Automatic Crop Pest Detection Oriented Multiscale Feature Fusion Approach

Specialized pest control for agriculture is a high-priority agricultural issue. There are multiple categories of tiny pests, which pose significant challenges to monitoring. Previous work mainly relied on manual monitoring of pests, which was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recently, deep-learning-based pest detection methods have achieved remarkable improvements and can be used for automatic pest monitoring. However, there are two main obstacles in the task of pest detection. (1) Small pests often go undetected because much information is lost during the network training process. (2) The highly similar physical appearances of some categories of pests make it difficult to distinguish the specific categories for networks. To alleviate the above problems, we proposed the multi-category pest detection network (MCPD-net), which includes a multiscale feature pyramid network (MFPN) and a novel adaptive feature region proposal network (AFRPN). MFPN can fuse the pest information in multiscale features, which significantly improves detection accuracy. AFRPN solves the problem of anchor and feature misalignment during RPN iterating, especially for small pest objects. In extensive experiments on the multi-category pests dataset 2021 (MPD2021), the proposed method achieved 67.3% mean average precision (mAP) and 89.3% average recall (AR), outperforming other deep learning-based models.

A Non-Invasive Method Based on AI and Current Measurements for the Detection of Faults in Three-Phase Motors

Three-phase motors are commonly adopted in several industrial contexts and their failures can result in costly downtime causing undesired service outages; therefore, motor diagnostics is an issue that assumes great importance. To prevent their failures and face the considered service outages in a timely manner, a non-invasive method to identify electrical and mechanical faults in three-phase asynchronous electric motors is proposed in the paper. In particular, a measurement strategy along with a machine learning algorithm based on an artificial neural network is exploited to properly classify failures. In particular, digitized current samples of each motor phase are first processed by means of FFT and PSD in order to estimate the associated spectrum. Suitable features (in terms of frequency and amplitude of the spectral components) are then singled out to either train or feed a neural network acting as a classifier. The method is preliminarily validated on a set of 28 electric motors, and its performance is compared with common state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. The obtained results show that the proposed methodology is able to reach accuracy levels greater than 98% in identifying anomalous conditions of three-phase asynchronous motors.

A Cost-Efficient MCSA-Based Fault Diagnostic Framework for SCIM at Low-Load Conditions

In industry, electric motors such as the squirrel cage induction motor (SCIM) generate motive power and are particularly popular due to their low acquisition cost, strength, and robustness. Along with these benefits, they have minimal maintenance costs and can run for extended periods before requiring repair and/or maintenance. Early fault detection in SCIMs, especially at low-load conditions, further helps minimize maintenance costs and mitigate abrupt equipment failure when loading is increased. Recent research on these devices is focused on fault/failure diagnostics with the aim of reducing downtime, minimizing costs, and increasing utility and productivity. Data-driven predictive maintenance offers a reliable avenue for intelligent monitoring whereby signals generated by the equipment are harnessed for fault detection and isolation (FDI). Particularly, motor current signature analysis (MCSA) provides a reliable avenue for extracting and/or exploiting discriminant information from signals for FDI and/or fault diagnosis. This study presents a fault diagnostic framework that exploits underlying spectral characteristics following MCSA and intelligent classification for fault diagnosis based on extracted spectral features. Results show that the extracted features reflect induction motor fault conditions with significant diagnostic performance (minimal false alarm rate) from intelligent models, out of which the random forest (RF) classifier was the most accurate, with an accuracy of 79.25%. Further assessment of the models showed that RF had the highest computational cost of 3.66 s, while NBC had the lowest at 0.003 s. Other significant empirical assessments were conducted, and the results support the validity of the proposed FDI technique.

Management of Smart and Sustainable Cities in the Post-COVID-19 Era: Lessons and Implications

Nowadays, the concept of smart sustainable governance is wrapped around basic principles such as: (i) transparency, (ii) accountability, (iii) stakeholders’ involvement, and iv) citizens’ participation. It is through these principles that are influenced by information and communication technologies (ICT), Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence, that the practices employed by citizens and their interaction with electronic government (e-government) are diversified. Previously, the misleading concepts of the smart city implied only the objective of the local level or public officials to utilize technology. However, the recent European experience and research studies have led to a more comprehensive notion that refers to the search for intelligent solutions which allow modern sustainable cities to enhance the quality of services provided to citizens and to improve the management of urban mobility. The smart city is based on the usage of connected sensors, data management, and analytics platforms to improve the quality and functioning of built-environment systems. The aim of this paper is to understand the effects of the pandemic on smart cities and to accentuate major exercises that can be learned for post-COVID sustainable urban management and patterns. The lessons and implications outlined in this paper can be used to enforce social distancing community measures in an effective and timely way, and to optimize the use of resources in smart and sustainable cities in critical situations. The paper offers a conceptual overview and serves as a stepping-stone to extensive research and the deployment of sustainable smart city platforms and intelligent transportation systems (a sub-area of smart city applications) after the COVID-19 pandemic using a case study from Russia. Overall, our results demonstrate that the COVID-19 crisis encompasses an excellent opportunity for urban planners and policy makers to take transformative actions towards creating cities that are more intelligent and sustainable.

A Comprehensive Survey of Digital Twins and Federated Learning for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and Internet of Drones (IoD)

As a result of the advancement in the fourth industrial revolution and communication technology, the use of digital twins (DT) and federated learning (FL) in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and the Internet of Drones (IoD) is increasing. However, the deployment of DT and FL for IoV is challenging. In this survey, we focus on DT and FL for IIoT, IoV, and IoD. Initially, we analyzed the existing surveys. In this paper, we present the applications of DT and FL in IIoT, IoV, and IoD. We also present the open research issues and future directions.

Can Interpretable Reinforcement Learning Manage Prosperity Your Way?

Personalisation of products and services is fast becoming the driver of success in banking and commerce. Machine learning holds the promise of gaining a deeper understanding of and tailoring to customers’ needs and preferences. Whereas traditional solutions to financial decision problems frequently rely on model assumptions, reinforcement learning is able to exploit large amounts of data to improve customer modelling and decision-making in complex financial environments with fewer assumptions. Model explainability and interpretability present challenges from a regulatory perspective which demands transparency for acceptance; they also offer the opportunity for improved insight into and understanding of customers. Post-hoc approaches are typically used for explaining pretrained reinforcement learning models. Based on our previous modeling of customer spending behaviour, we adapt our recent reinforcement learning algorithm that intrinsically characterizes desirable behaviours and we transition to the problem of prosperity management. We train inherently interpretable reinforcement learning agents to give investment advice that is aligned with prototype financial personality traits which are combined to make a final recommendation. We observe that the trained agents’ advice adheres to their intended characteristics, they learn the value of compound growth, and, without any explicit reference, the notion of risk as well as improved policy convergence.

