The 100 most-cited articles in IEEE Access, 2021

U-net is an image segmentation technique developed primarily for image segmentation tasks. These traits provide U-net with a high utility within the medical imaging community and have resulted in extensive adoption of U-net as the primary tool for segmentation tasks in medical imaging. The success of U-net is evident in its widespread use in nearly all major image modalities, from CT scans and MRI to X-rays and microscopy. Furthermore, while U-net is largely a segmentation tool, there have been instances of the use of U-net in other applications. Given that U-net's potential is still increasing, this narrative literature review examines the numerous developments and breakthroughs in the U-net architecture and provides observations on recent trends. We also discuss the many innovations that have advanced in deep learning and discuss how these tools facilitate U-net. In addition, we review the different image modalities and application areas that have been enhanced by U-net.

Deep learning is a branch of artificial intelligence. In recent years, with the advantages of automatic learning and feature extraction, it has been widely concerned by academic and industrial circles. It has been widely used in image and video processing, voice processing, and natural language processing. At the same time, it has also become a research hotspot in the field of agricultural plant protection, such as plant disease recognition and pest range assessment, etc. The application of deep learning in plant disease recognition can avoid the disadvantages caused by artificial selection of disease spot features, make plant disease feature extraction more objective, and improve the research efficiency and technology transformation speed. This review provides the research progress of deep learning technology in the field of crop leaf disease identification in recent years. In this paper, we present the current trends and challenges for the detection of plant leaf disease using deep learning and advanced imaging techniques. We hope that this work will be a valuable resource for…

This paper provides an extensive review of the popular multi-objective optimization algorithm NSGA-II for selected combinatorial optimization problems viz. assignment problem, allocation problem, travelling salesman problem, vehicle routing problem, scheduling problem, and knapsack problem. It is identified that based on the manner in which NSGA-II has been implemented for solving the aforementioned group of problems, there can be three categories: Conventional NSGA-II, where the authors have implemented the basic version of NSGA-II, without making any changes in the operators; the second one is Modified NSGA-II, where the researchers have implemented NSGA-II after making some changes into it and finally, Hybrid NSGA-II variants, where the researchers have hybridized the conventional and modified NSGA-II with some other technique. The article analyses the modifications in NSGA-II and also discusses the various performance assessment techniques used by the researchers, i.e., test instances, performance metrics, statistical tests, case studies, benchmarking with other state-of-the-art…

Employing large intelligent surfaces (LISs) is a promising solution for improving the coverage and rate of future wireless systems. These surfaces comprise massive numbers of nearly-passive elements that interact with the incident signals, for example by reflecting them, in a smart way that improves the wireless system performance. Prior work focused on the design of the LIS reflection matrices assuming full channel knowledge. Estimating these channels at the LIS, however, is a key challenging problem. With the massive number of LIS elements, channel estimation or reflection beam training will be associated with (i) huge training overhead if all the LIS elements are passive (not connected to a baseband) or with (ii) prohibitive hardware complexity and power consumption if all the elements are connected to the baseband through a fully-digital or hybrid analog/digital architecture. This paper proposes efficient solutions for these problems by leveraging tools from compressive sensing and deep learning. First, a novel LIS architecture based on sparse channel sensors is proposed. In…

Anomaly detection has been used for decades to identify and extract anomalous components from data. Many techniques have been used to detect anomalies. One of the increasingly significant techniques is Machine Learning (ML), which plays an important role in this area. In this research paper, we conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) which analyzes ML models that detect anomalies in their application. Our review analyzes the models from four perspectives; the applications of anomaly detection, ML techniques, performance metrics for ML models, and the classification of anomaly detection. In our review, we have identified 290 research articles, written from 2000-2020, that discuss ML techniques for anomaly detection. After analyzing the selected research articles, we present 43 different applications of anomaly detection found in the selected research articles. Moreover, we identify 29 distinct ML models used in the identification of anomalies. Finally, we present 22 different datasets that are applied in experiments on anomaly detection, as well as many other general datasets.…

This paper surveys current literature on modeling methods, control techniques, protection schemes, applications, and real-world implementations pertaining to grid forming inverters (GFMIs). Electric power systems are increasingly being augmented with inverter-based resources (IBRs). While having a growing share of IBRs, conventional synchronous generator-based voltage and frequency control mechanisms are still prevalent in the power industry. Therefore, IBRs are experiencing a growing demand for mimicking the behavior of synchronous generators, which is not possible with conventional grid following inverters (GFLIs). As a solution, the concept of GFMIs is currently emerging, which is drawing increased attention from academia and the industry. This paper presents a comprehensive review of GFMIs covering recent advancements in control technologies, fault ride-through capabilities, stability enhancement measures, and practical implementations. Moreover, the challenges in adding GFMIs into existing power systems, including a seamless transition from grid-connected mode to the standalone…

Feature selection is a critical and prominent task in machine learning. To reduce the dimension of the feature set while maintaining the accuracy of the performance is the main aim of the feature selection problem. Various methods have been developed to classify the datasets. However, metaheuristic algorithms have achieved great attention in solving numerous optimization problem. Therefore, this paper presents an extensive literature review on solving feature selection problem using metaheuristic algorithms which are developed in the ten years (2009-2019). Further, metaheuristic algorithms have been classified into four categories based on their behaviour. Moreover, a categorical list of more than a hundred metaheuristic algorithms is presented. To solve the feature selection problem, only binary variants of metaheuristic algorithms have been reviewed and corresponding to their categories, a detailed description of them explained. The metaheuristic algorithms in solving feature selection problem are given with their binary classification, name of the classifier used, datasets and…

Digital twinning is one of the top ten technology trends in the last couple of years, due to its high applicability in the industrial sector. The integration of big data analytics and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI-ML) techniques with digital twinning, further enriches its significance and research potential with new opportunities and unique challenges. To date, a number of scientific models have been designed and implemented related to this evolving topic. However, there is no systematic review of digital twinning, particularly focusing on the role of AI-ML and big data, to guide the academia and industry towards future developments. Therefore, this article emphasizes the role of big data and AI-ML in the creation of digital twins (DTs) or DT-based systems for various industrial applications, by highlighting the current state-of-the-art deployments. We performed a systematic review on top of multidisciplinary electronic bibliographic databases, in addition to existing patents in the field. Also, we identified development-tools that can facilitate various levels of the…

As industries become automated and connectivity technologies advance, a wide range of systems continues to generate massive amounts of data. Many approaches have been proposed to extract principal indicators from the vast sea of data to represent the entire system state. Detecting anomalies using these indicators on time prevent potential accidents and economic losses. Anomaly detection in multivariate time series data poses a particular challenge because it requires simultaneous consideration of temporal dependencies and relationships between variables. Recent deep learning-based works have made impressive progress in this field. They are highly capable of learning representations of the large-scaled sequences in an unsupervised manner and identifying anomalies from the data. However, most of them are highly specific to the individual use case and thus require domain knowledge for appropriate deployment. This review provides a background on anomaly detection in time-series data and reviews the latest applications in the real world. Also, we comparatively analyze state-of-the-art…

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are among the most common serious illnesses affecting human health. CVDs may be prevented or mitigated by early diagnosis, and this may reduce mortality rates. Identifying risk factors using machine learning models is a promising approach. We would like to propose a model that incorporates different methods to achieve effective prediction of heart disease. For our proposed model to be successful, we have used efficient Data Collection, Data Pre-processing and Data Transformation methods to create accurate information for the training model. We have used a combined dataset (Cleveland, Long Beach VA, Switzerland, Hungarian and Stat log). Suitable features are selected by using the Relief, and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) techniques. New hybrid classifiers like Decision Tree Bagging Method (DTBM), Random Forest Bagging Method (RFBM), K-Nearest Neighbors Bagging Method (KNNBM), AdaBoost Boosting Method (ABBM), and Gradient Boosting Boosting Method (GBBM) are developed by integrating the traditional classifiers with bagging and…

The commercial fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications networks have already been deployed with the aim of providing high data rates. However, the rapid growth in the number of smart devices and the emergence of the Internet of Everything (IoE) applications, which require an ultra-reliable and low-latency communication, will result in a substantial burden on the 5G wireless networks. As such, the data rate that could be supplied by 5G networks will unlikely sustain the enormous ongoing data traffic explosion. This has motivated research into continuing to advance the existing wireless networks toward the future generation of cellular systems, known as sixth generation (6G). Therefore, it is essential to provide a prospective vision of the 6G and the key enabling technologies for realizing future networks. To this end, this paper presents a comprehensive review/survey of the future evolution of 6G networks. Specifically, the objective of the paper is to provide a comprehensive review/survey about the key enabling technologies for 6G networks, which include a discussion about…

Optimization algorithms are one of the effective stochastic methods in solving optimization problems. In this paper, a new swarm-based algorithm called Northern Goshawk Optimization (NGO) algorithm is presented that simulates the behavior of northern goshawk during prey hunting. This hunting strategy includes two phases of prey identification and the tail and chase process. The various steps of the proposed NGO algorithm are described and then its mathematical modeling is presented for use in solving optimization problems. The ability of NGO to solve optimization problems is evaluated on sixty-eight different objective functions. To analyze the quality of the results, the proposed NGO algorithm is compared with eight well-known algorithms, particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm, teaching-learning based optimization, gravitational search algorithm, grey wolf optimizer, whale optimization algorithm, tunicate swarm algorithm, and marine predators algorithm. In addition, for further analysis, the proposed algorithm is also employed to solve four engineering design problems. The…

