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This short communication provides a discourse emerged after reading “Stacking ensemble based deep neural networks modeling for effective epileptic seizure detection, Expert Systems with Applications, 148, 113239, 2020.” The discussed paper proposes a novel application of stacking-based ensemble for seizure detection, where several deep neural networks were used as base classifiers. The ensemble design and experimental results presented by the author show some weaknesses, which is indicated by, one of which, an inability of the proposed model to outperform previous studies. In this note, controversy of the discussed paper is explained and an improved version of stacking-based deep neural network is also further introduced and detailed to prevent it in the future.

This paper addresses the problem of how to represent education system measurement definitions and the data used to derive them. ISO 37120 is standard for measuring city performance. It defines 100 indicators of which seven focus on Education. As cities adopt the standard and begin publishing their indicator values, citizens, city bureaucrats and politicians will be able to see how well their education systems perform relative to other cities. Hence, education systems will be subject to greater scrutiny and will have to provide evidence-based explanations for their performance. In order to enable the automated analysis of city performance, four problems must be solved: 1) how are indicator definitions represented? 2) how is the data used to derive an indicator value represented? 3) how is educational system specific knowledge represented, and 4) how is city specific educational system knowledge represented? In this paper we present an Education Ontology designed to represent ISO 37120 education indicators and the information delineated above. The ontology is designed to enable an intelligent agent to perform consistency and root cause analysis of city indicators. It can also be used by cities to publish their education indicators and data, using Semantic Web standards, on their Open Data portals.

Bayesian network structure learning is the basis of parameter learning and Bayesian inference. However, it is a NP-hard problem to find the optimal structure of Bayesian networks because the computational complexity increases exponentially with the increasing number of nodes. Hence, numerous algorithms have been proposed to obtain feasible solutions, while almost all of them are of certain limits. In this paper, we adopt a heuristic algorithm to learn the structure of Bayesian networks, and this algorithm can provide a reasonable solution to combine the PC and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms. Moreover, we consider structure priors to improve the performance of our PC-PSO algorithm. Meanwhile, we utilize a new mutation operator called Uniform Mutation by Addition and Deletion (UMAD) and a crossover operator called Uniform Crossover. Experiments on different networks show that the approach proposed in this paper has achieved better Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores than other algorithms.

Advances in neuroimaging techniques have enabled early diagnosis and better understanding of neuro-psychological disorders using resting state - functional Magnetic Resonance Images (rs-fMRI). However, factors like the large intra-class variability, high homogeneity, limited sample size and varied acquisition methodologies in aggregated datasets have limited their classification performance. These issues especially are highly prevalent in the automatic diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In this paper, a Discriminative Spatial Filtering Method (DSFM) is developed to improve the separability between the two classes in the dataset by automatically identifying regions of the brain with abnormal activities. Further, DSFM uses an orthogonal projection to extract highly separable features from raw rs-fMRI data of the identified regions of the brain. Using a projection based learning classifier DSFM achieved a classification accuracy of 73.83 % on the publicly available ADHD200 dataset. The results show that, selective inclusion of data from the regions of the brain with discriminant activity identified using DSFM removes the redundant features and improved the classification performance (improvement of 3.5 % over baseline). Further, the brain activity maps derived by inverse mapping of the DSFM spatial filters describe the nature of the abnormal brain activities and identify the corresponding regions responsible for the cognitive symptoms in neuro-psychological disorders like ADHD. The results in this paper clearly show that DSFM is a reliable diagnostic tool with interpretable results critical for the accurate understanding the etiological factors of neuro-psychological disorders like ADHD using rs-fMRI.

Music radio data is currently underutilised in radio program management. Software tools that listen to and analyse music airplay are in many markets nonexistent, limited, or unaffordable. In this paper we present a novel knowledge discovery and visualisation framework for broadcast radio, ZeitMetric. The ZeitMetric framework uses machine learning and music information retrieval techniques to label radio audio automatically for knowledge discovery. The framework incorporates a novel music dataset collection technique (MusiGrab) to leverage online music services for ground-truth data, as well as a novel knowledge visualisation and presentation technique based on self-organizing maps (ZeitViz). The framework is compared to what little literature relating to this topic exists, and a set of requirements for a high-quality broadcast radio knowledge discovery is developed. MusiGrab specifically is compared to an existing static music information retrieval dataset and shown to offer superior results in this context. Future research directions using and extending the framework are also discussed. On acceptance of the paper, code for a use-case of the MusiGrab dataset collection technique will be released on GitHub.

Classifying manual and non-manual gestures in sign language recognition is a complex and challenging task. Sign language gestures are the combination of hand, face, and body postures, which often have self-occlusions and inter-object occlusions of both the hands, hands with face, or hands with upper body postures. This paper addresses the characterization of manual and non-manual gestures in recognizing the sign language gestures from continuous video sequences. This paper introduces a novel hyperparameter based optimized Generative Adversarial Networks (H-GANs) to classify the sign gestures, and it works in three phases. In phase-I, it adapts the stacked variational auto-encoders (SVAE) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to get the pre-tuned data with reduced feature dimensions. In Phase-II, the H-GANs employed Deep Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) as generator and LSTM with 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) as a discriminator. The generator generates random sequences with noise from the real sequence of frames, and the discriminator detects and classifies the real frames of sign gestures. In Phase-III, the proposed approach employs Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for hyperparameter optimization and regularization. By getting the reward points, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) optimizes the hyperparameters, and Bayesian Optimization (BO) regularizes the hyperparameters. The proposed H-GANs used two different large vocabulary sign corpus of continuous sign videos to evaluate the performance and efficiency of the system. The experimental results on different dimensions reveal that the H-GANs improved the accuracy and recognition rate when compared with the state-of-the-art classification methods with reduced complexity.

Convolutional neural network is a prominent innovation in computer vision but is often troubled by problems such as dark light, turbidity, blur and high similarity to the background when applied to underwater object detection. Underwater object detection is one of the basic techniques of underwater grasping automation which plays a very important role in ocean detection and fishery of aquatic products. This paper presented an automatic detection method of underwater sea cucumber based on deep learning, which will provide effective technical support for the automated breeding and harvesting of sea cucumber. The Shortcut Feature Pyramid Network (S-FPN) proposed in this paper improves the existing multi-scale feature fusion strategy through shortcut connection. The ablation experimental results show that the mean average precision (mAP) of S-FPN reaches 91.5% which outperforms the baseline Feature Pyramid Network (88.6%), YOLO v3 (83.7%) and SVM-HOG (61.6%). To resolve the problem of complex environmental background interference of ocean floor, we proposed a Piecewise Focal Loss (PFL) function for balancing the positive and negative samples such that the algorithm can focus on the training difficulty of hard (i.e., positive) samples. And the ablation experimental results show that the mAP of PFL reaches 92.3% which outperforms the baseline Cross Entropy (91.5%) and Focal Loss (91.8%). Also, we chose Exponential Linear Unit as the optimization strategy, and Adaptive Moment Estimation as the activation function by ablation research, finally the mAP reached 94%.

