Search

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.

Healthcare waste (HCW) management is a complex and challenging problem. It is one of the priorities in health. An increase in the number of the health services provided leads to an increase in the amount of HCW, which has particularly been noticeable in recent years. Since this is the waste that may pose a risk to humans and the environment, it is necessary to ensure an adequate treatment of the same. HCW management is particularly important in developing countries, due to inappropriate disposal methods, underfunding and a lack of the infrastructure. In order to achieve the cost-effectiveness and sustainability of this area, HCW should be minimized through an adequate treatment of the same. The Public Enterprise Zdravstvo Brcko (Brcko Health System) has intensively been addressing the HCW management issue. They have decided to upgrade the HCW system by purchasing a new infectious waste treatment facility. The paper is aimed at creating a new original integrated multicriteria decision-making model based on D numbers for processing fuzzy linguistic information. This model will serve to support management in the procurement of the mentioned facility. The model integrates the benefits of different approaches and theories. An initial model was formed, consisting of the six potential solutions evaluated based on the 18 criteria classified into the following four groups: social, environmental, economic and technological. Four experts in this field evaluated the criteria and potential solutions. Then, a new Best-Worst Method based on D numbers (BWM-D) was applied in order to determine the significance of the criteria. After that, a Multi-Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison Based on D numbers (MABAC-D) was developed and applied so as to evaluate and select an infectious waste treatment facility. The results have shown that the alternative A1 gives the best results, whereas the alternative A5 shows the worst results. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was performed to validate the obtained results. In this part of the paper, the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS-D) and VIsekriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisnog Resenja (VIKOR-D) were developed in order to validate the results. When procuring a new Contagious Waste Treatment System, the characteristics of the available devices need be perceived and all the criteria need be taken into account in order to provide a device which will solve the HCW problem in the best way. This paper has shown how D numbers can be used when making a selection of an HCW management device, and also how all the characteristics of such a device can be perceived and how the device demonstrating the best characteristics can be selected.

Machine Learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence that studies algorithms able to learn autonomously, directly from the input data. Over the last decade, ML techniques have made a huge leap forward, as demonstrated by Deep Learning (DL) algorithms implemented by autonomous driving cars, or by electronic strategy games. Hence, researchers have started to consider ML also for applications within the industrial field, and many works indicate ML as one the main enablers to evolve a traditional manufacturing system up to the Industry 4.0 level. Nonetheless, industrial applications are still few and limited to a small cluster of international companies. This paper deals with these topics, intending to clarify the real potentialities, as well as potential flaws, of ML algorithms applied to operation management. A comprehensive review is presented and organized in a way that should facilitate the orientation of practitioners in this field. To this aim, papers from 2000 to date are categorized in terms of the applied algorithm and application domain, and a keyword analysis is also performed, to details the most promising topics in the field. What emerges is a consistent upward trend in the number of publications, with a spike of interest for unsupervised and especially deep learning techniques, which recorded a very high number of publications in the last five years. Concerning trends, along with consolidated research areas, recent topics that are growing in popularity were also discovered. Among these, the main ones are production planning and control and defect analysis, thus suggesting that in the years to come ML will become pervasive in many fields of operation management.

In recent years, the advancement in technology and the availability of a large number of sensors has led to a huge amount of real-time streaming data. The real-time data measured by Phasor Measurement Units (PMU), are of streaming data type and their analysis can identify the status of the power system failure which leads to system instability. Hence online monitoring of PMU data is extremely important which includes preprocessing, filtering, and analysis before taking any corrective actions in the power system. One of the crucial analyses that can be performed over PMU data is the identification of anomalies that arise due to several factors. Early detection of anomalies in the PMU streaming data is highly useful though in real-time it is difficult to detect anomalies consistently. This paper proposes a novel framework for detecting anomalies in multivariate streaming PMU data based on the Density Estimation technique. The main novelty of this paper is that the proposed model is suitable for any kind of anomaly detection in multivariate streaming PMU data which is not addressed in literatures. The proposed system implements Principal Component Analysis in streaming real-time data to select the relevant features. The K-Means algorithm is performed over the selected feature vectors to find the number of clusters in the streaming PMU data. The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is developed to represent the normal PMU data of the system. The minimum and maximum value of the probability of the training samples being generated by the model is selected as a minimum and maximum threshold. The samples with probability less than the minimum threshold or greater than the maximum threshold are considered as anomalies. The main advantage of this proposed model is that it can perform anomaly detection in multivariate streaming PMU data even online within the specified window. The proposed system can identify real time anomalies of multivariate dataset even by offline training model of GMM. The proposed model is developed in MATLAB 2018b version and is tested in streaming PMU data both for offline and online datasets. The performance of the proposed model is validated using performance metrics and the results show that F1 score is 0.95 for 2 features, 0.91 for 3 features, and 0.99 for 8, 12 and 16 features and 1 for 10 features in offline mode. The performance evaluation of testing data in online mode for 2, 3, 8, 10, 12 and 16 features are obtained which proves that the system is adapting to the streaming PMU data with reduced false positive rate and F1 score of 1 for 8, 10, 12 and 16 features. The experimental results prove that the proposed framework for anomaly detection in streaming data is more effective and accurate in identifying the anomalies in real time PMU streamed dataset.