In recent years, due to the wide utilization of direct current (DC) power sources, such as solar photovoltaic (PV), fuel cells, different DC loads, high-level integration of different energy storage systems such as batteries, supercapacitors, DC microgrids have been gaining more importance. Furthermore, unlike conventional AC systems, DC microgrids do not have issues such as synchronization, harmonics, reactive power control, and frequency control. However, the incorporation of different distributed generators, such as PV, wind, fuel cell, loads, and energy storage devices in the common DC bus complicates the control of DC bus voltage as well as the power-sharing. In order to ensure the secure and safe operation of DC microgrids, different control techniques, such as centralized, decentralized, distributed, multilevel, and hierarchical control, are presented. The optimal planning of DC microgrids has an impact on operation and control algorithms; thus, coordination among them is required. A detailed review of the planning, operation, and control of DC microgrids is missing in the…

Due to the sheer global energy crisis, concerns about fuel exhaustion, electricity shortages, and global warming are becoming increasingly severe. Solar and wind energy, which are clean and renewable, provide solutions to these problems through distributed generators. Microgrids, as an essential interface to connect the power produced by renewable energy resources-based distributed generators to the power system, have become a research hotspot. Modern research in the field of microgrids has focused on the integration of microgrid technology at the load level. Due to the complexity of protection and control of multiple interconnected distributed generators, the traditional power grids are now outmoded. Microgrids are feasible alternatives to the conventional grid since they provide an integrating platform for micro-resources-based distributed generators, storage equipment, loads, and voltage source converters at the user end, all within a compact footprint. A microgrid can be architected to function either in grid-connected or standalone mode, depending upon the generation,…

In this study, a new technique is proposed to forecast short-term electrical load. Load forecasting is an integral part of power system planning and operation. Precise forecasting of load is essential for unit commitment, capacity planning, network augmentation and demand side management. Load forecasting can be generally categorized into three classes such as short-term, midterm and long-term. Short-term forecasting is usually done to predict load for next few hours to few weeks. In the literature, various methodologies such as regression analysis, machine learning approaches, deep learning methods and artificial intelligence systems have been used for short-term load forecasting. However, existing techniques may not always provide higher accuracy in short-term load forecasting. To overcome this challenge, a new approach is proposed in this paper for short-term load forecasting. The developed method is based on the integration of convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The method is applied to Bangladesh power system to provide short-term…

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that is making a great impact on modern society due to its transparency, decentralization, and security properties. Blockchain gained considerable attention due to its very first application of Cryptocurrencies e.g., Bitcoin. In the near future, Blockchain technology is determined to transform the way we live, interact, and perform businesses. Recently, academics, industrialists, and researchers are aggressively investigating different aspects of Blockchain as an emerging technology. Unlike other Blockchain surveys focusing on either its applications, challenges, characteristics, or security, we present a comprehensive survey of Blockchain technology’s evolution, architecture, development frameworks, and security issues. We also present a comparative analysis of frameworks, classification of consensus algorithms, and analysis of security risks & cryptographic primitives that have been used in the Blockchain so far. Finally, this paper elaborates on key future directions, novel use cases and open research challenges, which could be explored by…

Encoder-decoder networks are state-of-the-art approaches to biomedical image segmentation, but have two problems: i.e., the widely used pooling operations may discard spatial information, and therefore low-level semantics are lost. Feature fusion methods can mitigate these problems but feature maps of different scales cannot be easily fused because downand upsampling change the spatial resolution of feature map. To address these issues, we propose INet, which enlarges receptive fields by increasing the kernel sizes of convolutional layers in steps (e.g., from 3 × 3 to 7 × 7 and then 15 × 15) instead of downsampling. Inspired by an Inception module, INet extracts features by kernels of different sizes through concatenating the output feature maps of all preceding convolutional layers. We also find that the large kernel makes the network feasible for biomedical image segmentation. In addition, INet uses two overlapping max-poolings, i.e., max-poolings with stride 1, to extract the sharpest features. Fixed-size and fixed-channel feature maps enable INet to concatenate feature maps and…

The 6G vision of creating authentic digital twin representations of the physical world calls for new sensing solutions to compose multi-layered maps of our environments. Radio sensing using the mobile communication network as a sensor has the potential to become an essential component of the solution. With the evolution of cellular systems to mmWave bands in 5G and potentially sub-THz bands in 6G, small cell deployments will begin to dominate. Large bandwidth systems deployed in small cell configurations provide an unprecedented opportunity to employ the mobile network for sensing. In this paper, we focus on the major design aspects of such a cellular joint communication and sensing (JCAS) system. We present an analysis of the choice of the waveform that points towards choosing the one that is best suited for communication also for radar sensing. We discuss several techniques for efficiently integrating the sensing capability into the JCAS system, some of which are applicable with NR air-interface for evolved 5G systems. Specifically, methods for reducing sensing overhead by…

Considering a future scenario in which a driverless Electric Vehicle (EV) needs an automatic charging system without human intervention. In this regard, there is a requirement for a fully automatable, fast, safe, cost-effective, and reliable charging infrastructure that provides a profitable business model and fast adoption in the electrified transportation systems. These qualities can be comprehended through wireless charging systems. Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) is a futuristic technology with the advantage of flexibility, convenience, safety, and the capability of becoming fully automated. In WPT methods resonant inductive wireless charging has to gain more attention compared to other wireless power transfer methods due to high efficiency and easy maintenance. This literature presents a review of the status of Resonant Inductive Wireless Power Transfer Charging technology also highlighting the present status and its future of the wireless EV market. First, the paper delivers a brief history throw lights on wireless charging methods, highlighting the pros and cons. Then, the…

Since the advent of distributed ledger technologies, they have provided diverse opportunities in a wide range of application domains. This article brings a comprehensive review of the fundamentals of distributed ledger and its variants. Analyzing 185 publications, ranging from academic journals to industry websites, it provides a comparative analysis of 130 consensus algorithms using a novel architectural classification. The distribution of the reviewed algorithms is analyzed in terms of the proposed classification and different application domains, along with the applicability of each class among the top 10 platforms in the most prominent blockchain application domains. Additional conclusions are drawn from the evolution of consensus mechanisms, and the analysis concludes envisaging future prospects for consensus as an important part of distributed ledger technology.

Herein, we focus on convergent 6G communication, localization and sensing systems by identifying key technology enablers, discussing their underlying challenges, implementation issues, and recommending potential solutions. Moreover, we discuss exciting new opportunities for integrated localization and sensing applications, which will disrupt traditional design principles and revolutionize the way we live, interact with our environment, and do business. Regarding potential enabling technologies, 6G will continue to develop towards even higher frequency ranges, wider bandwidths, and massive antenna arrays. In turn, this will enable sensing solutions with very fine range, Doppler, and angular resolutions, as well as localization to cm-level degree of accuracy. Besides, new materials, device types, and reconfigurable surfaces will allow network operators to reshape and control the electromagnetic response of the environment. At the same time, machine learning and artificial intelligence will leverage the unprecedented availability of data and computing resources to tackle the biggest…

An intrusion detection system (IDS) is an important protection instrument for detecting complex network attacks. Various machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) algorithms have been proposed for implementing anomaly-based IDS (AIDS). Our review of the AIDS literature identifies some issues in related work, including the randomness of the selected algorithms, parameters, and testing criteria, the application of old datasets, or shallow analyses and validation of the results. This paper comprehensively reviews previous studies on AIDS by using a set of criteria with different datasets and types of attacks to set benchmarking outcomes that can reveal the suitable AIDS algorithms, parameters, and testing criteria. Specifically, this paper applies 10 popular supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms for identifying effective and efficient ML-AIDS of networks and computers. These supervised ML algorithms include the artificial neural network (ANN), decision tree (DT), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), naive Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and convolutional…

This research introduces a path planning method based on the geometric A-star algorithm. The whole approach is applied to an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) in order to avoid the problems of many nodes, long-distance and large turning angle, and these problems usually exist in the sawtooth and cross paths produced by the traditional A-star algorithm. First, a grid method models a port environment. Second, the nodes in the close-list are filtered by the functions P(x,y ) and W(x,y ) and the nodes that do not meet the requirements are removed to avoid the generation of irregular paths. Simultaneously, to enhance the stability of the AGV regarding turning paths, the polyline at the turning path is replaced by a cubic B-spline curve. The path planning experimental results applied to different scenarios and different specifications showed that compared with other seven different algorithms, the geometric A-star algorithm reduces the number of nodes by 10% ~ 40%, while the number of turns is reduced by 25%, the turning angle is reduced by 33.3%, and the total distance is reduced by 25.5%.…

Stress is an escalated psycho-physiological state of the human body emerging in response to a challenging event or a demanding condition. Environmental factors that trigger stress are called stressors. In case of prolonged exposure to multiple stressors impacting simultaneously, a person's mental and physical health can be adversely affected which can further lead to chronic health issues. To prevent stress-related issues, it is necessary to detect them in the nascent stages which are possible only by continuous monitoring of stress. Wearable devices promise real-time and continuous data collection, which helps in personal stress monitoring. In this paper, a comprehensive review has been presented, which focuses on stress detection using wearable sensors and applied machine learning techniques. This paper investigates the stress detection approaches adopted in accordance with the sensory devices such as wearable sensors, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electroencephalography (EEG), and Photoplethysmography (PPG), and also depending on various environments like during driving, studying, and…

Even if measuring the outcome of binary classifications is a pivotal task in machine learning and statistics, no consensus has been reached yet about which statistical rate to employ to this end. In the last century, the computer science and statistics communities have introduced several scores summing up the correctness of the predictions with respect to the ground truth values. Among these scores, the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) was shown to have several advantages over confusion entropy, accuracy, F1score, balanced accuracy, bookmaker informedness, markedness, and diagnostic odds ratio: MCC, in fact, produces a high score only if the majority of the predicted negative data instances and the majority of the positive data instances are correct, and therefore it results being very trustworthy on imbalanced datasets. In this study, we compare MCC with two other popular scores: Cohen's Kappa, a metric that originated in social sciences, and the Brier score, a strictly proper scoring function which emerged in weather forecasting studies. After explaining the mathematical…

