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Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are playing a crucial role in transforming healthcare by enhancing the quality, accessibility, and efficiency of medical care, research, and operations. These algorithms enable healthcare providers to offer more accurate diagnoses, predict outcomes, and customize treatments to individual patient needs. AI also improves operational efficiency by automating routine tasks and optimizing resource management. However, there are challenges to adopting AI in healthcare, such as data privacy concerns and potential biases in algorithms. Collaboration among stakeholders is necessary to ensure ethical use of AI and its positive impact on the field. AI also has applications in medical research, preventive medicine, and public health. It is important to recognize that AI should augment, not replace, the expertise and compassionate care provided by healthcare professionals. The ethical implications and societal impact of AI in healthcare must be carefully considered, guided by fairness, transparency, and accountability principles. Several research papers in this special issue explore the application of AI algorithms in various aspects of healthcare, such as gait analysis for Parkinson's disease diagnosis, human activity recognition, heart disease prediction, compliance assessment with clinical protocols, epidemic management, neurological complications identification, fall prevention, leukemia diagnosis, and genetic clinical pathways. These studies demonstrate the potential of AI in improving medical diagnostics, patient monitoring, and personalized care. [Extracted from the article]

This paper is concerned with the application of computational intelligence techniques to the conceptual design and development of a large-scale floating settlement. The settlement in question is a design for the area of Urla, which is a rural touristic region located on the west coast of Turkey, near the metropolis of Izmir. The problem at hand includes both engineering and architectural aspects that need to be addressed in a comprehensive manner. We thus adapt the view as a multi-objective constrained real-parameter optimization problem. Specifically, we consider three objectives, which are conflicting. The first one aims at maximizing accessibility of urban functions such as housing and public spaces, as well as special functions, such as a marina for yachts and a yacht club. The second one aims at ensuring the wind protection of the general areas of the settlement, by adequately placing them in between neighboring land masses. The third one aims at maximizing visibility of the settlement from external observation points, so as to maximize the exposure of the settlement. To address this complex multi-objective optimization problem and identify lucrative alternative design solutions, a multi-objective harmony search algorithm (MOHS) is developed and applied in this paper. When compared to the Differential Evolution algorithm developed for the problem in the literature, we demonstrate that MOHS achieves competitive or slightly better performance in terms of hyper volume calculation, and gives promising results when the Pareto front approximation is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-preemptive schedulers, despite their many discussed drawbacks, remain a very popular choice for practitioners of real-time and embedded systems. The non-preemptive 'thrift' cyclic scheduler-variations of which can be found in other application areas-has recently received considerable attention for the implementation of such embedded systems. A thrift scheduler provides a flexible and compact implementation model for periodic task sets with comparatively small overheads; additionally, it can overcome several of the problems associated with traditional 'cyclic executives'. However, severe computational difficulties can still arise when designing schedules for non-trivial task sets. This paper is concerned with an optimization version of the offset-assignment problem, in which the objective is to assign task offsets such that the required CPU clock speed is minimized whilst ensuring that task overruns do not occur; it is known that the decision version of this problem is complete for Σ2. The paper first considers the problem of candidate solution verification-itself strongly coNP-Complete- and a fast, exact algorithm for this problem is proposed; it is shown that for any fixed number of tasks, its execution time is polynomial. The paper then proposes two heuristic algorithms of pseudo-polynomial complexity for solving the offset-assignment problem, and considers how redundant choices of offset combinations can be eliminated to help speed up the search. The performance of these algorithms is then experimentally evaluated, before conclusions are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]p. The paper first considers the problem of candidate solution verification-itself strongly coNP-Complete- and a fast, exact algorithm for this problem is proposed; it is shown that for any fixed number of tasks, its execution time is polynomial. The paper then proposes two heuristic algorithms of pseudo-polynomial complexity for solving the offset-assignment problem, and considers how redundant choices of offset combinations can be eliminated to help speed up the search. The performance of these algorithms is then experimentally evaluated, before conclusions are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results obtained for the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique applied to a photovoltaic (PV) system, composed of five solar panels in series using two different methodologies. First, we considered a traditional Perturb and Observe (P&O) algorithm and in a second stage we applied a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) that uses fuzzy logic concepts to improve the traditional P&O; both were implemented in a boost converter. The main aim of this paper is to study if an artificial intelligence (AI) based MPPT method, can be more efficient, stable and adaptable than a traditional MPPT method, in varying environment conditions, namely solar irradiation and/or environment temperature and also to analyze their behaviour in steady state conditions. The proposed FLC with a rule base collection of 25 rules outperformed the controller using the traditional P&O algorithm due to its adaptative step size, enabling the FLC to adapt the PV system faster to changing environment conditions, guessing the correct maximum power point (MPP) faster and achieving lower oscillations in steady state conditions, leading to higher generated energy due to lower losses both in steady state and dynamic environment conditions. The simulations in this study were performed using MATLAB (Version 2018)/Simulink. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydrogen provides a clean source of energy that can be produced with the aid of electrolysers. For electrolysers to operate cost-effectively and safely, it is necessary to define an appropriate maintenance strategy. Predictive maintenance is one of such strategies but often relies on data from sensors which can also become faulty, resulting in false information. Consequently, maintenance will not be performed at the right time and failure will occur. To address this problem, the artificial intelligence concept is applied to make predictions on sensor readings based on data obtained from another instrument within the process. In this study, a novel algorithm is developed using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to select the best feature(s) among measured data of the electrolyser, which can best predict the target sensor data for predictive maintenance. The features are used as input into a type of deep neural network called long short-term memory (LSTM) to make predictions. The DLR developed has been compared with those found in literatures within the scope of this study. The results have been excellent and, in fact, have produced the best scores. Specifically, its correlation coefficient with the target variable was practically total (0.99). Likewise, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) between the experimental sensor data and the predicted variable was only 0.1351. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to build explainable and interpretable machine learning (or deep learning) methods without sacrificing prediction performance. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successful in making predictions, especially in image classification. These popular and well-documented successes use extremely deep CNNs such as VGG16, DenseNet121, and Xception. However, these well-known deep learning models use tens of millions of parameters based on a large number of pretrained filters that have been repurposed from previous data sets. Among these identified filters, a large portion contain no information yet remain as input features. Thus far, there is no effective method to omit these noisy features from a data set, and their existence negatively impacts prediction performance. In this paper, a novel interaction-based convolutional neural network (ICNN) is introduced that does not make assumptions about the relevance of local information. Instead, a model-free influence score (I-score) is proposed to directly extract the influential information from images to form important variable modules. This innovative technique replaces all pretrained filters found by trial-and-error with explainable, influential, and predictive variable sets (modules) determined by the I-score. In other words, future researchers need not rely on pretrained filters; the suggested algorithm identifies only the variables or pixels with high I-score values that are extremely predictive and important. The proposed method and algorithm were tested on real-world data set and a state-of-the-art prediction performance of 99.8% was achieved without sacrificing the explanatory power of the model. This proposed design can efficiently screen patients infected by COVID-19 before human diagnosis and can be a benchmark for addressing future XAI problems in large-scale data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) research has aimed to achieve human-level performance in tasks that require understanding and decision making. Although major advances have been made, AI systems still struggle to achieve adaptive learning for generalization. One of the main approaches to generalization in ML is transfer learning, where previously learned knowledge is utilized to solve problems in a different, but related, domain. Another approach, pursued by cognitive scientists for several decades, has investigated the role of analogical reasoning in comparisons aimed at understanding human generalization ability. Analogical reasoning has yielded rich empirical findings and general theoretical principles underlying human analogical inference and generalization across distinctively different domains. Though seemingly similar, there are fundamental differences between the two approaches. To clarify differences and similarities, we review transfer learning algorithms, methods, and applications in comparison with work based on analogical inference. Transfer learning focuses on exploring feature spaces shared across domains through data vectorization while analogical inferences focus on identifying relational structure shared across domains via comparisons. Rather than treating these two learning approaches as synonymous or as independent and mutually irrelevant fields, a better understanding of how they are interconnected can guide a multidisciplinary synthesis of the two approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can provide actionable insights for clinical decision-making and managing chronic diseases. The treatment and management of complex chronic diseases, such as diabetes, stands to benefit from novel AI algorithms analyzing the frequent real-time streaming data and the occasional medical diagnostics and laboratory test results reported in electronic health records (EHR). Novel algorithms are needed to develop trustworthy, responsible, reliable, and robust AI techniques that can handle the imperfect and imbalanced data of EHRs and inconsistencies or discrepancies with free-living self-reported information. The challenges and applications of AI for two problems in the healthcare domain were explored in this work. First, we introduced novel AI algorithms for EHRs designed to be fair and unbiased while accommodating privacy concerns in predicting treatments and outcomes. Then, we studied the innovative approach of using machine learning to improve automated insulin delivery systems through analyzing real-time information from wearable devices and historical data to identify informative trends and patterns in free-living data. Application examples in the treatment of diabetes demonstrate the benefits of AI tools for medical and health informatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of novel sensing elements, computing nodes, wireless communication and integration technology provides unprecedented possibilities for the design and application of intelligent systems. Each new application system must be designed from scratch, employing sophisticated methods ranging from conventional signal processing to computational intelligence. Currently, a significant part of this overall algorithmic chain of the computational system model still has to be assembled manually by experienced designers in a time and labor consuming process. In this research work, this challenge is picked up and a methodology and algorithms for automated design of intelligent integrated and resource-aware multi-sensor systems employing multi-objective evolutionary computation are introduced. The proposed methodology tackles the challenge of rapid-prototyping of such systems under realization constraints and, additionally, includes features of system instance specific self-correction for sustained operation of a large volume and in a dynamically changing environment. The extension of these concepts to the reconfigurable hardware platform renders so called self-x sensor systems, which stands, e.g., for self-monitoring, -calibrating, -trimming, and -repairing/-healing systems. Selected experimental results prove the applicability and effectiveness of our proposed methodology and emerging tool. By our approach, competitive results were achieved with regard to classification accuracy, flexibility, and design speed under additional design constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider advection–diffusion–reaction problems, where the advective or the reactive term is dominating with respect to the diffusive term. The solutions of these problems are characterized by the so-called layers, which represent localized regions where the gradients of the solutions are rather large or are subjected to abrupt changes. In order to improve the accuracy of the computed solution, it is fundamental to locally increase the number of degrees of freedom by limiting the computational costs. Thus, adaptive refinement, by a posteriori error estimators, is employed. The error estimators are then processed by an anomaly detection algorithm in order to identify those regions of the computational domain that should be marked and, hence, refined. The anomaly detection task is performed in an unsupervised fashion and the proposed strategy is tested on typical benchmarks. The present work shows a numerical study that highlights promising results obtained by bridging together standard techniques, i.e., the error estimators, and approaches typical of machine learning and artificial intelligence, such as the anomaly detection task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]