The Dual Role of Artificial Intelligence in Developing Smart Cities

Defining smart city pillars, and their nature and essence, continues to be debated in the scientific literature. The vast amount of information collected by electronic devices, often regarded merely as a means of rationalizing the use of resources and improving efficiency, could also be considered as a pillar. Information by itself cannot be deciphered or understood without analysis performed by algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence. Such analysis extracts new forms of knowledge in the shape of correlations and patterns used to support the decision-making processes associated with governance and, ultimately, to define new policies. Alongside information, energy plays a crucial role in smart cities as many activities that lead to growth in the economy and employment depend on this pillar. As a result, it is crucial to highlight the link between energy and the algorithms able to plan and forecast the energy consumption of smart cities. The result of this paper consists in the highlighting of how AI and information together can be legitimately considered foundational pillars of smart cities only when their real impact, or value, has been assessed. Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence can be deployed to support smart grids, electric vehicles, and smart buildings by providing techniques and methods to enhance their innovative value and measured efficiency.

A Better Integration of Industrial Robots in Romanian Enterprises and the Labour Market

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the opportunities for adopting robotic applications, through a marketing mix perspective, as well as depicting the current state of industrial robot integration in Romanian enterprises and the labor market, in contrast to other economies of the European Union. In this research, we highlight the impact of industrial robots within enterprises, while also considering the perceived standard of living through GDP per capita. For this, we conducted exploratory research based on secondary data regarding the evolution of the robotics sector in Romania, in connection to the dynamics of the global and European Union robotics market. We also performed a principal components analysis, which revealed the main factors that contributed to the dynamics of nation-level enterprise statistics. Our analysis revealed that a higher integration of industrial robots contributed to the reduction of employment rates amongst all six EU countries considered, while also having positive correlations with the GDP per capita and apparent labor productivity. Mixed results were only observed for the impact of industrial robots on remuneration growth, suggesting the potential adverse effects automation could have on incomes.

Optimal Deep Stacked Sparse Autoencoder Based Osteosarcoma Detection and Classification Model

Osteosarcoma is a kind of bone cancer which generally starts to develop in the lengthy bones in the legs and arms. Because of an increase in occurrence of cancer and patient-specific treatment options, the detection and classification of cancer becomes a difficult process. The manual recognition of osteosarcoma necessitates expert knowledge and is time consuming. An earlier identification of osteosarcoma can reduce the death rate. With the development of new technologies, automated detection models can be exploited for medical image classification, thereby decreasing the expert's reliance and resulting in timely identification. In recent times, an amount of Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) systems are available in the literature for the segmentation and detection of osteosarcoma using medicinal images. In this view, this research work develops a wind driven optimization with deep transfer learning enabled osteosarcoma detection and classification (WDODTL-ODC) method. The presented WDODTL-ODC model intends to determine the presence of osteosarcoma in the biomedical images. To accomplish this, the osteosarcoma model involves Gaussian filtering (GF) based on pre-processing and contrast enhancement techniques. In addition, deep transfer learning using a SqueezNet model is utilized as a featured extractor. At last, the Wind Driven Optimization (WDO) algorithm with a deep-stacked sparse auto-encoder (DSSAE) is employed for the classification process. The simulation outcome demonstrated that the WDODTL-ODC technique outperformed the existing models in the detection of osteosarcoma on biomedical images.

Review of ML and AutoML Solutions to Forecast Time-Series Data

Time-series forecasting is a significant discipline of data modeling where past observations of the same variable are analyzed to predict the future values of the time series. Its prominence lies in different use cases where it is required, including economic, weather, stock price, business development, and other use cases. In this work, a review was conducted on the methods of analyzing time series starting from the traditional linear modeling techniques until the automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks, including deep learning models. The objective of this review article is to support identifying the time-series forecasting challenge and the different techniques to meet the challenge. This work can be additionally an assist and a reference for researchers and industries demanding to use AutoML to solve the problem of forecasting. It identifies the gaps of the previous works and techniques used to solve the problem of forecasting time series.

VP-Detector: A 3D multi-scale dense convolutional neural network for macromolecule localization and classification in cryo-electron tomograms

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) with subtomogram averaging (STA) is indispensable when studying macromolecule structures and functions in their native environments. Due to the low signal-to-noise ratio, the missing wedge artifacts in tomographic reconstructions, and multiple macromolecules of varied shapes and sizes, macromolecule localization and classification remain challenging. To tackle this bottleneck problem for structural determination by STA, we design an accurate macromolecule localization and classification method named voxelwise particle detector (VP-Detector).

METHODS

VP-Detector is a two-stage particle detection method based on a 3D multiscale dense convolutional neural network (3D MSDNet). The proposed network uses 3D hybrid dilated convolution (3D HDC) to avoid the resolution loss caused by scaling operations. Meanwhile, it uses 3D dense connectivity to encourage the reuse of feature maps to reduce trainable parameters. In addition, the weighted focal loss is proposed to focus more attention on difficult samples and rare classes, which relieves the class imbalance caused by multiple particles of various sizes. The performance of VP-Detector is evaluated on both simulated and real-world tomograms, and it shows that VP-Detector outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

RESULTS

The experiments show that VP-Detector outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on particle localization with an F1-score of 0.951 and a precision of 0.978. In addition, VP-Detector can replace manual particle picking in experiment on the real-world tomograms. Furthermore, it performs well in classifying large-, medium-, and small-weight proteins with accuracies of 1, 0.95, and 0.82, respectively. Finally, ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of 3D HDC, 3D dense connectivity, weighted focal loss, and training on small training sets.

CONCLUSIONS

VP-Detector can achieve high accuracy in particle detection with few trainable parameters and support training on small datasets. It can also relieve the class imbalance caused by multiple particles with various shapes and sizes.

IMNets: Deep Learning Using an Incremental Modular Network Synthesis Approach for Medical Imaging Applications

Deep learning approaches play a crucial role in computer-aided diagnosis systems to support clinical decision-making. However, developing such automated solutions is challenging due to the limited availability of annotated medical data. In this study, we proposed a novel and computationally efficient deep learning approach to leverage small data for learning generalizable and domain invariant representations in different medical imaging applications such as malaria, diabetic retinopathy, and tuberculosis. We refer to our approach as Incremental Modular Network Synthesis (IMNS), and the resulting CNNs as Incremental Modular Networks (IMNets). Our IMNS approach is to use small network modules that we call SubNets which are capable of generating salient features for a particular problem. Then, we build up ever larger and more powerful networks by combining these SubNets in different configurations. At each stage, only one new SubNet module undergoes learning updates. This reduces the computational resource requirements for training and aids in network optimization. We compare IMNets against classic and state-of-the-art deep learning architectures such as AlexNet, ResNet-50, Inception v3, DenseNet-201, and NasNet for the various experiments conducted in this study. Our proposed IMNS design leads to high average classification accuracies of 97.0%, 97.9%, and 88.6% for malaria, diabetic retinopathy, and tuberculosis, respectively. Our modular design for deep learning achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the scenarios tested. The IMNets produced here have a relatively low computational complexity compared to traditional deep learning architectures. The largest IMNet tested here has 0.95 M of the learnable parameters and 0.08 G of the floating-point multiply–add (MAdd) operations. The simpler IMNets train faster, have lower memory requirements, and process images faster than the benchmark methods tested.