Sustainable agricultural development is a significant solution with fast population development through the use of information and communication (ICT) in precision agriculture, which produced new methods for making cultivation further productive, proficient, well-regulated while preserving the climate. Big data (machine learning, deep learning, etc.) is amongst the vital technologies of ICT employed in precision agriculture for their huge data analytical capabilities to abstract significant information and to assist agricultural practitioners to comprehend well farming practices and take precise decisions. The main goal of this article is to acquire an awareness of the Big Data latest applications in smart agriculture and be acquainted with related social and financial challenges to be concentrated on. This article features data creation methods, accessibility of technology, accessibility of devices, software tools, and data analytic methods, and appropriate applications of big data in precision agriculture. Besides, there are still a few challenges that come across the widespread…

IoT is becoming more common and popular due to its wide range of applications in various domains. They collect data from the real environment and transfer it over the networks. There are many challenges while deploying IoT in a real-world, varying from tiny sensors to servers. Security is considered as the number one challenge in IoT deployments, as most of the IoT devices are physically accessible in the real world and many of them are limited in resources (such as energy, memory, processing power and even physical space). In this paper, we are focusing on these resource-constrained IoT devices (such as RFID tags, sensors, smart cards, etc.) as securing them in such circumstances is a challenging task. The communication from such devices can be secured by a mean of lightweight cryptography, a lighter version of cryptography. More than fifty lightweight cryptography (plain encryption) algorithms are available in the market with a focus on a specific application(s), and another 57 algorithms have been submitted by the researchers to the NIST competition recently. To provide a…

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is prospering and entering every part of our lives, be it education, home, vehicles, or healthcare. With the increase in the number of connected devices, several challenges are also coming up with IoT technology: heterogeneity, scalability, quality of service, security requirements, and many more. Security management takes a back seat in IoT because of cost, size, and power. It poses a significant risk as lack of security makes users skeptical towards using IoT devices. This, in turn, makes IoT vulnerable to security attacks, ultimately causing enormous financial and reputational losses. It makes up for an urgent need to assess present security risks and discuss the upcoming challenges to be ready to face the same. The undertaken study is a multi-fold survey of different security issues present in IoT layers: perception layer, network layer, support layer, application layer, with further focus on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks are significant threats for the cyber world because of their potential to bring down the…

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the primary causes of cancer death among women. Early detection of BC allows patients to receive appropriate treatment, thus increasing the possibility of survival. In this work, a new deep-learning (DL) model based on the transfer-learning (TL) technique is developed to efficiently assist in the automatic detection and diagnosis of the BC suspected area based on two techniques namely 80-20 and cross-validation. DL architectures are modeled to be problem-specific. TL uses the knowledge gained during solving one problem in another relevant problem. In the proposed model, the features are extracted from the mammographic image analysis- society (MIAS) dataset using a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture such as Inception V3, ResNet50, Visual Geometry Group networks (VGG)-19, VGG-16, and Inception-V2 ResNet. Six evaluation metrics for evaluating the performance of the proposed model in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F-score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC) has been chosen. Experimental results show that the…

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has accelerated strong interests in the development of low-power wireless sensors. Today, wireless sensors are integrated within IoT systems to gather information in a reliable and practical manner to monitor processes and control activities in areas such as transportation, energy, civil infrastructure, smart buildings, environment monitoring, healthcare, defense, manufacturing, and production. The long-term and self-sustainable operation of these IoT devices must be considered early on when they are designed and implemented. Traditionally, wireless sensors have often been powered by batteries, which, despite allowing low overall system costs, can negatively impact the lifespan and the performance of the entire network they are used in. Energy Harvesting (EH) technology is a promising environment-friendly solution that extends the lifetime of these sensors, and, in some cases completely replaces the use of battery power. In addition, energy harvesting offers economic and practical advantages through the optimal use of energy, and the…

Visual scene understanding is the core task in making any crucial decision in any computer vision system. Although popular computer vision datasets like Cityscapes, MS-COCO, PASCAL provide good benchmarks for several tasks (e.g. image classification, segmentation, object detection), these datasets are hardly suitable for post disaster damage assessments. On the other hand, existing natural disaster datasets include mainly satellite imagery which has low spatial resolution and a high revisit period. Therefore, they do not have a scope to provide quick and efficient damage assessment tasks. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can effortlessly access difficult places during any disaster and collect high resolution imagery that is required for aforementioned tasks of computer vision. To address these issues we present a high resolution UAV imagery, FloodNet, captured after the hurricane Harvey. This dataset demonstrates the post flooded damages of the affected areas. The images are labeled pixel-wise for semantic segmentation task and questions are produced for the task of visual question…

Healthcare supply chains are complex structures spanning across multiple organizational and geographical boundaries, providing critical backbone to services vital for everyday life. The inherent complexity of such systems can introduce impurities including inaccurate information, lack of transparency and limited data provenance. Counterfeit drugs is one consequence of such limitations within existing supply chains which not only has serious adverse impact on human health but also causes severe economic loss to the healthcare industry. Consequently, existing studies have emphasized the need for a robust, end-to-end track and trace system for pharmaceutical supply chains. Therein, an end-to-end product tracking system across the pharmaceutical supply chain is paramount to ensuring product safety and eliminating counterfeits. Most existing track and trace systems are centralized leading to data privacy, transparency and authenticity issues in healthcare supply chains. In this article, we present an Ethereum blockchain-based approach leveraging smart contracts and decentralized…

The growing development of IoT (Internet of Things) devices creates a large attack surface for cybercriminals to conduct potentially more destructive cyberattacks; as a result, the security industry has seen an exponential increase in cyber-attacks. Many of these attacks have effectively accomplished their malicious goals because intruders conduct cyber-attacks using novel and innovative techniques. An anomaly-based IDS (Intrusion Detection System) uses machine learning techniques to detect and classify attacks in IoT networks. In the presence of unpredictable network technologies and various intrusion methods, traditional machine learning techniques appear inefficient. In many research areas, deep learning methods have shown their ability to identify anomalies accurately. Convolutional neural networks are an excellent alternative for anomaly detection and classification due to their ability to automatically categorize main characteristics in input data and their effectiveness in performing faster computations. In this paper, we design and develop a novel anomaly-based intrusion…

Computer-aided detection, localisation, and segmentation methods can help improve colonoscopy procedures. Even though many methods have been built to tackle automatic detection and segmentation of polyps, benchmarking of state-of-the-art methods still remains an open problem. This is due to the increasing number of researched computer vision methods that can be applied to polyp datasets. Benchmarking of novel methods can provide a direction to the development of automated polyp detection and segmentation tasks. Furthermore, it ensures that the produced results in the community are reproducible and provide a fair comparison of developed methods. In this paper, we benchmark several recent state-of-the-art methods using Kvasir-SEG, an open-access dataset of colonoscopy images for polyp detection, localisation, and segmentation evaluating both method accuracy and speed. Whilst, most methods in literature have competitive performance over accuracy, we show that the proposed ColonSegNet achieved a better trade-off between an average precision of 0.8000 and mean IoU of 0.8100, and the…

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia globally. It steadily worsens from mild to severe, impairing one's ability to complete any work without assistance. It begins to outstrip due to the population ages and diagnosis timeline. For classifying cases, existing approaches incorporate medical history, neuropsychological testing, and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), but efficient procedures remain inconsistent due to lack of sensitivity and precision. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is utilized to create a framework that can be used to detect specific Alzheimer's disease characteristics from MRI images. By considering four stages of dementia and conducting a particular diagnosis, the proposed model generates high-resolution disease probability maps from the local brain structure to a multilayer perceptron and provides accurate, intuitive visualizations of individual Alzheimer's disease risk. To avoid the problem of class imbalance, the samples should be evenly distributed among the classes. The obtained MRI image dataset from Kaggle has a major class…

Cardiovascular disease is a substantial cause of mortality and morbidity in the world. In clinical data analytics, it is a great challenge to predict heart disease survivor. Data mining transforms huge amounts of raw data generated by the health industry into useful information that can help in making informed decisions. Various studies proved that significant features play a key role in improving performance of machine learning models. This study analyzes the heart failure survivors from the dataset of 299 patients admitted in hospital. The aim is to find significant features and effective data mining techniques that can boost the accuracy of cardiovascular patient’s survivor prediction. To predict patient’s survival, this study employs nine classification models: Decision Tree (DT), Adaptive boosting classifier (AdaBoost), Logistic Regression (LR), Stochastic Gradient classifier (SGD), Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting classifier (GBM), Extra Tree Classifier (ETC), Gaussian Naive Bayes classifier (G-NB) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The imbalance class problem is handled…

The fast development of electric vehicles (EVs) provides significant opportunities to further utilize clean energies in the automotive. On-board chargers (OBCs) are widely used in EVs because of their simple installation and low cost. Limited space in the vehicle and short charging time require an OBC to be power-dense and highly efficient. Moreover, the possibility for EVs to deliver power back to the grid has increased the interest in bidirectional power flow solutions in the automotive market. This paper presents a comprehensive overview and investigation on the state-of-the-art solutions of bidirectional OBCs. It reviews the current status, including architectures and configurations, smart operation modes, industry standards, major components, and commercially available products. A detailed overview of the promising topologies for bidirectional OBCs, including two-stage and single-stage structures, is provided. Future trends and challenges for topologies, wide bandgap technologies, thermal management, system integration, and wireless charging systems are also discussed in this…