Self-organizing and self-adaptation are known as two necessary means for reducing costs and efforts required for the maintenance of complex software systems. In strong self-organizing systems, decision-making processes are distributed internally among system elements without any centralized control point (internal or external). In these systems, local communications of agents at the micro-level cause the emergent of macro-level behaviors, which can be seen from a global point of view. These global behaviors contain essential information that usually is ignored and is out of reach of agents. Via increasing context-awareness of agents, this information can be used by agents to improve the performance of the system. In this paper, inspired by the concept of consulting, a relation between the macro-level and micro-level is made. In summary, using information hidden in emergent behaviors, it is made an indirect and advice-based (non-compulsory) effect on agents at the micro-level. Therefore, first, the proposed self-advising property (as a property of the self-adaptive hierarchy) is defined. Then using the MAPE-K loop and stigmergic communication, the advising process is described. Besides, SASO-System is provided to describe the self-advising property and the advising process. This system is implemented on a case study of the NASA-ANTS mission. The comparison of results with other paper shows that using self-advising property reduces the time spent for self-protecting of leader agents in the scenario considered. Also, experimental results indicate that when the system is of self-advising property, the number of calls for the self-protecting function is reduced, and the decrease percentage of self-adaptive function calls is at the range of 1.86–13.56. Results also show that in 80% of radio ranges, the context-awareness of the self-advising system is better than or equal to the context-awareness of the non-self-advising system.

In realistic production scheduling, the processing time of operations and the due time of orders always fail to be precisely estimated as deterministic values due to fluctuating manufacturing environments and modest delay tolerance. When fabricating complex products that are assembled by multilevel parts, tree-structure dependencies between parts lead to hierarchical precedence constraints between corresponding jobs. Consequently, this paper studies an uncertain flexible job shop scheduling problem with job precedence constraints (U-FJSP-JPC). Uncertain processing time and due time are represented as interval grey number and trimmed triangular fuzzy number respectively. A tardiness index indicator is devised to assess the delay extent of grey completion time relative to fuzzy due time. To solve U-FJSP-JPC with minimizing three objectives simultaneously involving interval grey makespan, interval grey total machine workload and average tardiness index, this paper elaborately designs a novel multi-objective multiple-micro-swarm leadership hierarchy-based optimization algorithm (MOM2SLHO). This algorithm adopts a two-vector encoding scheme based on job and operation sequencing and a grey active decoding scheme based on heuristic machine assignment. In MOM2SLHO, the entire search agents are divided into multiple micro-swarms in which each one conducts an independent search based on leadership hierarchy and communicates with others by specific strategies. MOM2SLHO embodies an enhanced external grid archive to store and retrieve non-dominated Pareto optimal solutions. Extensive experiments and statistical analyses demonstrate that the proposed MOM2SLHO algorithm outperforms other well-known and state-of-art algorithms significantly for solving the studied U-FJSP-JPC.

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a complex process. It aims to support decision makers in making their decisions more effective and consistent. MCDM provides a useful and successful alternative for handling three main types of MCDM problems, namely, choosing, ranking and sorting. The first two are the most common problems studied but the third offers a way to deal with real world MCDM problems that require alternatives to be assigned to ordered categories. The practitioners are currently developing and applying sorting methods to solve problems from different application areas. In spite of its interest and applicability, there is only one previous review on Multiple-Criteria sorting, performed almost 20 years ago. Hence, because of its interest this paper presents a new and systematic review of MCDM sorting methods that includes 30 years of research in the field. This review has systematically analyzed the conventional and non-classical methods of MCDM sorting and then classified the papers published into 16 application areas. The analysis reveals that the methodological development is still in growth phase for MCDM sorting and discovers the applied methods’ trends. It also shows the complete spectrum of the areas of the application addressed, the state of knowledge about methods, the type of contribution to the knowledge, and the application area for the four categories of the MCDM approaches. The systematic review scrutinizes each selected article in order to find out which approach from the multi-criteria sorting presents the most development based on its contribution and application of the methods. We also aim to discover which Multiple-Criteria sorting methods are the most studied in MCDM. The relevant finding is the relation between the most applied methods and the application areas together with future directions for further research.

Political Optimizer (PO) is a recently proposed meta-heuristic with excellent convergence speed and exploitation capability. However, it is found that PO prematurely converges for complex problems because of not giving enough time to the exploration. In this paper, the exploration capability and balance of PO are improved by making multiple modifications to propose an Improved Political Optimizer (IPO). To improve the exploration capability, the condition of an equal number of parties and constituencies is relaxed, and switching with a random member of a random party is incorporated in the party-switching phase. Moreover, the balance between exploration and exploitation is enhanced by modifying the position-updating strategy (RPPUS) in the election campaign phase and replacing the tunable party-switching rate with a self-adaptive parameter. The exploitation is further improved by utilizing the best solution of the population in the parliamentary affairs phase. In addition to improvement in PO, this paper also highlights a correction in the party-switching phase of the original PO. The performance of IPO is evaluated using 30 CEC-2014 benchmarks, 29 CEC-BC-2017 benchmarks, and 6 mechanical engineering problems. It is shown through non-parametric statistical Wilcoxon’s rank-sum test that IPO significantly outperforms PO. Moreover, IPO is also compared with 10 of the well-cited and 14 latest optimization algorithms published in 2020. It is shown by using the Friedman mean-rank test that IPO secures the first rank for both types of benchmark functions. Moreover, the comparison of IPO with PO and a few well-known algorithms for 6 of the engineering problems shows that IPO performs better or equivalently to the compared optimization algorithms.

Context-aware recommender systems have received considerable attention from industry and academic areas. In this paper, we pay heed to the growing interest in integrating context-awareness and multi-criteria decision making in recommender systems, to deal with the most pressing challenges in music recommender systems, namely the diversity of the recommended playlist, the scalability of the system, and the cold start problem. This paper introduces a new multi-criteria recommendation approach, named MORec, which generates Top-N music recommendations by bootstrapping the system using beforehand collected data. We usher by gauging the relevance of contextual information from the relation between three elements: user, music genre, and the user’s context. Then, we apply an aggregation technique to uncover the relationship between the context and the overall rating. Besides, we apply the K-means algorithm to generate a predictive model that comprises clusters of similar contexts defining the association between contextual dimensions and music genres. Carried out experiments emphasize very promising results of our approach in terms of clustering quality, compared to the Partitioning Around Medoids algorithm in terms of connectivity and stability. The comparison versus pioneering recommendation baselines underscored the effectiveness of MORec in terms of recommendation quality and usefulness.