An Infrared Array Sensor-Based Approach for Activity Detection, Combining Low-Cost Technology with Advanced Deep Learning Techniques

In this paper, we propose an activity detection system using a 24 × 32 resolution infrared array sensor placed on the ceiling. We first collect the data at different resolutions (i.e., 24 × 32, 12 × 16, and 6 × 8) and apply the advanced deep learning (DL) techniques of Super-Resolution (SR) and denoising to enhance the quality of the images. We then classify the images/sequences of images depending on the activities the subject is performing using a hybrid deep learning model combining a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). We use data augmentation to improve the training of the neural networks by incorporating a wider variety of samples. The process of data augmentation is performed by a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN). By enhancing the images using SR, removing the noise, and adding more training samples via data augmentation, our target is to improve the classification accuracy of the neural network. Through experiments, we show that employing these deep learning techniques to low-resolution noisy infrared images leads to a noticeable improvement in performance. The classification accuracy improved from 78.32% to 84.43% (for images with 6 × 8 resolution), and from 90.11% to 94.54% (for images with 12 × 16 resolution) when we used the CNN and CNN + LSTM networks, respectively.

Review on Artificial Intelligence Based Ophthalmic Application

Artificial intelligence is the leading branch of technology and innovation. The utility of artificial intelligence in the field of medicine is also remarkable. From drug discovery and development till the introduction of products in the market, artificial intelligence can play its role. As people age, they are more prone to be affected by eye diseases around the globe. Early diagnosis and detection help in minimizing the risk of vision loss and providing a quality life. With the help of artificial intelligence, the workload of humans and manmade errors can be reduced to an extent. The need for artificial intelligence in the area of ophthalmic is also found to be significant. As people age, they are more prone to be affected by eye diseases around the globe. Early diagnosis and detection help in minimizing the risk of vision loss and providing a quality life. In this review, we elaborated on the use of artificial intelligence in the field of pharmaceutical product development mainly with its application in ophthalmic care. AI in the future has a high potential to increase the success rate in the drug discovery phase has already been established. The application of artificial intelligence for drug development, diagnosis, and treatment is also reported with the scientific evidence in this paper.

A Review of the Potential of Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Forecasting COVID-19 Spreading

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 can be considered one of the most complicated patterns with a large number of uncertainties and nonlinearities. Therefore, analysis and prediction of the distribution of this virus are one of the most challenging problems, affecting the planning and managing of its impacts. Although different vaccines and drugs have been proved, produced, and distributed one after another, several new fast-spreading SARS-CoV-2 variants have been detected. This is why numerous techniques based on artificial intelligence (AI) have been recently designed or redeveloped to forecast these variants more effectively. The focus of such methods is on deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML), and they can forecast nonlinear trends in epidemiological issues appropriately. This short review aims to summarize and evaluate the trustworthiness and performance of some important AI-empowered approaches used for the prediction of the spread of COVID-19. Sixty-five preprints, peer-reviewed papers, conference proceedings, and book chapters published in 2020 were reviewed. Our criteria to include or exclude references were the performance of these methods reported in the documents. The results revealed that although methods under discussion in this review have suitable potential to predict the spread of COVID-19, there are still weaknesses and drawbacks that fall in the domain of future research and scientific endeavors.

IoT Intrusion Detection Using Machine Learning with a Novel High Performing Feature Selection Method

The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem has experienced significant growth in data traffic and consequently high dimensionality. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are essential self-protective tools against various cyber-attacks. However, IoT IDS systems face significant challenges due to functional and physical diversity. These IoT characteristics make exploiting all features and attributes for IDS self-protection difficult and unrealistic. This paper proposes and implements a novel feature selection and extraction approach (i.e., our method) for anomaly-based IDS. The approach begins with using two entropy-based approaches (i.e., information gain (IG) and gain ratio (GR)) to select and extract relevant features in various ratios. Then, mathematical set theory (union and intersection) is used to extract the best features. The model framework is trained and tested on the IoT intrusion dataset 2020 (IoTID20) and NSL-KDD dataset using four machine learning algorithms: Bagging, Multilayer Perception, J48, and IBk. Our approach has resulted in 11 and 28 relevant features (out of 86) using the intersection and union, respectively, on IoTID20 and resulted 15 and 25 relevant features (out of 41) using the intersection and union, respectively, on NSL-KDD. We have further compared our approach with other state-of-the-art studies. The comparison reveals that our model is superior and competent, scoring a very high 99.98% classification accuracy.

Impact Analysis of Emerging Semantic Communication Systems on Network Performance

With the paradigm shift from Shannon’s legacy, semantic communication (SC) is emerging as one of the promising next-generation communication technologies. The new paradigm in communication technology allows the meaning of transmitted messages to be successfully delivered to a receiver. Hence, the semantic communication focuses on the successful delivery of transmitted messages such as human language communication. In order to realize such new communication, both transmitter and receiver should share the same background knowledge with each other. Recently, several researchers have developed task-specific SC systems by exploiting astonishing achievements in deep learning, which can allow the same knowledge to be shared between them. However, since such SC systems are specialized to handle specific applications, not all users can be serviced by the SC systems. Therefore, a network will face a coexistence of an SC system and a traditional communication (TC) system. In this paper, we investigate how introducing emerging SC systems affects the performance of the TC system from a network perspective. For analysis, we consider the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) differently for the user served by an SC system and the user served by a TC system. Then, by using two different SNR equations, we formulate a max-min fairness problem in the coexistence of SC and TC systems. Via extensive numerical results, we compare the network performance of TC and SC users with and without SC systems, and then confirm that SC systems are indeed a promising next-generation communication alternative.