During the last decade, Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has emerged as an integral component within Human-computer Interaction (HCI) and other high-end speech processing systems. Generally, an SER system targets the speaker's existence of varied emotions by extracting and classifying the prominent features from a preprocessed speech signal. However, the way humans and machines recognize and correlate emotional aspects of speech signals are quite contrasting quantitatively and qualitatively, which present enormous difficulties in blending knowledge from interdisciplinary fields, particularly speech emotion recognition, applied psychology, and human-computer interface. The paper carefully identifies and synthesizes recent relevant literature related to the SER systems' varied design components/methodologies, thereby providing readers with a state-of-the-art understanding of the hot research topic. Furthermore, while scrutinizing the current state of understanding on SER systems, the research gap's prominence has been sketched out for consideration and analysis by other related…

A number of algorithms in the field of artificial intelligence offer poorly interpretable decisions. To disclose the reasoning behind such algorithms, their output can be explained by means of so-called evidence-based (or factual) explanations. Alternatively, contrastive and counterfactual explanations justify why the output of the algorithms is not any different and how it could be changed, respectively. It is of crucial importance to bridge the gap between theoretical approaches to contrastive and counterfactual explanation and the corresponding computational frameworks. In this work we conduct a systematic literature review which provides readers with a thorough and reproducible analysis of the interdisciplinary research field under study. We first examine theoretical foundations of contrastive and counterfactual accounts of explanation. Then, we report the state-of-the-art computational frameworks for contrastive and counterfactual explanation generation. In addition, we analyze how grounded such frameworks are on the insights from the inspected theoretical approaches. As a…

An early and reliable estimation of crop yield is essential in quantitative and financial evaluation at the field level for determining strategic plans in agricultural commodities for import-export policies and doubling farmer’s incomes. Crop yield predictions are carried out to estimate higher crop yield through the use of machine learning algorithms which are one of the challenging issues in the agricultural sector. Due to this developing significance of crop yield prediction, this article provides an exhaustive review on the use of machine learning algorithms to predict crop yield with special emphasis on palm oil yield prediction. Initially, the current status of palm oil yield around the world is presented, along with a brief discussion on the overview of widely used features and prediction algorithms. Then, the critical evaluation of the state-of-the-art machine learning-based crop yield prediction, machine learning application in the palm oil industry and comparative analysis of related studies are presented. Consequently, a detailed study of the advantages and difficulties…

Chronic Kidney Disease is one of the most critical illness nowadays and proper diagnosis is required as soon as possible. Machine learning technique has become reliable for medical treatment. With the help of a machine learning classifier algorithms, the doctor can detect the disease on time. For this perspective, Chronic Kidney Disease prediction has been discussed in this article. Chronic Kidney Disease dataset has been taken from the UCI repository. Seven classifier algorithms have been applied in this research such as artificial neural network, C5.0, Chi-square Automatic interaction detector, logistic regression, linear support vector machine with penalty L1 & with penalty L2 and random tree. The important feature selection technique was also applied to the dataset. For each classifier, the results have been computed based on (i) full features, (ii) correlation-based feature selection, (iii) Wrapper method feature selection, (iv) Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression, (v) synthetic minority over-sampling technique with least absolute shrinkage and selection…

Scene classification is a highly useful task in Remote Sensing (RS) applications. Many efforts have been made to improve the accuracy of RS scene classification. Scene classification is a challenging problem, especially for large datasets with tens of thousands of images with a large number of classes and taken under different circumstances. One problem that is observed in scene classification is the fact that for a given scene, only one part of it indicates which class it belongs to, whereas the other parts are either irrelevant or they actually tend to belong to another class. To address this issue, this paper proposes a deep attention Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for scene classification in remote sensing. CNN models use successive convolutional layers to learn feature maps from larger and larger regions (or receptive fields) of the scene. The attention mechanism computes a new feature map as a weighted average of these original feature maps. In particular, we propose a solution, named EfficientNet-B3-Attn-2, based on the pre-trained EfficientNet-B3 CNN enhanced with an…

Cloud computing has become a widely exploited research area in academia and industry. Cloud computing benefits both cloud services providers (CSPs) and consumers. The security challenges associated with cloud computing have been widely studied in the literature. This systematic literature review (SLR) is aimed to review the existing research studies on cloud computing security, threats, and challenges. This SLR examined the research studies published between 2010 and 2020 within the popular digital libraries. We selected 80 papers after a meticulous screening of published works to answer the proposed research questions. The outcomes of this SLR reported seven major security threats to cloud computing services. The results showed that data tampering and leakage were among the highly discussed topics in the chosen literature. Other identified security risks were associated with the data intrusion and data storage in the cloud computing environment. This SLR’s results also indicated that consumers’ data outsourcing remains a challenge for both CSPs and cloud users. Our survey paper…

The penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) in the transportation sector is increasing but conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) based vehicles dominates. To accelerate the adoption of EVs and to achieve sustainable transportation, the bottlenecks need to be elevated that mainly include the high cost EVs, range anxiety, lack of EV charging infrastructure, and the pollution of the grid due to EV chargers. The high cost of EVs is due to costly energy storage systems (ESS) with high energy density. This paper provides a comprehensive review of EV technology that mainly includes electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE), ESS, and EV chargers. A detailed discussion is presented on the state-of-the-art of EV chargers that include on-/off-board chargers. Different topologies are discussed with low-/high-frequency transformers. The different available power levels for charging are discussed. To reduce the range anxiety the EV chargers based on inductive power transfer (IPT) are discussed. The last part of the paper focuses on the negative impact of EV chargers along with the remedies…

Blockchain technology is becoming increasingly attractive to the next generation, as it is uniquely suited to the information era. Blockchain technology can also be applied to the Internet of Things (IoT). The advancement of IoT technology in various domains has led to substantial progress in distributed systems. Blockchain concept requires a decentralized data management system for storing and sharing the data and transactions in the network. This paper discusses the blockchain concept and relevant factors that provide a detailed analysis of potential security attacks and presents existing solutions that can be deployed as countermeasures to such attacks. This paper also includes blockchain security enhancement solutions by summarizing key points that can be exploited to develop various blockchain systems and security tools that counter security vulnerabilities. Finally, the paper discusses open issues relating to and future research directions of blockchain-IoT systems.

Image Steganography is the process of hiding information which can be text, image or video inside a cover image. The secret information is hidden in a way that it not visible to the human eyes. Deep learning technology, which has emerged as a powerful tool in various applications including image steganography, has received increased attention recently. The main goal of this paper is to explore and discuss various deep learning methods available in image steganography field. Deep learning techniques used for image steganography can be broadly divided into three categories - traditional methods, Convolutional Neural Network-based and General Adversarial Network-based methods. Along with the methodology, an elaborate summary on the datasets used, experimental set-ups considered and the evaluation metrics commonly used are described in this paper. A table summarizing all the details are also provided for easy reference. This paper aims to help the fellow researchers by compiling the current trends, challenges and some future direction in this field.

Sarcasm identification on text documents is one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP), has become an essential research direction, due to its prevalence on social media data. The purpose of our research is to present an effective sarcasm identification framework on social media data by pursuing the paradigms of neural language models and deep neural networks. To represent text documents, we introduce inverse gravity moment based term weighted word embedding model with trigrams. In this way, critical words/terms have higher values by keeping the word-ordering information. In our model, we present a three-layer stacked bidirectional long short-term memory architecture to identify sarcastic text documents. For the evaluation task, the presented framework has been evaluated on three-sarcasm identification corpus. In the empirical analysis, three neural language models (i.e., word2vec, fastText and GloVe), two unsupervised term weighting functions (i.e., term-frequency, and TF-IDF) and eight supervised term weighting functions (i.e., odds ratio, relevance…

The small battery capacities of the mobile robot and the un-optimized planning efficiency of the industrial robot bottlenecked the time efficiency and productivity rate of coverage tasks in terms of speed and accuracy, putting a great constraint on the usability of the robot applications in various planning strategies in specific environmental conditions. Thus, it became highly desirable to address the optimization problems related to exploration and coverage path planning (CPP). In general, the goal of the CPP is to find an optimal coverage path with generates a collision-free trajectory by reducing the travel time, processing speed, cost energy, and the number of turns along the path length, as well as low overlapped rate, which reflect the robustness of CPP. This paper reviews the principle of CPP and discusses the development trend, including design variations and the characteristic of optimization algorithms, such as classical, heuristic, and most recent deep learning methods. Then, we compare the advantages and disadvantages of the existing CPP-based modeling in the area and…

The Shapley value has become popular in the Explainable AI (XAI) literature, thanks, to a large extent, to a solid theoretical foundation, including four “favourable and fair” axioms for attribution in transferable utility games. The Shapley value is provably the only solution concept satisfying these axioms. In this paper, we introduce the Shapley value and draw attention to its recent uses as a feature selection tool. We call into question this use of the Shapley value, using simple, abstract “toy” counterexamples to illustrate that the axioms may work against the goals of feature selection. From this, we develop a number of insights that are then investigated in concrete simulation settings, with a variety of Shapley value formulations, including SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Shapley Additive Global importancE (SAGE). The aim is not to encourage any use of the Shapley value for feature selection, but we aim to clarify various limitations around their current use in the literature. In so doing, we hope to help demystify certain aspects of the Shapley value axioms that…

In this article, we present a comprehensive study with an experimental analysis of federated deep learning approaches for cyber security in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Specifically, we first provide a review of the federated learning-based security and privacy systems for several types of IoT applications, including, Industrial IoT, Edge Computing, Internet of Drones, Internet of Healthcare Things, Internet of Vehicles, etc. Second, the use of federated learning with blockchain and malware/intrusion detection systems for IoT applications is discussed. Then, we review the vulnerabilities in federated learning-based security and privacy systems. Finally, we provide an experimental analysis of federated deep learning with three deep learning approaches, namely, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Deep Neural Network (DNN). For each deep learning model, we study the performance of centralized and federated learning under three new real IoT traffic datasets, namely, the Bot-IoT dataset, the MQTTset dataset, and the TON_IoT dataset. The…

Nowadays, the ever-increasing complication and severity of security attacks on computer networks have inspired security researchers to incorporate different machine learning methods to protect the organizations' data and reputation. Deep learning is one of the exciting techniques which recently are vastly employed by the IDS or intrusion detection systems to increase their performance in securing the computer networks and hosts. This survey article focuses on the deep learning-based intrusion detection schemes and puts forward an in-depth survey and classification of these schemes. It first presents the primary background concepts about IDS architecture and various deep learning techniques. It then classifies these schemes according to the type of deep learning methods utilized in each of them. It describes how deep learning networks are utilized in the intrusion detection process to recognize intrusions accurately. Finally, a complete analysis of the investigated IDS frameworks is provided, and concluding remarks and future directions are highlighted.