One of the latest multi-criteria decision-making methods is best-worst method (BWM). In the procedure of BWM, decision maker (DM) identifies the most and the least important criteria namely, best and worst. Thereafter, DM identifies the degrees which he believes the best criterion is better than the other criteria, and identifies the degrees which he believes the other criteria are better than the worst criterion. Because of uncertainties in comparisons due to using linguistic variables for pairwise comparisons and also the lack of complete information, the crisp values of pairwise comparisons cannot appropriately model the problems. This paper develops the BWM for considering fuzzy pairwise comparisons (FBWM) by proposing a new fuzzy mathematical model which yields crisp weights from a fuzzy pairwise comparison matrix. Unlike to some previous papers that obtains fuzzy weights from fuzzy pairwise comparison matrix, the crisp weights of the proposed method of this paper eliminates the supplementary aggregation of fuzzy weights and ranking procedures. Moreover, the proposed method avoids obtaining the different ranking results due to the different ranking procedures of fuzzy numbers. Another outstanding advantage of this paper is that the obtained weights of the proposed method better satisfy the initial judgments compared to previous methods, while as we know, the satisfaction of the initial judgments is essential for pairwise comparison judgments. This paper presents several numerical examples to prove the good performance and the merit of the proposed method. According to the provided numerical examples, the proposed method of this paper absolutely outperforms the two well-known previous methods.

The variety and plethora of research papers available on the Web motivated researchers to propose models that could assist users with personalized citation recommendations. In recent years, citation recommendation models using Network Representation Learning (NRL) methods have shown promising results. Nevertheless, existing NRL-based models are limited in terms of exploiting semantic relations and contextual information between the objects of bibliographic papers’ networks. Additionally, these models cannot adequately explore the structure of heterogeneous information networks, topical relevance, and relevant semantics. Consequently, they suffer from network sparsity and inadequate personalization problems. To overcome these shortcomings, we present a network embedding model termed as Global Citation Recommendation employing Generative Adversarial Network (GCR-GAN). The proposed model exploits the Heterogeneous Bibliographic Network (HBN) to generate personalized citation recommendations. In particular, the proposed model utilizes semantic relations corresponding to the objects of the heterogeneous bibliographic network and captures network structure proximity employing the Scientific Paper Embeddings using Citation-informed Transformers (SPECTER) and Denoising Auto-encoder networks to learn semantic-preserving graph representations. Compared to baseline models, the recommendations generated by our model over the DBLP and ACM datasets prove that it outperforms baseline methods by gaining almost 11% and 12% improvement in terms of Mean Average Precision (MAP) and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) metrics, respectively. Furthermore, we analyzed the effectiveness of the proposed model considering network sparsity issue, where our model gains almost 7% better recall@100 score against the second-best counterpart.

In the Authorship Attribution (AA) task, the most likely author of textual documents, such as books, papers, news, and text messages and posts are identified using statistical and computational methods. In this paper, a new computational approach is presented for identifying the most likely author of text documents. The proposed solution emphasizes lazy profile-based classification and, by using the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF_IDF) scheme, introduces a new measure for identifying important terms of documents. The importance of the terms is then used to calculate the similarity between an anonymous document and known documents. The proposed solution works with raw text documents and does not require any NLP tools for preprocessing, which makes it language-independent. The efficiency of the proposed solution has been evaluated by conducting several experiments on two English and Persian datasets, each of which contains six corpora with different number of authors. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms state-of-the-art stylometric features, employed by seven well-known classifiers, by obtaining 0.902 accuracy for the English dataset and 0.931 accuracy for the Persian dataset. In addition, supplementary experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effects of documents’ length on the accuracy of the proposed solution, to examine the computation time of the proposed solution and competitive classifiers, and to identify the most effective stylometric features and classifiers.

Crowdsourcing as an important computing resource for the Crowd-based Cooperative, crowdsourcing workers, due to the complexity of their personnel composition and the ambiguity of group characteristics, make it difficult to accurately recommend suitable worker groups for the task. Recommending crowdsourcing tasks to suitable workers can greatly improve the efficiency and quality of the execution of crowdsourcing tasks. The current crowdsourcing recommendation algorithm is based on the single characteristics of the workers, ignoring the multi-dimensional characteristics of the workers and the community characteristics of the crowd. This paper proposes a worker group recommendation method based on multi-community collaboration (GRMBC) by utilizing the worker characteristics information extracted from crowdsourcing platform. Based on the characteristics of workers'reputation, preference and activity, the method divides the worker group into several characteristics communities with similar behavior to discover the potential multi-community structure in the crowdsourcing worker group, and then selects Top-N worker group for recommendation through the interaction among multi-communities. At the same time, we also proposed two mitigation strategies for the cold start problem of data in crowdsourcing. This paper uses the public data collected by AMT to do the experiments, and compares the aggregation results of the recommendations generated by different algorithms. The results show the recommendations generated by the GRBMC algorithm proposed in this paper performs the best comprehensively. When the GRBMC algorithm that considers both worker attributes and communi-ty characteristics has an accuracy improvement of 0.03 ~ 0.04 compared with not using the recommendation algorithm on each index, the accuracy of 0.01 ~ 0.02 is improved com-pared with the method considering single characteristic. Moreover, compared with the individual recommendation method of the workers, the recommendation method of the workers' group is more in line with the platform requirements, and can well reflect the wisdom of crowd wisdom.

In the field of medicine, decision-making has traditionally been carried out based on the best available scientific information and the experience of specialists using data found in analog formats such as radiographies, medical reports, and handwritten notes, among others. In this sense, the Big Data phenomenon is changing the world of medicine since the technologies that have been developed have made available to researchers and clinicians enormous amounts of data in digital formats that can be used to complement or help in complex tasks such as mentioned decision making. A key element in this process is data analysis techniques, since without them it is not possible to exploit the information. Currently the most used techniques are based on algorithms in the area of artificial intelligence and more specifically machine learning. This paper focuses on a specific domain of medicine, renal replacement therapies for end-stage renal disease, where machine learning is beginning to be used as a complementary tool to predict or make decisions. This paper provides a narrative review of the main machine learning methods that are being used to conduct end-stage renal disease treatment analyses.