Leveraging Guided Backpropagation to Select Convolutional Neural Networks for Plant Classification

The development of state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNN) has allowed researchers to perform plant classification tasks previously thought impossible and rely on human judgment. Researchers often develop complex CNN models to achieve better performances, introducing over-parameterization and forcing the model to overfit on a training dataset. The most popular process for evaluating overfitting in a deep learning model is using accuracy and loss curves. Train and loss curves may help understand the performance of a model but do not provide guidance on how the model could be modified to attain better performance. In this article, we analyzed the relation between the features learned by a model and its capacity and showed that a model with higher representational capacity might learn many subtle features that may negatively affect its performance. Next, we showed that the shallow layers of a deep learning model learn more diverse features than the ones learned by the deeper layers. Finally, we propose SSIM cut curve, a new way to select the depth of a CNN model by using the pairwise similarity matrix between the visualization of the features learned at different depths by using Guided Backpropagation. We showed that our proposed method could potentially pave a new way to select a better CNN model.

Hybrid Deep Learning Techniques for Predicting Complex Phenomena: A Review on COVID-19

Complex phenomena have some common characteristics, such as nonlinearity, complexity, and uncertainty. In these phenomena, components typically interact with each other and a part of the system may affect other parts or vice versa. Accordingly, the human brain, the Earth’s global climate, the spreading of viruses, the economic organizations, and some engineering systems such as the transportation systems and power grids can be categorized into these phenomena. Since both analytical approaches and AI methods have some specific characteristics in solving complex problems, a combination of these techniques can lead to new hybrid methods with considerable performance. This is why several types of research have recently been conducted to benefit from these combinations to predict the spreading of COVID-19 and its dynamic behavior. In this review, 80 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, and preprints with a focus on employing hybrid methods for forecasting the spreading of COVID-19 published in 2020 have been aggregated and reviewed. These documents have been extracted from Google Scholar and many of them have been indexed on the Web of Science. Since there were many publications on this topic, the most relevant and effective techniques, including statistical models and deep learning (DL) or machine learning (ML) approach, have been surveyed in this research. The main aim of this research is to describe, summarize, and categorize these effective techniques considering their restrictions to be used as trustable references for scientists, researchers, and readers to make an intelligent choice to use the best possible method for their academic needs. Nevertheless, considering the fact that many of these techniques have been used for the first time and need more evaluations, we recommend none of them as an ideal way to be used in their project. Our study has shown that these methods can hold the robustness and reliability of statistical methods and the power of computation of DL ones.

Improved U-Net++ with Patch Split for Micro-Defect Inspection in Silk Screen Printing

The trend of multi-variety production is leading to a change in the product type of silk screen prints produced at short intervals. The types and locations of defects that usually occur in silk screen prints may vary greatly and thus, it is difficult for operators to conduct quality inspections for minuscule defects. In this paper, an improved U-Net++ is proposed based on patch splits for automated quality inspection of small or tiny defects, hereinafter referred to as ‘fine’ defects. The novelty of the method is that, to better handle defects within an image, patch level inputs are considered instead of using the original image as input. In the existing technique with the original image as input, artificial intelligence (AI) learning is not utilized efficiently, whereas our proposed method learns stably, and the Dice score was 0.728, which is approximately 10% higher than the existing method. The proposed model was applied to an actual silk screen printing process. All of the fine defects in products, such as silk screen prints, could be detected regardless of the product size. In addition, it was shown that quality inspection using the patch-split method-based AI is possible even in situations where there are few prior defective data.

ASAS-NANP SYMPOSIUM: MATHEMATICAL MODELING IN ANIMAL NUTRITION: Opportunities and Challenges of Confined and Extensive Precision Livestock Production

Modern animal scientists, industry, and managers have never faced a more complex world. Precision livestock technologies have altered management in confined operations to meet production, environmental, and consumer goals. Applications of precision technologies have been limited in extensive systems such as rangelands due to lack of infrastructure, electrical power, communication, and durability. However, advancements in technology have helped to overcome many of these challenges. Investment in precision technologies is growing within the livestock sector, requiring the need to assess opportunities and challenges associated with implementation to enhance livestock production systems. In this review, precision livestock farming and digital livestock farming are explained in the context of a logical and iterative five-step process to successfully integrate precision livestock measurement and management tools, emphasizing the need for precision system models (PSMs). This five-step process acts as a guide to realize anticipated benefits from precision technologies and avoid unintended consequences. Consequently, the synthesis of precision livestock and modeling examples and key case studies help highlight past challenges and current opportunities within confined and extensive systems. Successfully developing PSM requires appropriate model(s) selection that aligns with desired management goals and precision technology capabilities. Therefore, it is imperative to consider the entire system to ensure that precision technology integration achieves desired goals while remaining economically and managerially sustainable. Achieving long-term success using precision technology requires the next generation of animal scientists to obtain additional skills to keep up with the rapid pace of technology innovation. Building workforce capacity and synergistic relationships between research, industry, and managers will be critical. As the process of precision technology adoption continues in more challenging and harsh, extensive systems, it is likely that confined operations will benefit from required advances in precision technology and PSMs, ultimately strengthening the benefits from precision technology to achieve short- and long-term goals.

Effective hybrid deep learning model for COVID-19 patterns identification using CT images

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has attracted significant attention of researchers from various disciplines since the end of 2019. Although the global epidemic situation is stabilizing due to vaccination, new COVID-19 cases are constantly being discovered around the world. As a result, lung computed tomography (CT) examination, an aggregated identification technique, has been used to ameliorate diagnosis. It helps reveal missed diagnoses due to the ambiguity of nucleic acid polymerase chain reaction. Therefore, this study investigated how quickly and accurately hybrid deep learning (DL) methods can identify infected individuals with COVID-19 on the basis of their lung CT images. In addition, this study proposed a developed system to create a reliable COVID-19 prediction network using various layers starting with the segmentation of the lung CT scan image and ending with disease prediction. The initial step of the system starts with a proposed technique for lung segmentation that relies on a no-threshold histogram-based image segmentation method. Afterward, the GrabCut method was used as a post-segmentation method to enhance segmentation outcomes and avoid over-and under-segmentation problems. Then, three pre-trained models of standard DL methods, including Visual Geometry Group Network, convolutional deep belief network, and high-resolution network, were utilized to extract the most affective features from the segmented images that can help to identify COVID-19. These three described pre-trained models were combined as a new mechanism to increase the system's overall prediction capabilities. A publicly available dataset, namely, COVID-19 CT, was used to test the performance of the proposed model, which obtained a 95% accuracy rate. On the basis of comparison, the proposed model outperformed several state-of-the-art studies. Because of its effectiveness in accurately screening COVID-19 CT images, the developed model will potentially be valuable as an additional diagnostic tool for leading clinical professionals.