Dynamic networks are used in a wide range of fields, including social network analysis, recommender systems and epidemiology. Representing complex networks as structures changing over time allow network models to leverage not only structural but also temporal patterns. However, as dynamic network literature stems from diverse fields and makes use of inconsistent terminology, it is challenging to navigate. Meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained a lot of attention in recent years for their ability to perform well on a range of network science tasks, such as link prediction and node classification. Despite the popularity of graph neural networks and the proven benefits of dynamic network models, there has been little focus on graph neural networks for dynamic networks. To address the challenges resulting from the fact that this research crosses diverse fields as well as to survey dynamic graph neural networks, this work is split into two main parts. First, to address the ambiguity of the dynamic network terminology we establish a foundation of dynamic networks with…

Medical datasets are usually imbalanced, where negative cases severely outnumber positive cases. Therefore, it is essential to deal with this data skew problem when training machine learning algorithms. This study uses two representative lung cancer datasets, PLCO and NLST, with imbalance ratios (the proportion of samples in the majority class to those in the minority class) of 24.7 and 25.0, respectively, to predict lung cancer incidence. This research uses the performance of 23 class imbalance methods (resampling and hybrid systems) with three classical classifiers (logistic regression, random forest, and LinearSVC) to identify the best imbalance techniques suitable for medical datasets. Resampling includes ten under-sampling methods (RUS, etc.), seven over-sampling methods (SMOTE, etc.), and two integrated sampling methods (SMOTEENN, SMOTE-Tomek). Hybrid systems include (Balanced Bagging, etc.). The results show that class imbalance learning can improve the classification ability of the model. Compared with other imbalanced techniques, under-sampling techniques have the highest…

This paper presents a comprehensive survey on anti-drone systems. After drones were released for non-military usages, drone incidents in the unarmed population are gradually increasing. However, it is unaffordable to construct a military grade anti-drone system for every private or public facility due to installation and operation costs, and regulatory restrictions. We focus on analyzing anti-drone system that does not use military weapons, investigating a wide range of anti-drone technologies, and deriving proper system models for reliable drone defense. We categorized anti-drone technologies into detection, identification, and neutralization, and reviewed numerous studies on each. Then, we propose a hypothetical anti-drone system that presents the guidelines for adaptable and effective drone defense operations. Further, we discuss drone-side safety and security schemes that could nullify current anti-drone methods, and propose future solutions to resolve these challenges.

The scene rigidity is a strong assumption in typical visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) algorithms. Such strong assumption limits the usage of most vSLAM in dynamic real-world environments, which are the target of several relevant applications such as augmented reality, semantic mapping, unmanned autonomous vehicles, and service robotics. Many solutions are proposed that use different kinds of semantic segmentation methods (e.g., Mask R-CNN, SegNet) to detect dynamic objects and remove outliers. However, as far as we know, such kind of methods wait for the semantic results in the tracking thread in their architecture, and the processing time depends on the segmentation methods used. In this paper, we present RDS-SLAM, a real-time visual dynamic SLAM algorithm that is built on ORB-SLAM3 and adds a semantic thread and a semantic-based optimization thread for robust tracking and mapping in dynamic environments in real-time. These novel threads run in parallel with the others, and therefore the tracking thread does not need to wait for the semantic information anymore.…

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a subsystem of the proposed intelligent transportation system (ITS) that enables vehicles to communicate over the wireless communication infrastructure. VANETs are used in multiple applications, such as improving traffic safety and collision prevention. The use of VANETs makes the network vulnerable to various types of attacks, such as denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS). Many researchers are now interested in adding a high level of security to VANETs. Machine learning (ML) methods were used for constructing a high level of security capabilities based on intrusion detection systems (IDSs). Furthermore, the vast majority of existing research is based on NSL-KDD or KDD-CUP99 datasets. Recent attacks are not present in these datasets. As a result, we employed a realistic dataset called ToN-IoT that derived from a large-scale, heterogeneous IoT network. This work tested various ML methods in both binary and multi-class classification problems. We used the Chi-square (Chi2) technique was used for feature selection and…

Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA) is a recent swarm intelligence algorithm inspired by the foraging and swarming behavior of grasshoppers in nature. The GOA algorithm has been successfully applied to solve various optimization problems in several domains and demonstrated its merits in the literature. This paper proposes a comprehensive review of GOA based on more than 120 scientific articles published by leading publishers: IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, IET, Hindawi, and others. It provides the GOA variants, including multi-objective and hybrid variants. It also discusses the main applications of GOA in various fields such as scheduling, economic dispatch, feature selection, load frequency control, distributed generation, wind energy system, and other engineering problems. Finally, the paper provides some possible future research directions in this area.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are interconnected architectures that employ analog and digital components as well as communication and computational resources for their operation and interaction with the physical environment. CPS constitute the backbone of enterprise (e.g., smart cities), industrial (e.g., smart manufacturing), and critical infrastructure (e.g., energy systems). Thus, their vital importance, interoperability, and plurality of computing devices make them prominent targets for malicious attacks aiming to disrupt their operations. Attacks targeting cyber-physical energy systems (CPES), given their mission-critical nature within the power grid infrastructure, can lead to disastrous consequences. The security of CPES can be enhanced by leveraging testbed capabilities in order to replicate and understand power systems operating conditions, discover vulnerabilities, develop security countermeasures, and evaluate grid operation under fault-induced or maliciously constructed scenarios. Adequately modeling and reproducing the behavior of CPS could be a challenging task. In this…

Digital twins are quickly becoming a popular tool in several domains, taking advantage of recent advancements in the Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Big Data, while being used by both the industry sector and the research community. In this paper, we review the current research landscape as regards digital twins in the field of smart cities, while also attempting to draw parallels with the application of digital twins in Industry 4.0. Although digital twins have received considerable attention in the Industrial Internet of Things domain, their utilization in smart cities has not been as popular thus far. We discuss here the open challenges in the field and argue that digital twins in smart cities should be treated differently and be considered as cyber-physical "systems of systems", due to the vastly different system size, complexity and requirements, when compared to other recent applications of digital twins. We also argue that researchers should utilize established tools and methods of the smart city community, such as co-creation, to better handle the specificities of…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the emerging technologies. In recent decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has gained widespread acceptance in a variety of fields, including virtual support, healthcare, and security. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a field that has been combining AI and human-computer engagement over the past several years in order to create an interactive intelligent system for user interaction. AI, in conjunction with HCI, is being used in a variety of fields by employing various algorithms and employing HCI to provide transparency to the user, allowing them to trust the machine. The comprehensive examination of both the areas of AI and HCI, as well as their subfields, has been explored in this work. The main goal of this article was to discover a point of intersection between the two fields. The understanding of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), which is a linking point of HCI and XAI, was gained through a literature review conducted in this research. The literature survey encompassed themes identified in the literature (such as XAI and its…

This paper studies the classification of unbalanced data sets. First, this kind of data sets is briefly introduced, and then the classification methods of unbalanced data sets are analyzed in detail from different perspectives such as data sampling method, algorithm level, feature level, cost-sensitive function, and deep learning. In addition, the data sampling methods are divided into different technologies for introduction: unbalanced data set classification method based on synthetic minority over-sampling technology (SMOTE), support vector machine (SVM) technology, and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) technology, etc. Then, the advantages and disadvantages of these methods are compared. Finally, the evaluation criteria of the unbalanced data set classifier are summarized, and the future work directions are prospected and summarized.