In this paper, we propose a Deep Belief Network (DBN) based approach for the classification of audio signals to improve work activity identification and remote surveillance of construction projects. The aim of the work is to obtain an accurate and flexible tool for consistently executing and managing the unmanned monitoring of construction sites by using distributed acoustic sensors. In this paper, ten classes of multiple construction equipment and tools, frequently and broadly used in construction sites, have been collected and examined to conduct and validate the proposed approach. The input provided to the DBN consists in the concatenation of several statistics evaluated by a set of spectral features, like MFCCs and mel-scaled spectrogram. The proposed architecture, along with the preprocessing and the feature extraction steps, has been described in details while the effectiveness of the proposed idea has been demonstrated by some numerical results, evaluated by using real-world recordings. The final overall accuracy on the test set is up to 98% and is a significantly improved performance compared to other state-of-the-are approaches. A practical and real-time application of the presented method has been also proposed in order to apply the classification scheme to sound data recorded in different environmental scenarios.

In this paper, we consider a class of multi-objective optimization (MOP) problems where the objective holders are independent humans or human-based entities. These problems are indeed game problems, which we call non-cooperative multi-objective optimization problems (NC-MOP). We discuss that for such problems, the Pareto-Optimal (PO) solutions are not necessarily valid as they primarily require Nash equilibrium (NE) solutions. Instead, we suggest that a new solution concept of the Pareto-optimal Equilibrium (POE) point could be adopted. Such a solution is, in particular, important in engineering design and articulation of new rules and protocols among independent entities. This paper reviews all relevant works that approach the POE concept and investigates the interplay between game problems and multi-objective optimization problems. We present illustrative examples to deepen our understanding of where a POE solution is achievable, as this is not always the case.

This paper investigates the link prediction in multiplex networks. Multiplex networks that represent multiple types of interaction between the same group of individuals are a special case of complex networks. Each type of interaction is modeled as a layer in a multiplex network. Usually, the topological structures between different layers of a multiplex network have a certain extent of correlation. As a result, the accuracy of link prediction in multiplex networks can be enhanced by combining the information of different layers. In this paper, link prediction in multiplex networks is regarded as a multiple-attribute decision-making problem, in which the potential links in the target layer are considered as alternatives, layers are viewed as attributes, and the similarity score of a potential link in each layer is an attribute value. In implementation, the TOPSIS method is employed to rank alternatives, and interlayer relevance is used to weight the attributes. The experimental results show that the proposed method is not sensitive to the parameter and the interlayer relevance measure, and achieves superior prediction accuracy.

Semantic web technology seems to be in the infant stage as only little efforts have been taken on ontology construction with cross-domain application. This paper intends to take an effort on a new workspace, in which the ontology construction model under cross-domain application is performed. The core concern of this work is on two decision-making process namely data filtering and data annotation. Certain process is followed in this work: (i) Preprocessing (ii) Proposed Jaccard Similarity Evaluation (iii) Data filtering and Outlier Detection (iv) Semantic annotation and clustering. More particularly, data filtering is performed based on the evaluated similarity function. The outliers are identified and grouped separately. The data annotation is performed based on the semantics and thereby the clustering process takes place to form the ontology precisely. This clustering process obviously relies to the optimization crisis as the optimal centroid selection becomes the greatest issue. In order to solve this, this paper extends with the introduction of a hybrid algorithm named Circling Insisted-Rider Optimization Algorithm (CI-ROA), which hybrids the concept of Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and Rider Optimization Algorithm (ROA), respectively. Finally, the performance of proposed work is compared and proved over other state-of-the-art models.

The symbiotic organisms search (SOS) algorithm is investigated and corrected by removing the benefit factors due to their biased search around the original dot. However, the removal of these benefit factors results in performance that is far inferior to the outstanding performance of the basic SOS algorithm. Accordingly, this paper suggests adopting combination schemes for the mutualistic equations in order to prevent premature convergence, and further recommends adopting lower combination rates for parasitic equations. Combination schemes are found to be not applicable to the commensal equation, as this equation is not greedy. Therefore, this paper proposes two types of combination schemes to improve the corrected SOS version in terms of achieving high early convergence speed, attaining convergence precision at a lower cost, arriving at the convergence plateau at either a lower cost or a higher level of precision, handling tests of composition functions well, and achieving competitive performance on CEC2015 test problems.

This paper develops smoothing data association based on integrated probabilistic data association (FLIPDA-S) tracker to identify a multicopter UAV (MUAV) and estimate its trajectory in an uncertain and cluttered environment. Recently, a number of unidentified MUAVs have been flown in prohibited airspace and a radar system has been utilized to identify the MUAV and track the trajectory. However, target tracking methods could have difficulties to track the target MUAV through randomly distributed and moving objects. The vehicle state estimation (VSE) algorithm, which utilize FLIPDA-S in this paper, adopts UAV kinematics and dynamics for tracking a UAV in clutter and false targets with significant UAV identification performance. The performance of the method has been validated with and without an initial position of the target MUAV. Both numerical simulation and experiments are demonstrated to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of FLIPDA-S with VSE algorithm to track UAVs in an uncertain and clutter environment.

In the interest of developing an intelligent manufacturing environment with an agile, efficient, and optimally utilized transportation system, mobile robots need to achieve a certain level of autonomy as they play an important role in carrying out transportation tasks. Bearing this in mind, in the paper we propose a novel stereo visual servoing method for nonholonomic mobile robot control based on semantic segmentation. Semantic segmentation provides a rich body of information required for an adequate decision-making process in a clustered, dynamic, and ever-changing manufacturing environment. The innovative idea behind the new visual servoing system is to utilize semantic information of the scene for visual servoing, as well as for other mobile robot tasks, such as obstacle avoidance, scene understanding, and simultaneous localization and mapping. Semantic segmentation is carried out by exploiting fully convolutional neural networks. The new visual servoing algorithm utilizes an intensity-based image registration procedure, which results in the image transformation matrix. The transformation matrix encompasses the relations of images taken at the current and desired pose, and that information is directly used for visual servoing. The developed algorithm is deployed on our own developed wheeled differential drive mobile robot RAICO (Robot with Artificial Intelligence based COgnition). The experimental evaluation is carried out in the 3D simulation environment and in the laboratory model of the real manufacturing environment. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed approach is improved when compared to the state-of-the-art approaches while being robust to the partial occlusions of the scene and illumination changes.