Deep-Learning-Based Stream-Sensing Method for Detecting Asynchronous Multiple Signals

In a disaster site, terrestrial communication infrastructures are often destroyed or malfunctioning, and hence it is very difficult to detect the existence of survivors in the site. At such sites, UAVs are rapidly emerging as an alternative to mobile base stations to establish temporary infrastructure. In this paper, a novel deep-learning-based multi-source detection scheme is proposed for the scenario in which an UAV wants to estimate the number of survivors sending rescue signals within its coverage in a disaster site. For practicality, survivors are assumed to use off-the-shelf smartphones to send rescue signals, and hence the transmitted signals are orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-modulated. Since the line of sight between the UAV and survivors cannot be generally secured, the sensing performance of existing radar techniques significantly deteriorates. Furthermore, we discover that transmitted signals of survivors are unavoidably aysnchronized to each other, and thus existing frequency-domain multi-source classification approaches cannot work. To overcome the limitations of these existing technologies, we propose a lightweight deep-learning-based multi-source detection scheme by carefully designing neural network architecture, input and output signals, and a training method. Extensive numerical simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing methods for various SNRs under the scenario where synchronous and asynchronous transmission is mixed in a received signal. For almost all cases, the precision and recall of the proposed scheme is nearly one, even when users’ signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) are randomly changing within a certain range. The precision and recall are improved up to 100% compared to existing methods, confirming that the proposal overcomes the limitation of the existing works due to the asynchronicity. Moreover, for Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6900K CPU, the processing time of our proposal for a case is 31.8 milliseconds. As a result, the proposed scheme provides a robust and reliable detection performance with fast processing time. This proposal can also be applied to any field that needs to detect the number of wireless signals in a scenario where synchronization between wireless signals is not guaranteed.

A Machine Learning Classification Model for Gold-Binding Peptides

There has been growing interest in using peptides for the controlled synthesis of nanomaterials. Peptides play a crucial role not only in regulating the nanostructure formation process but also in influencing the resulting properties of the nanomaterials. Leveraging machine learning (ML) in the biomimetic workflow is anticipated to accelerate peptide discovery, make the process more resource-efficient, and unravel associations among attributes that may be useful in peptide design. In this study, a binary ML classifier is formulated that was trained and tested on 1720 peptide examples. The support vector machine classifier uses Kidera factors to categorize peptides into one of two groups based on their binding ability. The classifier exhibits satisfactory performance, as demonstrated by various performance metrics. In addition, key variables that bear a huge impact on the model were identified, such as peptide hydrophobicity. As these trends were derived from a large and diverse dataset, the insights drawn from the data are expected to be generalizable and robust. Thus, the presented ML model is an important step toward the rational and predictive peptide design.

Predicting Grape Sugar Content under Quality Attributes Using Normalized Difference Vegetation Index Data and Automated Machine Learning

Wine grapes need frequent monitoring to achieve high yields and quality. Non-destructive methods, such as proximal and remote sensing, are commonly used to estimate crop yield and quality characteristics, and spectral vegetation indices (VIs) are often used to present site-specific information. Analysis of laboratory samples is the most popular method for determining the quality characteristics of grapes, although it is time-consuming and expensive. In recent years, several machine learning-based methods have been developed to predict crop quality. Although these techniques require the extensive involvement of experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) offers the possibility to improve this task, saving time and resources. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach for robust prediction of grape quality attributes by combining open-source AutoML techniques and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data for vineyards obtained from four different platforms-two proximal vehicle-mounted canopy reflectance sensors, orthomosaics from UAV images and Sentinel-2 remote sensing imagery-during the 2019 and 2020 growing seasons. We investigated AutoML, extending our earlier work on manually fine-tuned machine learning methods. Results of the two approaches using Ordinary Least Square (OLS), Theil-Sen and Huber regression models and tree-based methods were compared. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Automatic Relevance Determination (ARD) were included in the analysis and different combinations of sensors and data collected over two growing seasons were investigated. Results showed promising performance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Spectrosense+ GPS data in predicting grape sugars, especially in mid to late season with full canopy growth. Regression models with both manually fine-tuned ML (R² = 0.61) and AutoML (R² = 0.65) provided similar results, with the latter slightly improved for both 2019 and 2020. When combining multiple sensors and growth stages per year, the coefficient of determination R² improved even more averaging 0.66 for the best-fitting regressions. Also, when considering combinations of sensors and growth stages across both cropping seasons, UAV and Spectrosense+ GPS, as well as Véraison and Flowering, each had the highest average R² values. These performances are consistent with previous work on machine learning algorithms that were manually fine-tuned. These results suggest that AutoML has greater long-term performance potential. To increase the efficiency of crop quality prediction, a balance must be struck between manual expert work and AutoML.

A Novel Image Recognition Method Based on DenseNet and DPRN

Image recognition is one of the important branches of computer vision, which has important theoretical and practical significance. For the insufficient use of features, the single type of convolution kernel and the incomplete network optimization problems in densely connected networks (DenseNet), a novel image recognition method based on DenseNet and deep pyramidal residual networks (DPRN) is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, a new residual unit based on DPRN is designed, and the idea of a pyramid residual unit is introduced, which makes the input greater than the output. Then, a module based on dilated convolution is designed for parallel feature extraction. Finally, the designed module is fused with DenseNet in order to construct the image recognition model. This model not only overcomes some of the existing problems in DenseNet, but also has the same general applicability as DensenNet. The CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 are selected to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experiment results show that the proposed method can effectively reuse features and has obtained accuracy rates of 83.98 and 51.19%, respectively. It is an effective method for dealing with images in different fields.

A Survey of Artificial Intelligence Challenges: Analyzing the Definitions, Relationships, and Evolutions

In recent years, artificial intelligence has had a tremendous impact on every field, and several definitions of its different types have been provided. In the literature, most articles focus on the extraordinary capabilities of artificial intelligence. Recently, some challenges such as security, safety, fairness, robustness, and energy consumption have been reported during the development of intelligent systems. As the usage of intelligent systems increases, the number of new challenges increases. Obviously, during the evolution of artificial narrow intelligence to artificial super intelligence, the viewpoint on the challenges such as security will be changed. In addition, the recent development of human-level intelligence cannot appropriately happen without considering whole challenges in designing intelligent systems. Considering the mentioned situation, no study in the literature summarizes the challenges in designing artificial intelligence. In this paper, a review of the challenges is presented. Then, some important research questions about the future dynamism of challenges and their relationships are answered.

An Effective Approach for Controller Placement in Software-Defined Internet-of-Things (SD-IoT)

The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has transferred network intelligence from network devices to a centralized controller. Controllers are distributed in a network to eliminate a single point of failure (SPOF) and improve reliability and balance load. In Software-Defined Internet of Things (SD-IoT), sensors exchange data with a controller on a regular basis. If the controllers are not appropriately located in SD-IoT, the E2E latency between the switches, to which the sensors are connected, and the controller increases. However, examining the placement of controllers in relation to the whole network is not an efficient technique since applying the objective function to the entire network is a difficult operation. As a result, segmenting the network into clusters improves the efficiency with which switches are assigned to the controller. As a result, in this research, we offer an effective clustering strategy for controller placement in SDN that leverages the Analytical Network Process (ANP), a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) scheme. The simulation results demonstrated on real Internet topologies suggest that our proposed method outperforms the standard k-means approach in terms of E2E delay, controller-to-controller (C2C) delay, the fair allocation of switches in the network, and the communication overhead.