Deep Learning is the most widely used tool in the contemporary field of computer vision. Its ability to accurately solve complex problems is employed in vision research to learn deep neural models for a variety of tasks, including security critical applications. However, it is now known that deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can manipulate its predictions by introducing visually imperceptible perturbations in images and videos. Since the discovery of this phenomenon in 2013, it has attracted significant attention of researchers from multiple sub-fields of machine intelligence. In 2018, we published the first-ever review of the contributions made by the computer vision community in adversarial attacks on deep learning (and their defenses). Many of those contributions have inspired new directions in this area, which has matured significantly since witnessing the first generation methods. Hence, as a legacy sequel of our first literature survey, this review article focuses on the advances in this area since 2018. We thoroughly discuss the first generation attacks…

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly emerging field of technologies that delivers numerous cutting-edge solutions in various domains including the critical infrastructures. Thanks to the IoT, the conventional power system network can be transformed into an effective and smarter energy grid. In this article, we review the architecture and functionalities of IoT-enabled smart energy grid systems. Specifically, we focus on different IoT technologies including sensing, communication, computing technologies, and their standards in relation to smart energy grid. This article also presents a comprehensive overview of existing studies on IoT applications to the smart grid system. Based on recent surveys and literature, we observe that the security vulnerabilities related to IoT technologies have been attributed as one of the major concerns of IoT-enabled energy systems. Therefore, we review the existing threat and attack models for IoT-enabled energy systems and summarize mitigation techniques for those security vulnerabilities. Finally, we highlight how advanced technologies (e.g.,…

To solve object detection issues in infrared images, such as a low recognition rate and a high false alarm rate caused by long distances, weak energy, and low resolution, we propose a region-free object detector named YOLO-FIR for infrared (IR) images with YOLOv5 core by compressing channels, optimizing parameters, etc. An improved infrared image object detection network, YOLO-FIRI, is further developed. Specifically, while designing the feature extraction network, the cross-stage-partial-connections (CSP) module in the shallow layer is expanded and iterated to maximize the use of shallow features. In addition, an improved attention module is introduced in residual blocks to focus on objects and suppress background. Moreover, multiscale detection is added to improve small object detection accuracy. Experimental results on the KAIST and FLIR datasets show that YOLO-FIRI demonstrates a qualitative improvement compared with the state-of-the-art detectors. Compared with YOLOv4, the mean average precision (mAP50) of YOLO-FIRI is increased by 21% on the KAIST dataset, the speed is reduced…

Inkjet printing technology uses the low-cost direct deposition manufacturing technique for printing and is applicable in various fields including optics, ceramics, three-dimensional printing in biomedicine, and conductive circuitry. This study reviews the classifications and applications of inkjet printing technologies, with a focus on recent publications. The different design approaches, applications, and research progress of several inkjet printing techniques are reviewed. Among them, the piezoelectric inkjet printing technology is the main focus owing to its reliability and handling of a diverse range of inks. A piezo-driven inkjet printhead is activated by applying a voltage waveform to a piezoelectric membrane. The waveform ensures the formation of the designed droplet and a stable jet. A survey of various driving-voltage waveforms is conducted, which can serve as a reference to the research community that uses piezo-driven inkjet printheads. The challenges of printing quality, stability, and speed and their solutions as published in recent studies are reviewed. Technologies…

Digital twin (DT), primarily a virtual replica of any conceivable physical entity, is a highly transformative technology with profound implications. Whether it be product development, design optimisation, performance improvement, or predictive maintenance, digital twins are changing the ways work is undertaken in various industries with multifarious business applications. Aerospace industry, including its manufacturing base, is one such keen adopter of digital twins with an unprecedented interest in their bespoke design, development, and implementation across wider operations and critical functions. This, however, comes with some misconceptions about the digital twin technology and lack of understanding with respect to its optimal implementation. For instance, equating a digital twin to an intelligent model while ignoring the essential components of data acquisition and visualisation, misleads the creators into building digital shadow or digital models, instead of the actual digital twin. This paper unfolds such intricacies of digital twin technology for the aerospace community in…

In this work, we present Point Transformer, a deep neural network that operates directly on unordered and unstructured point sets. We design Point Transformer to extract local and global features and relate both representations by introducing the local-global attention mechanism, which aims to capture spatial point relations and shape information. For that purpose, we propose SortNet, as part of the Point Transformer, which induces input permutation invariance by selecting points based on a learned score. The output of Point Transformer is a sorted and permutation invariant feature list that can directly be incorporated into common computer vision applications. We evaluate our approach on standard classification and part segmentation benchmarks to demonstrate competitive results compared to the prior work.

Recent advances in the domain of software defect prediction (SDP) include the integration of multiple classification techniques to create an ensemble or hybrid approach. This technique was introduced to improve the prediction performance by overcoming the limitations of any single classification technique. This research provides a systematic literature review on the use of the ensemble learning approach for software defect prediction. The review is conducted after critically analyzing research papers published since 2012 in four well-known online libraries: ACM, IEEE, Springer Link, and Science Direct. In this study, five research questions covering the different aspects of research progress on the use of ensemble learning for software defect prediction are addressed. To extract the answers to identified questions, 46 most relevant papers are shortlisted after a thorough systematic research process. This study will provide compact information regarding the latest trends and advances in ensemble learning for software defect prediction and provide a baseline for future innovations and…

Blockchain technology enables users to verify, preserve, and synchronize the contents of a data sheet (a transaction ledger) replicated by multiple users. Blockchain technology has provided considerable advantages and incentives to industries in terms of enabling better services. This review aims to explore the benefits, challenges and functionalities that affect blockchain applications in different sectors. This article is constructed as a systematic literature review study. From 1976 articles, 168 final articles were selected and classified into three main dimensions, that is, benefits, challenges, and functionalities, in four different sectors: government, financial, manufacturing, and healthcare. The results were extracted and compared based on factors in three dimensions, which were categorized as benefits (informational, technological, economic, organizational, and strategic), challenges (technological, organizational, adoption, operational, and environmental and sustainability), and functionalities (point-to-point transmission, data ownership, data protection, and transaction…

Since electricity plays a crucial role in countries' industrial infrastructures, power companies are trying to monitor and control infrastructures to improve energy management and scheduling. Accurate forecasting is a critical task for a stable and efficient energy supply, where load and supply are matched. This article discusses various algorithms and a new hybrid deep learning model which combines long short-term memory networks (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) model to analyze their performance for short-term load forecasting. The proposed model is called parallel LSTM-CNN Network or PLCNet. Two real-world data sets, namely “hourly load consumption of Malaysia ” as well as “daily power electric consumption of Germany”, are used to test and compare the presented models. To evaluate the tested models' performance, root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and R-squared were used. In total, this article is divided into two parts. In the first part, different machine learning models, including the PLCNet, predict the next time step load. In…

Brain is the controlling center of our body. With the advent of time, newer and newer brain diseases are being discovered. Thus, because of the variability of brain diseases, existing diagnosis or detection systems are becoming challenging and are still an open problem for research. Detection of brain diseases at an early stage can make a huge difference in attempting to cure them. In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is surging through all spheres of science, and no doubt, it is revolutionizing the field of neurology. Application of AI in medical science has made brain disease prediction and detection more accurate and precise. In this study, we present a review on recent machine learning and deep learning approaches in detecting four brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), brain tumor, epilepsy, and Parkinson's disease. 147 recent articles on four brain diseases are reviewed considering diverse machine learning and deep learning approaches, modalities, datasets etc. Twenty-two datasets are discussed which are used most frequently in the reviewed…

Many machine learning algorithms and almost all deep learning architectures are incapable of processing plain texts in their raw form. This means that their input to the algorithms must be numerical in order to solve classification or regression problems. Hence, it is necessary to encode these categorical variables into numerical values using encoding techniques. Categorical features are common and often of high cardinality. One-hot encoding in such circumstances leads to very high dimensional vector representations, raising memory and computability concerns for machine learning models. This paper proposes a deep-learned embedding technique for categorical features encoding on categorical datasets. Our technique is a distributed representation for categorical features where each category is mapped to a distinct vector, and the properties of the vector are learned while training a neural network. First, we create a data vocabulary that includes only categorical data, and then we use word tokenization to make each categorical data a single word. After that, feature learning is…

While 5G is being deployed and the economy and society begin to reap the associated benefits, the research and development community starts to focus on the next, 6th Generation (6G) of wireless communications. Although there are papers available in the literature on visions, requirements and technical enablers for 6G from various academic perspectives, there is a lack of joint industry and academic work towards 6G. In this paper a consolidated view on vision, values, use cases and key enabling technologies from leading industry stakeholders and academia is presented. The authors represent the mobile communications ecosystem with competences spanning hardware, link layer and networking aspects, as well as standardization and regulation. The second contribution of the paper is revisiting and analyzing the key concurrent initiatives on 6G. A third contribution of the paper is the identification and justification of six key 6G research challenges: (i) “connecting”, in the sense of empowering, exploiting and governing, intelligence; (ii) realizing a network of networks, i.e., leveraging…

Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, has raised a calamitous situation all over the world and has become one of the most acute and severe ailments in the past hundred years. The prevalence rate of COVID-19 is rapidly rising every day throughout the globe. Although no vaccines for this pandemic have been discovered yet, deep learning techniques proved themselves to be a powerful tool in the arsenal used by clinicians for the automatic diagnosis of COVID-19. This paper aims to overview the recently developed systems based on deep learning techniques using different medical imaging modalities like Computer Tomography (CT) and X-ray. This review specifically discusses the systems developed for COVID-19 diagnosis using deep learning techniques and provides insights on well-known data sets used to train these networks. It also highlights the data partitioning techniques and various performance measures developed by researchers in this field. A taxonomy is drawn to categorize the recent works for proper insight. Finally, we conclude by addressing the challenges associated with the use of…

Next-generation of the cellular network will attempt to overcome the limitations of the current Fifth Generation (5G) networks and equip itself to address the challenges which become obvious in the future. Currently, academia and industry have focused their attention on the Sixth Generation (6G) network, which is anticipated to be the next big game-changer in the telecom industry. The outbreak of COVID'19 has made the whole world to opt for virtual meetings, live video interactions ranging from healthcare, business to education. However, we miss an immersive experience due to the lack of supporting technology. Experts have anticipated that starting from the post-pandemic age, the performance requirements of technology for virtual and real-time communication, the rise of several verticals such as industrial automation, robotics, and autonomous driving will increase tremendously, and will skyrocket during the next decade. In this manuscript, we study the latest perspectives and future megatrends that are most likely to drive 6G. Initially, we describe the instances that lead us to the…