The novel of coronavirus (COVID-19) has suddenly and abruptly changed the world as we knew at the start of the 3rd decade of the 21st century. Particularly, COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected financial econometrics and stock markets across the globe. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)-based prediction models, especially Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures, have the potential to act as a key enabling factor to reduce the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and future possible ones on financial markets. In this regard, first, a unique COVID-19 related PRIce MOvement prediction ( COVID19 PRIMO ) dataset is introduced in this paper, which incorporates effects of social media trends related to COVID-19 on stock market price movements. Afterwards, a novel hybrid and parallel DNN-based framework is proposed that integrates different and diversified learning architectures. Referred to as the COVID-19 adopted Hybrid and Parallel deep fusion framework for Stock price Movement Prediction ( COVID19-HPSMP ), innovative fusion strategies are used to combine scattered social media news related to COVID-19 with historical mark data. The proposed COVID19-HPSMP consists of two parallel paths (hence hybrid), one based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Local/Global Attention modules, and one integrated CNN and Bi-directional Long Short term Memory (BLSTM) path. The two parallel paths are followed by a multilayer fusion layer acting as a fusion center that combines localized features. Performance evaluations are performed based on the introduced COVID19 PRIMO dataset illustrating superior performance of the proposed framework.

The chemometric analysis of chromatographic data is commonly used for discriminating bee propolis based on their geographical origin. Traditional machine learning methods for this purpose include principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering. When viewed as a time-series, the key discriminatory features in chromatographic data are the peaks, which should have similar location patterns for the propolis of the same origin. However, the peaks between same-origin samples are not always exactly aligned. Without proper alignment, samples from the same origin may be perceived by the clustering method to be very different. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic time warping kernel principal component analysis (DTW-KPCA) method for the chemometric discrimination of propolis. The proposed method uses a Gaussian dynamic time warping kernel to measure the similarity between chromatographic time-series which incorporates time-series alignment. Results show a better clustering of propolis samples compared to the currently used methods, as measured by the silhouette coefficient. Hence, the proposed method enables a more reliable clustering as to the origin of propolis samples.

We proposed in this paper Type-2 Fuzzy Logic-based transit priority strategy. The developed strategy belongs to the class of active priority strategies. At the same time, it is a conditional priority strategy. We tried to find out the finest trade-off between transit and traffic delay. The suggested approach used the data collected from the VISSIM analysis. The simulation tests were performed on the section of an arterial with two intersections in downtown Belgrade, Serbia. The obtained results are promising. It looks that the developed strategy could improve traffic operations in cities, or areas, with high bus frequencies and/or low or medium traffic volume.

Recommender systems use intelligent algorithms to learn a user’s preferences and provide them relevant suggestions. Lack of sufficient ratings – also known as data sparsity problem – often results in poor recommendation performance. The existing recommendation methods have mainly focused on designing recommenders with high accuracy without paying much attention to the reliability of the recommendations. On the other hand, the users’ preferences may vary over time and considering the time factor in the design process is crucial, which has been largely ignored in most of the existing recommenders. To deal with these issues, a novel recommendation method is proposed in this paper which incorporates temporal reliability and confidence measures into the recommendation process. First, the effectiveness of the users’ rating is measured using a probabilistic approach and ineffective rating profiles are enriched by adding some implicit ratings to them. The quality of the predictions is evaluated using a temporal reliability measure taking into account the changes of users’ preferences over time. Then, the ratings with low reliability values are recalculated using a novel procedure, which updates the target user’s neighborhood by removing ineffective users. This leads to a temporal confidence measure that is used to update the neighborhood to provide more reliable and accurate recommendations. The superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art recommendation methods is shown by conducting extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets.

In the last decades, a wide portfolio of Feature Weighting (FW) methods have been proposed in the literature. Their main potential is the capability to transform the features in order to contribute to the Machine Learning (ML) algorithm metric proportionally to their estimated relevance for inferring the output pattern. Nevertheless, the extensive number of FW related works makes difficult to do a scientific study in this field of knowledge. Therefore, in this paper a global taxonomy for FW methods is proposed by focusing on: (1) the learning approach (supervised or unsupervised), (2) the methodology used to calculate the weights (global or local), and (3) the feedback obtained from the ML algorithm when estimating the weights (filter or wrapper). Among the different taxonomy levels, an extensive review of the state-of-the-art is presented, followed by some considerations and guide points for the FW strategies selection regarding significant aspects of real-world data analysis problems. Finally, a summary of conclusions and challenges in the FW field is briefly outlined.

Blockchain technology have gained importance in the supply chain with its transparency, robustness, and elimination of intermediaries. Different impacts are expected with the integration of blockchain technology in supply chain processes. Comprehensive evaluation methods are required to take important strategic decisions about blockchain technology. To examine the impact of blockchain technology, factors of cost, risks, business, and customer related benefits should be considered comprehensively. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the causal relationships among the factors to evaluate blockchain technology impact on supply chain. Cognitive maps (CM) methods which are hesitant fuzzy cognitive map (HFCM), probabilistic linguistic fuzzy cognitive map (PL-FCM) and rough set cognitive map (RS-CM) are used in this study. Also, PL-FCM that is generated based on probabilistic linguistic term sets is used for the first time in this study as a novel cognitive model. This study provides a contribution by developing cognitive map methods to measure and examine the impact of blockchain technology on supply chain for the first time. Firstly, the impacts of blockchain technology on supply chain and their relations are formed according to expert views and literature review. Then, five scenarios are considered using cognitive mapping methods, future predictions in terms of supply chain management are determined. Sensitivity analysis is performed. In this way, firms can analyze various implications and under what conditions how blockchain technology will have an impact on the supply chain.

International audience; Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) has become the focus of many research topics over the past decades. This is mostly related to the development of new machine learning algorithms and the ever increasing capacity to collect data allowing failures to be detected and the system’s remaining lifetime to be estimated while requiring few or no expert knowledge. However, current machine learning based CBM solutions have limitations. They require an extensive and relevant data set to train on and are performed at the component level, not system-wide. Conversely, Expert Systems (ES) do not have these restrictions but should be used on systems with available expert knowledge and are currently suffering from efficiency, scalability and applicability limits. In this paper, an ES solution for CBM based on an heterogeneous information network will be presented to address the efficiency, scalability and applicability issues of modern ES. An application to an aircraft system will be used as case study to illustrate the process and performance of this solution for anomaly detection and diagnostics.

In this paper, a knowledge-based differential covariance matrix adaptation cooperative algorithm (DCMAC) is proposed for continuous problems. On the basis of combining successful history-based adaptive DE variants with linear population size reduction (LSHADE) and covariance matrix adaptation evolutionary strategy (CMA-ES), DCMAC proposes a strategy based on knowledge reward and punishment to achieve the purpose of collaborative optimization. Afterward, an adaptive learning mechanism is introduced to optimize the parameters to balance the exploitation and exploration of DCMAC. This process enables the algorithm to have global search capability. Finally, the niching-based population size reduction mechanism is introduced to improve the local search ability of the DCMAC. A weighted mutation strategy with dynamic greedy p value and covariance matrix adaptation (CMA) sampled based on differential vector are presented. Meanwhile, the knowledge acquired in the previous iteration process is adopted in the algorithm to select a mutation strategy for generating the new candidate solutions in the next iteration. The niching population size reduction mechanism is introduced to maintain the diversity of the population and compared with the other classical population size reduction methods. The optimal combination of parameters in the DCMAC algorithm is testified by the design of the experiment. Furthermore, the DCMAC is testified on the CEC2017 benchmark functions. The effectiveness and efficiency of the DCMAC are demonstrated by the experimental results in solving complex continuous problems.