In this paper, the new aggregation models for the interrelated multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems based on the quantifier guided ordered weighted averaging (QGOWA) and Bonferroni mean (BM) operator with interval type 2 fuzzy sets (IT2FS) are developed. In most MCDM problems, the decision criteria might not be totally independent. For some MCDM methodologies that are not considering the interrelationship of the criteria, the decision results suggested are meaningless. The BM operator can express the interrelationship of the input arguments, which serves as a mean type aggregator. Yager introduced the OWA operator which is associated with the orness level (attitudinal character) by means of the quantifiers. Different quantifier functions are associated with the respective different orness levels. This is referred to as the QGOWA operator. Besides, the real world MCDM problems are mostly under uncertain environments. To address such MCDM problems, the linguistic criteria weights and the alternative rates are better characterized by IT2FS. The major contributions of this paper are to propose the interrelation MCDM aggregation models with various extensions, to construct the mixed integer linear programming models for obtaining the optimal QGOWA BM IT2FS weights, and to formulate a new interrelation MCDM paradigm. The developed aggregation models are: (1). Ordinary MCDM aggregation; (2). BM with OWA weights; (3). BM with OWA weights and personal importance; (4). BM with QGOWA weights; (5). BM with QGOWA weights and personal importance; (6). BM with QGOWA weights and attitudinal characters; (7). BM with QGOWA weights, attitudinal characters and personal importance. A new MCDM aggregation methodology with application based on the developed models is introduced. The application results from the MCDM aggregation methodology demonstrate that the final decision prioritization are actually affected by the various orness levels predetermined by the decision experts.

In order to deploy deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on the mobile devices, many mobile CNNs are introduced. Currently, some online applications are usually re-trained because of the constantly-increasing data. However, compared with the regular models, it is not very efficient to train the present mobile models. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose efficient mobile models both in the training and test processes through exploring the main causes of the current mobile CNNs’ inefficiency and the parameters’ properties. Finally, this paper introduces Highly Shared Convolutional Neural Networks (HSC-Nets). The HSC-Nets employ two shared mechanisms to reuse the filters comprehensively. Experimental results showed that, compared with the regular networks and the latest state-of-the-art group-conv mobile networks, the HSC-Nets can achieve promising performances and effectively decrease the model size. Furthermore, it is also more efficient in both the training and test processes.

Electric vehicles are environmental transportation modes that are widely applied in green logistics systems. To guarantee the energy efficiency, the impacts of customer service modes and recharging strategies need to be integrated into the optimization of electric logistics resource. This paper proposes an electric vehicle routing problem with mixed backhauls, time windows, and recharging strategies (EVRPMBTW-RS), minimizing the total travel cost with sophisticated constraints on the time-dependent pickup and delivery requests, limited recharging station capacity, and battery remaining capacity of electric vehicles. Mixed service sequences of linehaul and backhaul customers is allocated for the routing planning, with the synchronous optimization of recharging strategies including the selection of recharging stations and determination of recharging time. A time-discretized multi-commodity network flow model is constructed based on an extended space–time-state modeling framework, which is formulated as a quadratic 0–1 programming model by using the augmented Lagrangian relaxation technique. After the dualization and linearized transformation, we decompose the model into a sequence of least-cost path subproblems based on the alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM). The subproblems are alternately minimized and solved using the time-dependent forward dynamic programming algorithm. The solution quality can be guaranteed through calculating the optimality gap between the best lower bound and upper bound for each iteration. The proposed solution approach is examined on examples of a simple 7-node network and real-world Yizhuang road network. This paper provides a theoretical foundation for the route optimization method of electric logistics vehicles, and contributes to improve the operational efficiency of electric logistics systems.