Ethical Issues in AI-Enabled Disease Surveillance: Perspectives from Global Health

Infectious diseases, as COVID-19 is proving, pose a global health threat in an interconnected world. In the last 20 years, resistant infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), H1N1 influenza (swine flu), Ebola virus, Zika virus, and now COVID-19 have been impacting global health defences, and aggressively flourishing with the rise of global travel, urbanization, climate change, and ecological degradation. In parallel, this extraordinary episode in global human health highlights the potential for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled disease surveillance to collect and analyse vast amounts of unstructured and real-time data to inform epidemiological and public health emergency responses. The uses of AI in these dynamic environments are increasingly complex, challenging the potential for human autonomous decisions. In this context, our study of qualitative perspectives will consider a responsible AI framework to explore its potential application to disease surveillance in a global health context. Thus far, there is a gap in the literature in considering these multiple and interconnected levels of disease surveillance and emergency health management through the lens of a responsible AI framework.

ADC-Net: An Open-Source Deep Learning Network for Automated Dispersion Compensation in Optical Coherence Tomography

Chromatic dispersion is a common problem to degrade the system resolution in optical coherence tomography (OCT). This study is to develop a deep learning network for automated dispersion compensation (ADC-Net) in OCT. The ADC-Net is based on a modified UNet architecture which employs an encoder-decoder pipeline. The input section encompasses partially compensated OCT B-scans with individual retinal layers optimized. Corresponding output is a fully compensated OCT B-scan with all retinal layers optimized. Two numeric parameters, i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index metric computed at multiple scales (MS-SSIM), were used for objective assessment of the ADC-Net performance and optimal values of 29.95 ± 2.52 dB and 0.97 ± 0.014 were obtained respectively. Comparative analysis of training models, including single, three, five, seven and nine input channels were implemented. The mode with five-input channels was observed to be optimal for ADC-Net training to achieve robust dispersion compensation in OCT.

A New Vehicle Dataset in the City of Los Angeles for V2X and Machine Learning Applications

The fifth-generation (5G) network is the current emerging technology that meets the increasing need for higher throughputs and greater system capacities. It is expected that 5G technology will enable many new applications and services. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is an example of an application that is supported by 5G technology and beyond. A V2X communication system allows a vehicle to be connected to an entity, such as a pedestrian, another vehicle, infrastructure, and a network, to provide a robust transportation solution. It uses many models and strategies that are usually based on machine learning (ML) techniques, which require the use of a vehicle dataset. In this paper, a real vehicle dataset is proposed that was generated in the city of Los Angeles (LA). It is called the Vehicle dataset in the city of LA (VehDS-LA). It has 74,170 samples that are located on 15 LA streets and each sample has 4 features. The LA dataset has been opened to allow researchers in V2X and ML fields to use it for academic purposes. The main uses of the VehDS-LA dataset are studies related to 5G networks, vehicle automation, or ML-Based vehicle mobility applications. The proposed dataset overcomes limitations experienced by previous related works.

Distinguishing Malicious Drones Using Vision Transformer

Drones are commonly used in numerous applications, such as surveillance, navigation, spraying pesticides in autonomous agricultural systems, various military services, etc., due to their variable sizes and workloads. However, malicious drones that carry harmful objects are often adversely used to intrude restricted areas and attack critical public places. Thus, the timely detection of malicious drones can prevent potential harm. This article proposes a vision transformer (ViT) based framework to distinguish between drones and malicious drones. In the proposed ViT based model, drone images are split into fixed-size patches; then, linearly embeddings and position embeddings are applied, and the resulting sequence of vectors is finally fed to a standard ViT encoder. During classification, an additional learnable classification token associated to the sequence is used. The proposed framework is compared with several handcrafted and deep convolutional neural networks (D-CNN), which reveal that the proposed model has achieved an accuracy of 98.3%, outperforming various handcrafted and D-CNNs models. Additionally, the superiority of the proposed model is illustrated by comparing it with the existing state-of-the-art drone-detection methods.

Developing an Optimized Policy Tree-Based Reservoir Operation Model for High Aswan Dam Reservoir, Nile River

The impacts of climate change on the Nile River and Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) along with the increased water demand downstream suggest an urgent need for more efficient management of the reservoir system that is well-informed by accurate modeling and optimization of the reservoir operation. This study provides an updated water balance model for Aswan High Dam Reservoir, which was validated using combined heterogeneous sources of information, including in situ gauge data, bias-corrected reanalyzed data, and remote sensing information. To investigate the future challenges, the spatial distribution of the annual/seasonal Aswan High Dam Reservoir surface air temperature trends over the period from 1979 to 2018 was studied. An increase of around 0.48 °C per decade in average annual temperature was detected, a trend that is expected to continue until 2100. Moreover, a set of machine learning models were developed and utilized to bias-correct the reanalyzed inflow and outflow data available for Aswan High Dam Reservoir. Finally, a policy tree optimization model was developed to inform the decision-making process and operation of the reservoir system. Results from the historical test simulations show that including reliable inflow data, accurate estimation of evaporation losses, and including new regulations and added projects, such as the Toshka Project, greatly affect the simulation results and guide managers through how the reservoir system should be operated in the future.

Inertial Motion Capture-Based Wearable Systems for Estimation of Joint Kinetics: A Systematic Review

In biomechanics, joint kinetics has an important role in evaluating the mechanical load of the joint and understanding its motor function. Although an optical motion capture (OMC) system has mainly been used to evaluate joint kinetics in combination with force plates, inertial motion capture (IMC) systems have recently been emerging in joint kinetic analysis due to their wearability and ubiquitous measurement capability. In this regard, numerous studies have been conducted to estimate joint kinetics using IMC-based wearable systems. However, these have not been comprehensively addressed yet. Thus, the aim of this review is to explore the methodology of the current studies on estimating joint kinetic variables by means of an IMC system. From a systematic search of the literature, 48 studies were selected. This paper summarizes the content of the selected literature in terms of the (i) study characteristics, (ii) methodologies, and (iii) study results. The estimation methods of the selected studies are categorized into two types: the inverse dynamics-based method and the machine learning-based method. While these two methods presented different characteristics in estimating the kinetic variables, it was demonstrated in the literature that both methods could be applied with good performance for the kinetic analysis of joints in different daily activities.