The objective of the paper is to detect sarcasm in human communication. The methodology uses basic cognitive features of human utterances by capturing three modes of data viz., voice, text, and temporal facial features. The captured data is unstructured as it consists of parameters of feelings and emotions to generate sarcasm which affects expressions through glottal and facial organs. The data capturing method is equally challenging as compared to the method of data processing to acquire features. The significant work is aligned to make natural decisions in the prediction processes using cognitive information in the data lineage. Sarcasm detection in natural human communication is a challenging process. The Linguistic features of natural language processing (NLP) methods help identify sentiment as negative and positive sentences based on polarity using the pre-labelled samples. The multiclass neural network model is used as a soft cognition method for the detection of sarcasm under cloud resources. Identified cognitive features have information like voice cues and eye movements, they tend to influence the decision of detecting sarcasm. The visual data are found to be quite interesting and can establish a strong platform in the area of NLP for further research work.

One-off sequential pattern mining (SPM) (or SPM under the one-off condition) is a kind of repetitive SPM with gap constraints, and has been widely applied in many fields. However, current research on one-off SPM ignores the utility (can be price or profit) of items, resulting in some low-frequency but extremely important patterns being ignored. To solve this issue, this paper addresses self-adaptive High-Average utility One-off sequential Pattern (HAOP) mining which has following three characteristics. Any two occurrences cannot share any letter in the sequence. The support (number of occurrences), utility and length of the pattern are considered simultaneously. The HAOP mining discovers patterns with a self-adaptive gap which means that users do not need to set the gap constraints. We propose an effective algorithm called HAOP-Miner that involves two key steps: support calculation and candidate pattern generation. For the support calculation, we propose a heuristic algorithm named the Reverse filling (Rf) algorithm that can effectively calculate the support by avoiding creating redundant nodes and pruning the redundant and useless nodes after finding an occurrence. Since HAOP mining does not satisfy the Apriori property, a support lower bound method combined with the pattern growth strategy is adopted to generate the candidate patterns. The experimental results first validate the effectiveness of HAOP-Miner, and then demonstrate that HAOP-Miner has better performance than other state-of-the-art algorithms. More importantly, HAOP-Miner is easier to mine valuable patterns. The algorithms and datasets are available at https://github.com/wuc567/Pattern-Mining/tree/master/HAOP-Miner .

Nowadays, resource-optimizing techniques are required in many engineering areas to obtain the most appropriate solutions for complex problems. For this reason, there is a trend among researchers to improve existing swarm-based algorithms through different evolutionary techniques and to create new population-based methods that can accurately explore the feature space. The recently proposed Moth swarm algorithm (MSA) inspired by the orientation of moths towards moonlight is an associative learning mechanism with immediate memory that uses Levy mutation to cross-population diversity and spiral movement. The MSA is a population-based method used for tackling complex optimization problems. It presents an adequate capacity for exploration and exploitation trends; however, due to its nature of operators, this type of method is prone to get stuck in sub-optimal locations, which affects the speed of convergence and the computational effort to reach better solutions. To mitigate these shortcomings, this paper proposes an improved MSA that combines opposition-based learning (OBL) as a mechanism to enhance the exploration drifts of the basic version and increase the speed of convergence to obtain more accurate solutions. The proposed approach is called OBMSA. It has been tested for solving three classic engineering design problems (welded beam, tension/compression spring, and pressure vessel designs) with constraints, 19 benchmark functions comprising 7 unimodal, 6 multimodal, and 6 composite functions. Experimental results and comparisons provide evidence that the performance and accuracy of the proposed method are superior to the original MSA. We hope the community utilizes the proposed MSA-based approach for solving other complex problems.

Fake news is the information or stories that are intentionally created to deceive or mislead the readers. In recent times, Fake news detection has attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners due to its many-fold benefits, including bringing in preventive measures to tackle the dissemination of misinformation that could otherwise disturb the social fabrics. Social media in recent times are heavily loaded with multimedia news and information. People prefer online news reading and find it more informative and convenient if they have access to multimedia content in the forms of text, images, audio, and videos. In early studies, researchers have proposed several fake news detection mechanisms that mostly utilize the textual features and not proper to learn multimodal (textual + visual) shared representation. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we propose a multimodal fake news detection framework with appropriate multimodal feature fusion that leverages information from text and image and tries to maximize the correlation between them to get the efficient multimodal shared representation. We empirically show that text, when combined with the image, can improve the performance of the model. The model detects the post once it is introduced into the network in an early stage. At the early stage of a news post’s introduction into the network, the model takes the text and image of the post as input and decides whether this is fake or genuine. Since this model only analyzes news contents, It does not require any prior information regarding the user and network details. This framework has four different sub-modules viz. Attention Based Stacked Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (ABS-BiLSTM) for textual feature representation, Attention Based Multilevel Convolutional Neural Network–Recurrent Neural Network (ABM-CNN–RNN) for visual feature extraction, multimodal Factorized Bilinear Pooling (MFB) for feature fusion and finally Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) for the classification. We perform experiments on two publicly available datasets, viz. Twitter and Weibo. Evaluation results show the efficacy of our proposed approach that performs significantly better compared to the state-of-the-art models. It shows to outperform the current state-of-the-art by approximately 10 points for the Twitter dataset. In contrast, the Weibo dataset achieves an overall better performance with balanced F1-scores between fake and real classes. Furthermore, the complexity of our proposed model is significantly lower than the state-of-the-art.

In this era of big data, processing large scale data efficiently and accurately has become a challenging problem. Ensemble classification is a type of supervised learning that uses multiple experts to generate the final output. It provides a way to classify data more accurately. As a result of using multiple classifiers, they are often more complicated than single classifiers, especially for big data problems. Apache Spark is a unified analytics engine for big data processing which provides a scalable framework to analyze the data. In this paper, we first extend our previous work and design a distributed heterogeneous ensemble classifier inspired by the boosting approach, which is capable of dealing with big datasets. Using heterogeneous classifiers makes it possible to have more diverse classifiers, and consequently, a more accurate classifier is obtained. Then, we present the Spark version of the proposed approach to speed up our heterogeneous ensemble classifier using the MapReduce paradigm. In order to evaluate our approach, we have applied it to seven big datasets. Extensive experimental results indicate the superiority of the proposed method over the existing ensemble algorithms implemented by Spark MLlib in terms of the classification accuracy, performance, and scalability.