The beginning of 2020 has seen the emergence of coronavirus outbreak caused by a novel virus called SARS-CoV-2. The sudden explosion and uncontrolled worldwide spread of COVID-19 show the limitations of existing healthcare systems in timely handling public health emergencies. In such contexts, innovative technologies such as blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have emerged as promising solutions for fighting coronavirus epidemic. In particular, blockchain can combat pandemics by enabling early detection of outbreaks, ensuring the ordering of medical data, and ensuring reliable medical supply chain during the outbreak tracing. Moreover, AI provides intelligent solutions for identifying symptoms caused by coronavirus for treatments and supporting drug manufacturing. Therefore, we present an extensive survey on the use of blockchain and AI for combating COVID-19 epidemics. First, we introduce a new conceptual architecture which integrates blockchain and AI for fighting COVID-19. Then, we survey the latest research efforts on the use of blockchain and AI for fighting COVID-19 in…

A protuberant issue of the present time is that, organizations from different domains are struggling to obtain effective solutions for detecting online-based fake news. It is quite thought-provoking to distinguish fake information on the internet as it is often written to deceive users. Compared with many machine learning techniques, deep learning-based techniques are capable of detecting fake news more accurately. Previous review papers were based on data mining and machine learning techniques, scarcely exploring the deep learning techniques for fake news detection. However, emerging deep learning-based approaches such as Attention, Generative Adversarial Networks, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations for Transformers are absent from previous surveys. This study attempts to investigate advanced and state-of-the-art fake news detection mechanisms pensively. We begin with highlighting the fake news consequences. Then, we proceed with the discussion on the dataset used in previous research and their NLP techniques. A comprehensive overview of deep learning-based techniques has…

As the educational possibilities of AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) are getting more attention, understanding teachers' readiness to integrate new technologies for instruction would help researchers and practitioners to plan how to support them. In this regard, the present study explores teachers' willingness to integrate AR and VR technologies for teaching and learning practices. Employing an extended Technology Acceptance Model (eTAM), this study investigated whether technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK), social norm (SN), and motivational support (MS) for teachers influence teachers' intention to use the technologies. Analysis from 292 in-service teacher responses supported all of the eight hypotheses formulated in the study. TPACK was found to have a significant influence on perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEU) while SN influenced PU. In addition, MS was found to have an influence on PEU, which ultimately affects attitudes toward technology use (ATU) and then behavioral intention (BI). The results imply the importance of…

Recently, diagnosing diseases using medical images became crucial. As these images are transmitted through the network, they need a high level of protection. If the data in these images are liable for unauthorized usage, this may lead to severe problems. There are different methods for securing images. One of the most efficient techniques for securing medical images is encryption. Confusion and diffusion are the two main steps used in encryption algorithms. This paper presents a new encryption algorithm for encrypting both grey and color medical images. A new image splitting technique based on image blocks introduced. Then, the image blocks scrambled using a zigzag pattern, rotation, and random permutation. Then, a chaotic logistic map generates a key to diffuse the scrambled image. The efficiency of our proposed method in encrypting medical images is evaluated using security analysis and time complexity. The security is tested in entropy, histogram differential attacks, correlation coefficient, PSNR, keyspace, and sensitivity. The achieved results show a high-performance security…

Blended learning incorporates online learning experiences and helps students for meaningful learning through flexible online information and communication technologies, reduced overcrowded classroom presence, and planned teaching and learning experience. This study has conducted surveys of various tools, techniques, frameworks, and models useful for blended learning. This article has prepared a comprehensive survey of student, teacher, and management experiences in blended learning courses during COVID-19 and pre-COVID-19 times. The survey will be useful to faculty members, students, and management to adopt new tools and mindsets for positive outcomes. This work reports on implementing and assessing blended learning at two different universities (University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, India, and Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India). The assessments prepare the benefits and challenges of learning (by students) and teaching (by faculty) blended learning courses with different online learning tools. Additionally, student performance in the traditional and…

A brain tumor is a life-threatening neurological condition caused by the unregulated development of cells inside the brain or skull. The death rate of people with this condition is steadily increasing. Early diagnosis of malignant tumors is critical for providing treatment to patients, and early discovery improves the patient’s chances of survival. The patient’s survival rate is usually very less if they are not adequately treated. If a brain tumor cannot be identified in an early stage, it can surely lead to death. Therefore, early diagnosis of brain tumors necessitates the use of an automated tool. The segmentation, diagnosis, and isolation of contaminated tumor areas from magnetic resonance (MR) images is a prime concern. However, it is a tedious and time-consuming process that radiologists or clinical specialists must undertake, and their performance is solely dependent on their expertise. To address these limitations, the use of computer-assisted techniques becomes critical. In this paper, different traditional and hybrid ML models were built and analyzed in detail to classify…

The use of simulators in robotics research is widespread, underpinning the majority of recent advances in the field. There are now more options available to researchers than ever before, however navigating through the plethora of choices in search of the right simulator is often non-trivial. Depending on the field of research and the scenario to be simulated there will often be a range of suitable physics simulators from which it is difficult to ascertain the most relevant one. We have compiled a broad review of physics simulators for use within the major fields of robotics research. More specifically, we navigate through key sub-domains and discuss the features, benefits, applications and use-cases of the different simulators categorised by the respective research communities. Our review provides an extensive index of the leading physics simulators applicable to robotics researchers and aims to assist them in choosing the best simulator for their use case.

Accurate detection and classification of breast cancer is a critical task in medical imaging due to the complexity of breast tissues. Due to automatic feature extraction ability, deep learning methods have been successfully applied in different areas, especially in the field of medical imaging. In this study, a novel patch-based deep learning method called Pa-DBN-BC is proposed to detect and classify breast cancer on histopathology images using the Deep Belief Network (DBN). Features are extracted through an unsupervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning phase. The network automatically extracts features from image patches. Logistic regression is used to classify the patches from histopathology images. The features extracted from the patches are fed to the model as input and the model presents the result as a probability matrix as either a positive sample (cancer) or a negative sample (background). The proposed model is trained and tested on the whole slide histopathology image dataset having images from four different data cohorts and achieved an accuracy of 86%.…

Battery ensures power solutions for many necessary portable devices such as electric vehicles, mobiles, and laptops. Owing to the rapid growth of Li-ion battery users, unwanted incidents involving Li-ion batteries have also increased to some extent. In particular, the sudden breakdown of industrial and lightweight machinery due to battery failure causes a substantial economic loss for the industry. Consequently, battery state estimation, management system, and estimation of the remaining useful life (RUL) have become a topic of interest for researchers. Considering this, appropriate battery data acquisition and proper information on available battery data sets may require. This review paper is mainly focused on three parts. The first one is battery data acquisitions with commercially and freely available Li-ion battery data set information. The second is the estimation of the states of battery with the battery management system. And third is battery RUL estimation. Various RUL prognostic methods applied for Li-ion batteries are classified, discussed, and reviewed based on their…

Over the past decades, numerous practical applications of machine learning techniques have shown the potential of AI-driven and data-driven approaches in a large number of computing fields. Machine learning is increasingly included in computing curricula in higher education, and a quickly growing number of initiatives are expanding it in K-12 computing education, too. As machine learning enters K-12 computing education, understanding how intuition and agency in the context of such systems is developed becomes a key research area. But as schools and teachers are already struggling with integrating traditional computational thinking and traditional artificial intelligence into school curricula, understanding the challenges behind teaching machine learning in K-12 is an even more daunting challenge for computing education research. Despite the central position of machine learning and AI in the field of modern computing, the computing education research body of literature contains remarkably few studies of how people learn to train, test, improve, and deploy machine learning systems.…

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0, the indoor usage of smart devices is expected to increase, thereby making their location information more important. Based on various practical issues related to large delays, high design cost, and limited performance, conventional localization techniques are not practical for indoor IoT applications. In recent years, many researchers have proposed a wide range of machine learning (ML)-based indoor localization approaches using Wi-Fi received signal strength indicator (RSSI) fingerprints. This survey attempts to provide a summarized investigation of ML-based Wi-Fi RSSI fingerprinting schemes, including data preprocessing, data augmentation, ML prediction models for indoor localization, and postprocessing in ML, and compare their performance. Any ML-based study is heavily reliant on datasets. Therefore, we dedicate a significant portion of this survey to the discussion of dataset collection and open-source datasets. To provide good direction for future research, we discuss the current challenges and potential solutions…

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular for applications such as inspections, delivery, agriculture, surveillance, and many more. It is estimated that, by 2040, UAVs/drones will become a mainstream delivery channel to satisfy the growing demand for parcel delivery. Though the UAVs are gaining interest in civil applications, the future of UAV charging is facing a set of vital concerns and open research challenges. Considering the case of parcel delivery, handling countless drones and their charging will become complex and laborious. The need for non-contact based multi-device charging techniques will be crucial in saving time and human resources. To efficiently address this issue, Wireless Power Transmission (WPT) for UAVs is a promising technology for multi-drone charging and autonomous handling of multiple devices. In the literature of the past five years, limited surveys were conducted for wireless UAV charging. Moreover, vital problems such as coil weight constraints, comparison between existing charging techniques, shielding methods and many other key…

Time series prediction with neural networks has been the focus of much research in the past few decades. Given the recent deep learning revolution, there has been much attention in using deep learning models for time series prediction, and hence it is important to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we present an evaluation study that compares the performance of deep learning models for multi-step ahead time series prediction. The deep learning methods comprise simple recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, bidirectional LSTM networks, encoder-decoder LSTM networks, and convolutional neural networks. We provide a further comparison with simple neural networks that use stochastic gradient descent and adaptive moment estimation (Adam) for training. We focus on univariate time series for multi-step-ahead prediction from benchmark time-series datasets and provide a further comparison of the results with related methods from the literature. The results show that the bidirectional and encoder-decoder LSTM network provides the best performance…