IoT as a Backbone of Intelligent Homestead Automation

The concepts of smart agriculture, with the aim of highly automated industrial mass production leaning towards self-farming, can be scaled down to the level of small farms and homesteads, with the use of more affordable electronic components and open-source software. The backbone of smart agriculture, in both cases, is the Internet of Things (IoT). Single-board computers (SBCs) such as a Raspberry Pi, working under Linux or Windows IoT operating systems, make affordable platform for smart devices with modular architecture, suitable for automation of various tasks by using machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision (CV). Similarly, the Arduino microcontroller enables the building of nodes in the IoT network, capable of reading various physical values, wirelessly sending them to other computers for processing and furthermore, controlling electronic elements and machines in the physical world based on the received data. This review gives a limited overview of currently available technologies for smart automation of industrial agricultural production and of alternative, smaller-scale projects applicable in homesteads, based on Arduino and Raspberry Pi hardware, as well as a draft proposal of an integrated homestead automation system based on the IoT.

A Classifier for Improving Early Lung Cancer Diagnosis Incorporating Artificial Intelligence and Liquid Biopsy

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide and in China. Screening for lung cancer by low dose computed tomography (LDCT) can reduce mortality but has resulted in a dramatic rise in the incidence of indeterminate pulmonary nodules, which presents a major diagnostic challenge for clinicians regarding their underlying pathology and can lead to overdiagnosis. To address the significant gap in evaluating pulmonary nodules, we conducted a prospective study to develop a prediction model for individuals at intermediate to high risk of developing lung cancer. Univariate and multivariate logistic analyses were applied to the training cohort (n = 560) to develop an early lung cancer prediction model. The results indicated that a model integrating clinical characteristics (age and smoking history), radiological characteristics of pulmonary nodules (nodule diameter, nodule count, upper lobe location, malignant sign at the nodule edge, subsolid status), artificial intelligence analysis of LDCT data, and liquid biopsy achieved the best diagnostic performance in the training cohort (sensitivity 89.53%, specificity 81.31%, area under the curve [AUC] = 0.880). In the independent validation cohort (n = 168), this model had an AUC of 0.895, which was greater than that of the Mayo Clinic Model (AUC = 0.772) and Veterans' Affairs Model (AUC = 0.740). These results were significantly better for predicting the presence of cancer than radiological features and artificial intelligence risk scores alone. Applying this classifier prospectively may lead to improved early lung cancer diagnosis and early treatment for patients with malignant nodules while sparing patients with benign entities from unnecessary and potentially harmful surgery.

Clinical Trial Registration Number

ChiCTR1900026233, URL: http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=43370.

Personalized Product Recommendation Model of Automatic Question Answering Robot Based on Deep Learning

The collaborative filtering algorithm widely used in recommendation systems has problems with the sparsity of scoring data and the cold start of new products. A personalized product recommendation model for automated question-answering robots using deep learning is proposed. First, a personalized attention mechanism at the word level and the comment level is proposed, and the comments and users are individually coded. Then, the bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) is used to construct the score prediction matrix, and through the dynamic collaborative filtering algorithm to integrate the time characteristics of the user’s interest changes. Finally, the feature codes of the users and products are input into the Bi-GRU model for learning, so as to output the recommendation list of personalized products of the automated question answering robot. Experimental results based on the JD and Tianchi datasets show that the training loss of the proposed model is lower than 45 and 23, respectively. And HR@15 and MRR@15 exceed 48 and 15, respectively, which are better than other comparison models. It can better adapt to the actual needs of automatic question-answering robots.

Identifying Country-Level Risk Factors for the Spread of COVID-19 in Europe Using Machine Learning

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in approximately 5 million deaths around the world with unprecedented consequences in people’s daily routines and in the global economy. Despite vast increases in time and money spent on COVID-19-related research, there is still limited information about the factors at the country level that affected COVID-19 transmission and fatality in EU. The paper focuses on the identification of these risk factors using a machine learning (ML) predictive pipeline and an associated explainability analysis. To achieve this, a hybrid dataset was created employing publicly available sources comprising heterogeneous parameters from the majority of EU countries, e.g., mobility measures, policy responses, vaccinations, and demographics/generic country-level parameters. Data pre-processing and data exploration techniques were initially applied to normalize the available data and decrease the feature dimensionality of the data problem considered. Then, a linear ε-Support Vector Machine (ε-SVM) model was employed to implement the regression task of predicting the number of deaths for each one of the three first pandemic waves (with mean square error of 0.027 for wave 1 and less than 0.02 for waves 2 and 3). Post hoc explainability analysis was finally applied to uncover the rationale behind the decision-making mechanisms of the ML pipeline and thus enhance our understanding with respect to the contribution of the selected country-level parameters to the prediction of COVID-19 deaths in EU.

Affective State Recognition in Livestock—Artificial Intelligence Approaches

Simple Summary

Emotions or affective states recognition in farm animals is an underexplored research domain. Despite significant advances in animal welfare research, animal affective state computing through the development and application of devices and platforms that can not only recognize but interpret and process the emotions, are in a nascent stage. The analysis and measurement of unique behavioural, physical, and biological characteristics offered by biometric sensor technologies and the affiliated complex and large data sets, opens the pathway for novel and realistic identification of individual animals amongst a herd or a flock. By capitalizing on the immense potential of biometric sensors, artificial intelligence enabled big data methods offer substantial advancement of animal welfare standards and meet the urgent needs of caretakers to respond effectively to maintain the wellbeing of their animals.

Abstract

Farm animals, numbering over 70 billion worldwide, are increasingly managed in large-scale, intensive farms. With both public awareness and scientific evidence growing that farm animals experience suffering, as well as affective states such as fear, frustration and distress, there is an urgent need to develop efficient and accurate methods for monitoring their welfare. At present, there are not scientifically validated ‘benchmarks’ for quantifying transient emotional (affective) states in farm animals, and no established measures of good welfare, only indicators of poor welfare, such as injury, pain and fear. Conventional approaches to monitoring livestock welfare are time-consuming, interrupt farming processes and involve subjective judgments. Biometric sensor data enabled by artificial intelligence is an emerging smart solution to unobtrusively monitoring livestock, but its potential for quantifying affective states and ground-breaking solutions in their application are yet to be realized. This review provides innovative methods for collecting big data on farm animal emotions, which can be used to train artificial intelligence models to classify, quantify and predict affective states in individual pigs and cows. Extending this to the group level, social network analysis can be applied to model emotional dynamics and contagion among animals. Finally, ‘digital twins’ of animals capable of simulating and predicting their affective states and behaviour in real time are a near-term possibility.