Image clustering is one of the most significant problems in computer vision and data mining. To mitigate the influence brought by appearance variation, many scholars attempt to cluster images with multiple features, a.k.a, multi-view image clustering. However, the majority of existing methods simply consider context information across images or content information within images, failing to combine both sides. We in this paper propose a novel auto-weighted multi-view content-context information bottleneck (AMC2IB) method for image clustering. The AMC2IB method can simultaneously utilize the content and context information for partitioning images. The “content” characterizes the intrinsic information within each image, e.g., appearance feature of color or shape; The “context” describes the close relationships among images of each view, e.g., inter-image similarity. The mechanism of maximum entropy is also introduced to automatically learn the view weight, and thus the importance of different views can be integrated for effective clustering. Additionally, to remove the extra weight regularization parameter in AMC2IB, we further propose an auto-weighted multi-view content-context information bottleneck without weight regularization (AMC2IBW) method. Afterwards, the above problems can be formulated as information loss functions by maintaining the context and content information maximally when the input images are compressed. Eventually, a new alternating iterative method is designed for the optimization of both proposed objective functions. Experimental results on five real-world multi-view image datasets show the superiority of the proposed method.

In this paper, we consider a joint array resource allocation and transmit beamforming approach to track multiple targets using phased array radar. Firstly, array allocation is accomplished by solving a constrained optimization problem formulated to minimize total tracking Cramer-Rao Lower Bound with antenna number as a constraint. A procedure to solve this problem is developed by checking Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. Based on the allocated array resource, we develop a novel transmit beampattern design with null steering capability. The emitted signal model and objective functions of optimization are presented with a given power budget and null steering constraint. The resulted problem is revealed to be hard to tackle, therefore, we propose a cyclic algorithm scheme for solving it. The scheme separates the optimization into two problems, where each problem is transformed into simpler convex problems. Lastly, the projected gradient decent method with a penalty function is applied for the optimal design of beamforming with null steering. Simulation results show that the proposed array allocation solution provides better tracking accuracy, and the proposed beampattern design method outperforms conventional optimization methods in the optimal beamforming by achieving much deeper null steering and more accurate peak power in the given directions.

The unidentified number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can execute aggressive maneuvers in the restricted and the cluttered environment. Therefore, it is difficult to detect and track the uncertain motion of the UAV target in such complex environment. In addition, multi-target tracking (MTT) algorithms such as joint data association approach faces various computational complexities that could exceeds the available computation resources. This paper develops a novel smoothing data association idea in a linear multi-target (LM) tracking based on integrated probabilistic data association (sLM-IPDA) algorithm that acts like a single target tracker in the MTT situation. The significant detection and tracking performance of a UAV are validated without a-prior information of the UAV’s initial position. The forward and backward tracks are initialized separately using sensor measurements received in each scan. The sLM-IPDA estimates the backward multi-tracks simultaneously associating backward tracks in a subsequent predicted forward track for fusion. Thus, a forward track state estimate is obtain using the smoothing (fusion) measurements. This significantly improves estimation accuracy for large number of cross-over targets in heavy clutter. Numerical assessments of the sLM-IPDA are verified using both simulation and experiment to demonstrate the application of the proposed algorithm.

Moth–Flame Optimization (MFO) algorithm is widely used to solve real parameter global optimization problems. However, the original MFO algorithm has some problems. First, the global search ability of the algorithm is insufficient due to the lack of high-quality flames or the lack of diversity of the population. Moreover, due to the reduction of the number of flames mechanism and the simple transverse orientation flight mode of moths, the algorithm is easy to fall into local optimum. To overcome these difficulties, a new MFO called ODSFMFO is proposed in this paper, which consists of an improved flame generation mechanism based on Opposition-Based Learning (OBL) and Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm, and an enhanced local search mechanism based on Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm (SFLA) and death mechanism. The ODSFMFO firstly obtains a high-quality population through opposition-based learning, then enhances the diversity of the population through differential evolution algorithm, to improve the global search ability of the algorithm, and then, employs an improved shuffled frog leaping algorithm as a local search algorithm, and uses the death mechanism to eliminate the individuals with low fitness value, which not only make the algorithm easy to jump out of the local optimum, but also further improve the convergence speed. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the ODSFMFO and other fourteen well-known optimization algorithms are tested and compared on 28 benchmark tasks of CEC 2013 and 30 benchmark tasks of CEC 2017. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm obtains better results compared with other competitive algorithms.

Traditionally, data envelopment analysis (DEA) evaluates the performance of decision-making units (DMUs) with the most favorable weights on the best practice frontier. In this regard, less emphasis is placed on non-performing or distressed DMUs. To identify the worst performers in risk-taking industries, the worst-practice frontier (WPF) DEA model has been proposed. However, the model does not assume evaluation in the condition that the environment is uncertain. In this paper, we examine the WPF-DEA from basics and further propose novel robust WPF-DEA models in the presence of interval data uncertainty and non-discretionary factors. The proposed approach is based on robust optimization where uncertain input and output data are constrained in an uncertainty set. We first discuss the applicability of worst-practice DEA models to a broad range of application domains and then consider the selection of worst-performing suppliers in supply chain decision analysis where some factors are unknown and not under varied discretion of management. Using the Monte-Carlo simulation, we compute the conformity of rankings in the interval efficiency as well as determine the price of robustness for selecting the worst-performing suppliers.

When reading an article, especially a professional article, we often encounter words or phrases that we don't recognize. They may be specific domain terms or emerging entities. When we can't guess their meaning from the article, we generally refer to the terminology dictionary or search for related content on the Internet to understand them. Some researchers have used natural language generation (NLG) models to explain these unknown phrases in recent years automatically. Still, current NLG models have difficulties generating long sentences with good coherence, and they are difficult to generate multiple sentences that describe unknown phrases from different angles. Therefore, this paper proposes a model that can judge whether an existing sentence can explain a certain phrase, called TransExplain. TransExplain can use LSTM, convolutional neural network, and attention mechanism to extract multiple sentence features and map them to a fixed-dimensional semantic feature vector. By calculating the cosine similarity between the semantic feature vector and the unknown phrase vector, it is judged whether the sentence can explain the semantics of the unknown phrase. And a loss function called positive and negative means square error is introduced to improve the model's ability that distinguishes negative examples. For this task, we provided a Chinese dataset containing phrases and explanation pairs in 7 important domains. On this dataset, TransExplain can achieve better results than previous similar tasks.