Traffic forecasting is a fundamental and challenging task in the field of intelligent transportation. Accurate forecasting not only depends on the historical traffic flow information but also needs to consider the influence of a variety of external factors, such as weather conditions and surrounding POI distribution. Recently, spatiotemporal models integrating graph convolutional networks and recurrent neural networks have become traffic forecasting research hotspots and have made significant progress. However, few works integrate external factors. Therefore, based on the assumption that introducing external factors can enhance the spatiotemporal accuracy in predicting traffic and improving interpretability, we propose an attribute-augmented spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (AST-GCN). We model the external factors as dynamic attributes and static attributes and design an attribute-augmented unit to encode and integrate those factors into the spatiotemporal graph convolution model. Experiments on real datasets show the effectiveness of considering external information on…

Recently, solar energy has been intensively employed in power systems, especially using the photovoltaic (PV) generation units. In this regard, this paper proposes a novel design of a fuzzy logic based algorithm for varying the step size of the incremental conductance (INC) maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method for PV. In the proposed method, a variable voltage step size is estimated according to the degree of ascent or descent of the power-voltage relation. For this purpose, a novel unique treatment is proposed based on introducing five effective regions around the point of maximum PV power. To vary the step size of the duty cycle, a fuzzy logic system is developed according to the locations of the fuzzy inputs regarding the five regions. The developed fuzzy inputs are inspired from the slope of the power-voltage relation, namely the current-voltage ratio and its derivatives whereas appropriate membership functions and fuzzy rules are designed. The benefit of the proposed method is that the MPPT efficiency is improved for varying the step size of the incremental conductance…

Weed identification in vegetable plantation is more challenging than crop weed identification due to their random plant spacing. So far, little work has been found on identifying weeds in vegetable plantation. Traditional methods of crop weed identification used to be mainly focused on identifying weed directly; however, there is a large variation in weed species. This paper proposes a new method in a contrary way, which combines deep learning and image processing technology. Firstly, a trained CenterNet model was used to detect vegetables and draw bounding boxes around them. Afterwards, the remaining green objects falling out of bounding boxes were considered as weeds. In this way, the model focuses on identifying only the vegetables and thus avoid handling various weed species. Furthermore, this strategy can largely reduce the size of training image dataset as well as the complexity of weed detection, thereby enhancing the weed identification performance and accuracy. To extract weeds from the background, a color index-based segmentation was performed utilizing image processing.…

The current electric power system witnesses a significant transition into Smart Grids (SG) as a promising landscape for high grid reliability and efficient energy management. This ongoing transition undergoes rapid changes, requiring a plethora of advanced methodologies to process the big data generated by various units. In this context, SG stands tied very closely to Deep Learning (DL) as an emerging technology for creating a more decentralized and intelligent energy paradigm while integrating high intelligence in supervisory and operational decision-making. Motivated by the outstanding success of DL-based prediction methods, this article attempts to provide a thorough review from a broad perspective on the state-of-the-art advances of DL in SG systems. Firstly, a bibliometric analysis has been conducted to categorize this review's methodology. Further, we taxonomically delve into the mechanism behind some of the trending DL algorithms. We then showcase the DL enabling technologies in SG, such as federated learning, edge intelligence, and distributed computing. Finally, challenges…

Security and safety is a big concern for today's modern world. For a country to be economically strong, it must ensure a safe and secure environment for investors and tourists. Having said that, Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras are being used for surveillance and to monitor activities i.e. robberies but these cameras still require human supervision and intervention. We need a system that can automatically detect these illegal activities. Despite state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms, fast processing hardware, and advanced CCTV cameras, weapon detection in real-time is still a serious challenge. Observing angle differences, occlusions by the carrier of the firearm and persons around it further enhances the difficulty of the challenge. This work focuses on providing a secure place using CCTV footage as a source to detect harmful weapons by applying the state of the art open-source deep learning algorithms. We have implemented binary classification assuming pistol class as the reference class and relevant confusion objects inclusion concept is introduced to reduce false…

Effectively managing the healthcare supply chain (HCSC) process is crucial for healthcare providers not only during pandemics such as COVID-19 but also in their normal operations. Despite significant advances in new technologies and treatment options providers still suffer from poor procurement, ordering, forecasting, and distribution practices. Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) are an important stakeholder in HCSC and benefit providers with cost savings, volume discounts, and vendor selection. However, the current GPO contract process is time-consuming and lacks efficiency. Hence, our proposed solution integrates blockchain technology and decentralized storage to promote transparency, streamlines communication with stakeholders, and minimize the procurement timeline while avoiding pricing discrepancies and inaccuracies. Our solution connects all the stakeholders such as manufacturer, GPO, distributor, and provider using Ethereum network. In this paper, we propose a blockchain solution using smart contracts to automate the GPO contract process. We propose a generic framework for…

As a key pillar of smart transportation in smart city applications, electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming increasingly popular for their contribution in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One of the key challenges, however, is the strain on power grid infrastructure that comes with large-scale EV deployment. The solution to this lies in utilization of smart scheduling algorithms to manage the growing public charging demand. Using data-driven tools and machine learning algorithms to learn the EV charging behavior can improve scheduling algorithms. Researchers have focused on using historical charging data for predictions of behavior such as departure time and energy needs. However, variables such as weather, traffic, and nearby events, which have been neglected to a large extent, can perhaps add meaningful representations, and provide better predictions. Therefore, in this paper we propose the usage of historical charging data in conjunction with weather, traffic, and events data to predict EV session duration and energy consumption using popular machine learning algorithms including…

The recent advancements in Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) transformed the conventional healthcare system into smart healthcare. By incorporating key technologies such as IoT and AI, medical services can be improved. The convergence of IoT and AI offers different opportunities in healthcare sector. In this view, the current research article presents a new AI and IoT convergence-based disease diagnosis model for smart healthcare system. The major goal of this article is to design a disease diagnosis model for heart disease and diabetes using AI and IoT convergence techniques. The presented model encompasses different stages namely, data acquisition, preprocessing, classification, and parameter tuning. IoT devices such as wearables and sensors permit seamless data collection while AI techniques utilize the data in disease diagnosis. The proposed method uses Crow Search Optimization algorithm-based Cascaded Long Short Term Memory (CSO-CLSTM) model for disease diagnosis. In order to achieve better classification of the medical data, CSO is…

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a disease that damages retinal blood vessels and leads to blindness. Usually, colored fundus shots are used to diagnose this irreversible disease. The manual analysis (by clinicians) of the mentioned images is monotonous and error-prone. Hence, various computer vision hands-on engineering techniques are applied to predict the occurrences of the DR and its stages automatically. However, these methods are computationally expensive and lack to extract highly nonlinear features and, hence, fail to classify DR’s different stages effectively. This paper focuses on classifying the DR’s different stages with the lowest possible learnable parameters to speed up the training and model convergence. The VGG16, spatial pyramid pooling layer (SPP) and network-in-network (NiN) are stacked to make a highly nonlinear scale-invariant deep model called the VGG-NiN model. The proposed VGG-NiN model can process a DR image at any scale due to the SPP layer’s virtue. Moreover, the stacking of NiN adds extra nonlinearity to the model and tends to better classification. The…

It is expected that peer to peer energy trading will constitute a significant share of research in upcoming generation power systems due to the rising demand of energy in smart microgrids. However, the on-demand use of energy is considered a big challenge to achieve the optimal cost for households. This paper proposes a blockchain-based predictive energy trading platform to provide real-time support, day-ahead controlling, and generation scheduling of distributed energy resources. The proposed blockchain-based platform consists of two modules; blockchain-based energy trading and smart contract enabled predictive analytics modules. The blockchain module allows peers with real-time energy consumption monitoring, easy energy trading control, reward model, and unchangeable energy trading transaction logs. The smart contract enabled predictive analytics module aims to build a prediction model based on historical energy consumption data to predict short-term energy consumption. This paper uses real energy consumption data acquired from the Jeju province energy department, the Republic of…

Citrus fruit diseases are the major cause of extreme citrus fruit yield declines. As a result, designing an automated detection system for citrus plant diseases is important. Deep learning methods have recently obtained promising results in a number of artificial intelligence issues, leading us to apply them to the challenge of recognizing citrus fruit and leaf diseases. In this paper, an integrated approach is used to suggest a convolutional neural networks (CNNs) model. The proposed CNN model is intended to differentiate healthy fruits and leaves from fruits/leaves with common citrus diseases such as black spot, canker, scab, greening, and Melanose. The proposed CNN model extracts complementary discriminative features by integrating multiple layers. The CNN model was checked against many state-of-the-art deep learning models on the Citrus and PlantVillage datasets. According to the experimental results, the CNN Model outperforms the competitors in a variety of measurement metrics. The CNN Model has a test accuracy of 94.55 percent, making it a valuable decision support tool for…

Online learning platforms such as Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), and Learning Management Systems (LMS) facilitate thousands or even millions of students to learn according to their interests without spatial and temporal constraints. Besides many advantages, online learning platforms face several challenges such as students’ lack of interest, high dropouts, low engagement, students’ self-regulated behavior, and compelling students to take responsibility for settings their own goals. In this study, we propose a predictive model that analyzes the problems faced by at-risk students, subsequently, facilitating instructors for timely intervention to persuade students to increase their study engagements and improve their study performance. The predictive model is trained and tested using various machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms to characterize the learning behavior of students according to their study variables. The performance of various ML algorithms is compared by using accuracy, precision, support, and f-score. The ML…