions during the next few years. To support such a massive connectivity, various wireless technologies are investigated. In this survey, we provide a broad view of the existing wireless IoT connectivity technologies and discuss several new emerging technologies and solutions that can be effectively used to enable massive connectivity for IoT. In particular, we categorize the existing wireless IoT connectivity technologies based on coverage range and review diverse types of connectivity technologies with different specifications. We also point out key technical challenges of the existing connectivity technologies for enabling massive IoT connectivity. To address the challenges, we further review and discuss some examples of promising technologies such as compressive sensing (CS) random access, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and massive multiple input multiple output…

Oral cancer is a major global health issue accounting for 177,384 deaths in 2018 and it is most prevalent in low- and middle-income countries. Enabling automation in the identification of potentially malignant and malignant lesions in the oral cavity would potentially lead to low-cost and early diagnosis of the disease. Building a large library of well-annotated oral lesions is key. As part of the MeMoSA®(Mobile Mouth Screening Anywhere) project, images are currently in the process of being gathered from clinical experts from across the world, who have been provided with an annotation tool to produce rich labels. A novel strategy to combine bounding box annotations from multiple clinicians is provided in this paper. Further to this, deep neural networks were used to build automated systems, in which complex patterns were derived for tackling this difficult task. Using the initial data gathered in this study, two deep learning based computer vision approaches were assessed for the automated detection and classification of oral lesions for the early detection of oral cancer, these…

The dynamic uncertain environment and complex tasks determine that the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system is bound to develop towards clustering, autonomy, and intelligence. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of UAV swarm intelligence from the hierarchical framework perspective. Firstly, we review the basics and advances of UAV swarm intelligent technology. Then we look inside to investigate the research work by classifying UAV swarm intelligence research into five layers, i.e., decision-making layer, path planning layer, control layer, communication layer, and application layer. Furthermore, the relationship between each level is explicitly illustrated, and the research trends of each layer are given. Finally, limitations and possible technology trends of swarm intelligence are also covered to enable further research interests. Through this in-depth literature review, we intend to provide novel insights into the latest technologies in UAV swarm intelligence.

In this paper, a forecasting algorithm is proposed to predict photovoltaic (PV) power generation using a long short term memory (LSTM) neural network (NN). A synthetic weather forecast is created for the targeted PV plant location by integrating the statistical knowledge of historical solar irradiance data with the publicly available type of sky forecast of the host city. To achieve this, a K-means algorithm is used to classify the historical irradiance data into dynamic type of sky groups that vary from hour to hour in the same season. In other words, the types of sky are defined for each hour uniquely using different levels of irradiance based on the hour of the day and the season. This can mitigate the performance limitations of using fixed type of sky categories by translating them into dynamic and numerical irradiance forecast using historical irradiance data. The proposed synthetic weather forecast is proved to embed the statistical features of the historical weather data, which results in a significant improvement in the forecasting accuracy. The performance of the proposed…

Forecasting of fast fluctuated and high-frequency financial data is always a challenging problem in the field of economics and modelling. In this study, a novel hybrid model with the strength of fractional order derivative is presented with their dynamical features of deep learning, long-short term memory (LSTM) networks, to predict the abrupt stochastic variation of the financial market. Stock market prices are dynamic, highly sensitive, nonlinear and chaotic. There are different techniques for forecast prices in the time-variant domain and due to variability and uncertain behavior in stock prices, traditional methods, such as data mining, statistical approaches, and non-deep neural networks models are not suited for prediction and generalized forecasting stock prices. While autoregressive fractional integrated moving average (ARFIMA) model provides a flexible tool for classes of long-memory models. The advancement of machine learning-based deep non-linear modelling confirms that the hybrid model efficiently extracts profound features and model non-linear functions. LSTM networks…

In the last decade, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has become a vibrant research area, especially due to the spread of electronic devices such as smartphones, smartwatches and video cameras present in our daily lives. In addition, the advance of deep learning and other machine learning algorithms has allowed researchers to use HAR in various domains including sports, health and well-being applications. For example, HAR is considered as one of the most promising assistive technology tools to support elderly's daily life by monitoring their cognitive and physical function through daily activities. This survey focuses on critical role of machine learning in developing HAR applications based on inertial sensors in conjunction with physiological and environmental sensors.

Images captured under poor illumination conditions often exhibit characteristics such as low brightness, low contrast, a narrow gray range, and color distortion, as well as considerable noise, which seriously affect the subjective visual effect on human eyes and greatly limit the performance of various machine vision systems. The role of low-light image enhancement is to improve the visual effect of such images for the benefit of subsequent processing. This paper reviews the main techniques of low-light image enhancement developed over the past decades. First, we present a new classification of these algorithms, dividing them into seven categories: gray transformation methods, histogram equalization methods, Retinex methods, frequency-domain methods, image fusion methods, defogging model methods and machine learning methods. Then, all the categories of methods, including subcategories, are introduced in accordance with their principles and characteristics. In addition, various quality evaluation methods for enhanced images are detailed, and comparisons of different algorithms are…

Face recognition technology is a biometric technology, which is based on the identification of facial features of a person. People collect the face images, and the recognition equipment automatically processes the images. The paper introduces the related researches of face recognition from different perspectives. The paper describes the development stages and the related technologies of face recognition. We introduce the research of face recognition for real conditions, and we introduce the general evaluation standards and the general databases of face recognition. We give a forward-looking view of face recognition. Face recognition has become the future development direction and has many potential application prospects.

Nowadays synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems with the capability to radiate waves in more than one pattern and polarization are playing a key role in modern telecommunication and radar systems. This is possible with the use of antenna arrays as they offer advantages of high gain and beamforming capability, which can be utilized for controlling radiation pattern for electromagnetic (EM) interference immunity in wireless systems. However, with the growing demand for compact array antennas, the physical footprint of the arrays needs to be smaller and the consequent of this is severe degradation in the performance of the array resulting from strong mutual-coupling and crosstalk effects between adjacent radiating elements. This review presents a detailed systematic and theoretical study of various mutual-coupling suppression (decoupling) techniques with a strong focus on metamaterial (MTM) and metasurface (MTS) approaches. While the performance of systems employing antenna arrays can be enhanced by calibrating out the interferences…

Recent developments in technology have introduced dramatic changes to the practice of the accounting profession. This paper provides a comprehensive review of current developments in big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain utilized in general business practice and by specialized practitioners in the accounting profession worldwide. This paper explores the evolution of the accounting profession following these recent technological developments and assesses the impact of future developments. Inherent challenges and opportunities posed by these new technologies pertaining to accounting professionals and accounting educators are also examined, including an increased demand for IT professionals with accounting experience as opposed to accounting major graduates. Considering the dramatic changes and developments of AI applications in accounting, this paper reflects how all these technologies and the associated requirements of job candidates will affect the desired capabilities of accounting graduates and provides further discussion regarding what higher…