In this paper a semi-supervised method for the detection of anomalies in both texture- and object-based product images is presented. The method exploits a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) autoencoder that is blended with a statistical-based transformation of the neural network embedding layer in order to remove anomalies from the input image. The “cleaned” version of the input image is then compared with the input image itself in order to spatially localize the anomalies. The method does not require a specific training of the CNN to be applied to a new class of product, but it requires a very fast domain adaptation based on only “anomaly-free” examples. Experiments conducted on a publicly available dataset made of fifteen texture- and object-based classes show that overall performance is better than the state of the art of about 4%. In the case of texture-based classes the proposed method outperforms the state of the art of about 13%. In the case of object-based classes, the proposed method reaches overall the same performance of the state of the art. In this case, apart from 3 cases, that is “bottle”, “transistor” and “metal nut”, the proposed method performs better than the state of the art in 7 object classes out of 10.

Learning the distributed representation of a sentence is a fundamental operation for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as text classification, machine translation, and text semantic matching. Tree-structured dynamic compositional networks have achieved promising performance in sentence representation due to its ability in capturing the richness of compositionality. However, existing dynamic compositional networks are mostly based on binarized constituency trees which cannot represent the inherent structural information of sentences effectively. Moreover, syntactic tag information, which is demonstrated to be useful in sentence representation, has been rarely exploited in existing dynamic compositional models. In this paper, a novel LSTM structure, ARTree-LSTM, is proposed to handle general constituency trees in which each non-leaf node can have any number of child nodes. Based on ARTree-LSTM, a novel network model, Tag-Enhanced Dynamic Compositional Neural Network (TE-DCNN), is proposed for sentence representation learning, which contains two ARTree-LSTMs, i.e. tag-level ARTree-LSTM and word-level ARTree-LSTM. The tag-level ARTree-LSTM guides the word-level ARTree-LSTM in conducting dynamic composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed TE-DCNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on text classification and text semantic matching tasks.

This paper proposed a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) modeling to deal with multi-target regression problem. This model offered a feature ranking approach for multi-target regression by one of the famous MCDM algorithms called VIKOR. In fact, in this approach, the multi-target feature selection has become an MCDM model in which features are evaluated based on relations with targets. Our proposed method, VIKOR-based Multi-target Feature Selection (VMFS), first uses cosine similarity to construct the decision matrix for the MCDM process. Then VIKOR method is applied to the decision matrix to rank the features in the multi-target space. To illustrate the optimality and efficiency of the proposed method, we have compared our approach with some multi-output feature selection methods. The results show that our method in terms of average RRMSE is superior to other similar methods and performs in a short time, and it is more efficient than the other methods.

Efficient and accurate semantic segmentation is particularly important in scene understanding for autonomous driving. Although Deep Convolutional Neural Networks(DCNNs) approaches have made a significant improvement for semantic segmentation. However, state-of-the-art models such as Deeplab and PSPNet have complex architectures and high computation complexity. Thus, it is inefficient for realtime applications. On the other hand, many works compromise the performance to obtain real-time inference speed which is critical for developing a light network model with high segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient network named DSANet, which follows a two-branch strategy to tackle the problem of real-time semantic segmentation in urban scenes. We first design a Semantic Encoding Branch, which employs channel split and shuffle to reduce the computation and maintain higher segmentation accuracy. Also, we propose a dual attention module consisting of dilated spatial attention and channel attention to make full use of the multi-level feature maps simultaneously, which helps predict the pixel-wise labels in each stage. Meanwhile, Spatial Encoding Network is used to enhance semantic information and preserve the spatial details. To better combine context information and spatial information, we introduce a Simple Feature Fusion Module. We evaluated our model with state-of-the-art semantic image semantic segmentation methods using two challenging datasets. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 69.9% mean IoU and 71.3% mean IoU at speed of 75.3 fps and 34.08 fps on CamVid and Cityscapes test datasets respectively.

Recently, many intelligent algorithms have been proposed to find the best solution for complex engineering problems. These algorithms can search volatile and multi-dimensional solution spaces and find optimal answers timely. In this paper, a new meta-heuristic method is proposed that inspires the behavior of the swarm of birds called Coot. The Coot algorithm imitates two different modes of movement of birds on the water surface: in the first phase, the movement of birds is irregular, and in the second phase, the movements are regular. The swarm moves towards a group of leading leaders to reach a food supply; the movement of the end of the swarm is in the form of a chain of coots, each of coot which moves behind its front coots. The algorithm then runs on a number of test functions, and the results are compared with well-known optimization algorithms. In addition, to solve several real problems, such as Tension/Compression spring, Pressure vessel design, Welded Beam Design, Multi-plate disc clutch brake, Step-cone pulley problem, Cantilever beam design, reducer design problem, and Rolling element bearing problem this algorithm is used to confirm the applicability of this algorithm. The results show that this algorithm is capable to outperform most of the other optimization methods. The source code is currently available for public from: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/89102-coot-optimization-algorithm .

This paper proposes a bi-objective reliable path-finding algorithm for routing battery electric vehicles on a road network, with vehicles’ energy consumption uncertainty and travel time uncertainty. A bi-objective stochastic optimization problem is proposed and formulated to simultaneously maximize energy consumption reliability (ECR) and travel time reliability (TTR). ECR is defined as the probability of finishing a trip without exhausting a given battery energy budget, while TTR is the on-time arrival probability with the travel time budget. In this study, the proposed optimization problem is decomposed into two sub-problems: (1) finding K most reliable paths for maximizing the TTR objective and (2) finding the most reliable path for optimizing the ECR objective. Then, a novel ranking algorithm is proposed to exactly solve the formulated optimization problem. A case study is carried out on Hong Kong’s road network to demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for real-world applications.

The Electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmia classification has become an interesting research area for researchers and developers as it plays a vital role in early prevention and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. In ECG signal classification, the feature extraction and selection processes are critical steps. Thus, in this paper, different ECG signal descriptors based on one-dimensional local binary pattern (LBP), wavelet, higher-order statistical (HOS), and morphological information are introduced for feature extraction. For feature selection and classification processes, a new hybrid ECG arrhythmia classification approach called MRFO-SVM that combines a metaheuristic algorithm termed Manta ray foraging optimization (MRFO) with support vector machine (SVM) is proposed to automatically determine the relevance features of LBP, HOS, wavelet and magnitude values. In MRFO-SVM approach, the MRFO is utilized to optimize the parameters of SVM and to select the significant features subset that provides the best classification performance, meanwhile SVM is used for classification purposes. The proposed MRFO-SVM approach is trained on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database containing four abnormal and one normal heartbeats. The experimental results of ECG arrhythmia classification using the proposed MRFO-SVM revealed with evidence its superiority with overall classification accuracy of 98.26% over seven well-known metaheuristic algorithms.