Wireless Technologies for Social Distancing in the Time of COVID-19: Literature Review, Open Issues, and Limitations

This research aims to provide a comprehensive background on social distancing as well as effective technologies that can be used to facilitate the social distancing practice. Scenarios of enabling wireless and emerging technologies are presented, which are especially effective in monitoring and keeping distance amongst people. In addition, detailed taxonomy is proposed summarizing the essential elements such as implementation type, scenarios, and technology being used. This research reviews and analyzes existing social distancing studies that focus on employing different kinds of technologies to fight the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This study main goal is to identify and discuss the issues, challenges, weaknesses and limitations found in the existing models and/or systems to provide a clear understanding of the area. Articles were systematically collected and filtered based on certain criteria and within ten years span. The findings of this study will support future researchers and developers to solve specific issues and challenges, fill research gaps, and improve social distancing systems to fight pandemics similar to COVID-19.

Weight-Quantized SqueezeNet for Resource-Constrained Robot Vacuums for Indoor Obstacle Classification

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) theory, particularly deep learning neural networks, robot vacuums equipped with AI power can automatically clean indoor floors by using intelligent programming and vacuuming services. To date, several deep AI models have been proposed to distinguish indoor objects between cleanable litter and noncleanable hazardous obstacles. Unfortunately, these existing deep AI models focus entirely on the accuracy enhancement of object classification, and little effort has been made to minimize the memory size and implementation cost of AI models. As a result, these existing deep AI models require far more memory space than a typical robot vacuum can provide. To address this shortcoming, this paper aims to study and find an efficient deep AI model that can achieve a good balance between classification accuracy and memory usage (i.e., implementation cost). In this work, we propose a weight-quantized SqueezeNet model for robot vacuums. This model can classify indoor cleanable litters from noncleanable hazardous obstacles based on the image or video captures from robot vacuums. Furthermore, we collect videos or pictures captured by built-in cameras of robot vacuums and use them to construct a diverse dataset. The dataset contains 20,000 images with a ground-view perspective of dining rooms, kitchens and living rooms for various houses under different lighting conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed deep AI model can achieve comparable object classification accuracy of around 93% while reducing memory usage by at least 22.5 times. More importantly, the memory footprint required by our AI model is only 0.8 MB, indicating that this model can run smoothly on resource-constrained robot vacuums, where low-end processors or microcontrollers are dedicated to running AI algorithms.

Deep Learning and Transformer Approaches for UAV-Based Wildfire Detection and Segmentation

Wildfires are a worldwide natural disaster causing important economic damages and loss of lives. Experts predict that wildfires will increase in the coming years mainly due to climate change. Early detection and prediction of fire spread can help reduce affected areas and improve firefighting. Numerous systems were developed to detect fire. Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were employed to tackle this problem due to their high flexibility, their low-cost, and their ability to cover wide areas during the day or night. However, they are still limited by challenging problems such as small fire size, background complexity, and image degradation. To deal with the aforementioned limitations, we adapted and optimized Deep Learning methods to detect wildfire at an early stage. A novel deep ensemble learning method, which combines EfficientNet-B5 and DenseNet-201 models, is proposed to identify and classify wildfire using aerial images. In addition, two vision transformers (TransUNet and TransFire) and a deep convolutional model (EfficientSeg) were employed to segment wildfire regions and determine the precise fire regions. The obtained results are promising and show the efficiency of using Deep Learning and vision transformers for wildfire classification and segmentation. The proposed model for wildfire classification obtained an accuracy of 85.12% and outperformed many state-of-the-art works. It proved its ability in classifying wildfire even small fire areas. The best semantic segmentation models achieved an F1-score of 99.9% for TransUNet architecture and 99.82% for TransFire architecture superior to recent published models. More specifically, we demonstrated the ability of these models to extract the finer details of wildfire using aerial images. They can further overcome current model limitations, such as background complexity and small wildfire areas.

Computational Models of Readers' Apperceptive Mass

Recent progress in machine-learning-based distributed semantic models (DSMs) offers new ways to simulate the apperceptive mass (AM; Kintsch, 1980) of reader groups or individual readers and to predict their performance in reading-related tasks. The AM integrates the mental lexicon with world knowledge, as for example, acquired via reading books. Following pioneering work by Denhière and Lemaire (2004), here, we computed DSMs based on a representative corpus of German children and youth literature (Jacobs et al., 2020) as null models of the part of the AM that represents distributional semantic input, for readers of different reading ages (grades 1–2, 3–4, and 5–6). After a series of DSM quality tests, we evaluated the performance of these models quantitatively in various tasks to simulate the different reader groups' hypothetical semantic and syntactic skills. In a final study, we compared the models' performance with that of human adult and children readers in two rating tasks. Overall, the results show that with increasing reading age performance in practically all tasks becomes better. The approach taken in these studies reveals the limits of DSMs for simulating human AM and their potential for applications in scientific studies of literature, research in education, or developmental science.

Introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning into orthodontics: A review

Over the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have revolutionized different healthcare branches, including dentistry. AI in a wider aspect means computers that mimic or behave like human intelligence whereas ML forms a part of AI and enables machines to increase their capabilities by the process of self-adapting algorithms. AI models’ basic principles or fundamentals are purely based on artificial neural networks or convolutional neural networks. This review focuses on giving a comprehensive and detailed explanation about AI and ML technology and their wide range of applications in various sections of orthodontic practice.

Crop Pest Recognition in Real Agricultural Environment Using Convolutional Neural Networks by a Parallel Attention Mechanism

Crop pests are a major agricultural problem worldwide because the severity and extent of their occurrence threaten crop yield. However, traditional pest image segmentation methods are limited, ineffective and time-consuming, which causes difficulty in their promotion and application. Deep learning methods have become the main methods to address the technical challenges related to pest recognition. We propose an improved deep convolution neural network to better recognize crop pests in a real agricultural environment. The proposed network includes parallel attention mechanism module and residual blocks, and it has significant advantages in terms of accuracy and real-time performance compared with other models. Extensive comparative experiment results show that the proposed model achieves up to 98.17% accuracy for crop pest images. Moreover, the proposed method also achieves a better performance on the other public dataset. This study has the potential to be applied in real-world applications and further motivate research on pest recognition.

Telehealth and Artificial Intelligence Insights into Healthcare during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Soon after the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic was proclaimed, digital health services were widely adopted to respond to this public health emergency, including comprehensive monitoring technologies, telehealth, creative diagnostic, and therapeutic decision-making methods. The World Health Organization suggested that artificial intelligence might be a valuable way of dealing with the crisis. Artificial intelligence is an essential technology of the fourth industrial revolution that is a critical nonmedical intervention for overcoming the present global health crisis, developing next-generation pandemic preparation, and regaining resilience. While artificial intelligence has much potential, it raises fundamental privacy, transparency, and safety concerns. This study seeks to address these issues and looks forward to an intelligent healthcare future based on best practices and lessons learned by employing telehealth and artificial intelligence during the COVID-19 pandemic.