Emergency medical services (EMS) are essential components for post-disaster rescue activities. Considering injury heterogeneity and deterioration over time of the casualties, the uncertainty in the number of the casualties can effectively improve the medical service performance. This paper develops a robust optimization model for combined facility location and casualty transportation under uncertainty in the number of casualties. We divide casualties into two types: mild casualties who are transported to on-site clinics with rescue vehicles and serious casualties who are transported to general hospitals with helicopters. Meanwhile, we consider the Injury Severity Score (ISS) increment to describe the injury deterioration of the casualties over time. The objective is to minimize the total weighted ISS increment of mild casualties and serious casualties. Then, we employ the robust optimization method to deal with the uncertainty and derive the robust counterpart of the proposed model in this paper. Case studies based on Yushu Earthquake show that the model can get the optimal emergency facility location and casualty transportation scheme to minimize the total weighted ISS increment. The total weighted ISS increment increases as the constraint violation probability decreases, which reflects the trade-off between performance and robustness. Sensitivity analyses show that the greater uncertainty of the casualty number is, the greater the impact on the total weighted ISS increment is, the more conservative the decision scheme is. The capacity of general hospitals has a greater effect on the objective value compared with the capacity of on-site clinics and the decision scheme of the robust optimization model has a greater optimality compared with the deterministic model when the problem size is magnified.

Customer purchase prediction aims to predict customers' future purchases, and the prediction results are of great importance for conducting future commercial activities. To obtain accurate predictions of customer purchases, this paper develops a machine learning framework based on historical behavioural data. First, considering the sparsity of behavioural data, this paper proposes a feature combination method based on the improved factorization machine algorithm. Second, due to the imbalance of customer purchase data, this paper proposes an imbalanced prediction method based on the maximized marginal category and cost-sensitive ensemble learning. Finally, a real-word travel service purchase dataset is adopted to test the feasibility of the proposed prediction framework. The experimental results and comparative analysis verify the validity of the proposed model.

Current software systems are inherently complex and this fact strongly complicates, and makes more expensive, to validate them. Therefore, it is a must to provide methodologies, supported by tools, that can direct validation activities so that they focus on specific aspects of the system (e.g. its critical parts, common errors produced by developers, components that are expensive to fix after deployment, etc). Among the different validation techniques, testing is the most widely used. In this paper we focus on one of the main problems when testing systems with many components: the likelihood of Failed Error Propagation (FEP). FEP appears when we have faulty components such that their wrong behaviour is not revealed when isolatedly testing them but that might produce an error when they are combined with other components. Given a component, it is not possible to automatically assess the likelihood of FEP. However, previous work has shown that there is a strong correlation between the likelihood of FEP and an Information Theory notion called Squeeziness . Recent work has shown that it is possible to compute different values of Squeeziness (essentially, Squeeziness depends on a positive real value) and some of them are more suitable to estimate FEP. In this paper we present our tool SqSelect . Our tool receives either a specific system or its more important characteristics (number of states, maximum and minimum number of outgoing transitions from a state, size of the input and output alphabets) and returns interesting data that can help the tester to estimate the presence of FEP. In particular, our tool provides the most promising value(s) of the parameter associated with Squeeziness so that the likelihood of FEP can be more accurately estimated. In order to compute these values, our tool relies on an artificial neural network that has been extensively trained (compressing the information from around 250 , 000 systems and around 1 , 500 , 000 executions).

Traditional social community discovery methods concentrate mainly on static social networks, but the analysis of dynamic networks is a prerequisite for real-time and personalized social services. Through the study of community changes, the community structure in a dynamic network can be tracked over time, which helps in the mining of dynamic network information. In this paper, we propose a method of tracking dynamic community evolution that is based on resistance distance. Specifically, we model the time-varying features of dynamic networks using the convergence of a resistance-based distance. In our model, the heterogeneity of neighboring nodes can be obtained in the local topology of nodes by analyzing the resistance distance between nodes. We design a community discovery algorithm that essentially discovers community structures on dynamic networks by identifying the so-called core node. During the process of community evolution analysis, both the dynamic contribution of ordinary nodes and core nodes in each community are considered. In addition, to avoid the inclusion of spurious communities in the community structure, we define the notion of noise community and account for it in our algorithm. Experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper can yield better accuracy than other existing methods.

The paper addresses the problem of trust management of cloud, fog and IoT services in dynamically changing environments. The continuous dynamic environment is one of the challenges that trustworthy services management in the cloud, fog and IoT settings faces. Services in such an environmental context have difficulty securing an acceptable quality of service (QoS). This article proposes a trust management framework that establishes service trust by considering the direct trust from the truster (subjective trust), aggregating referrals about the service in a collusion-resistant manner (objective trust), and bootstrapping new services. We introduce a subjective trust model based on the formalism of dependency networks to dynamically predict the provided QoS in response to context environment changes. The proposed approach leverages the dependency relations that exist among the QoS metrics and environmental context variables. The novelty at the subjective trust level lies in considering the dynamic cyclic dependency relations that enhances the prediction accuracy. However, subjective trust based on direct interactions could be insufficient to make the trust estimate credible. Hence, on top of the subjective layer, we propose an objective trust management model resilient to collusion attacks by leveraging the power of mass collaboration among referees. Finally, we propose a bootstrapping mechanism that is resilient to the white-washing attacks by observing the behaviours of newcomer services with no trust resources using the concept of social adoption to estimate their initial trust values. Experiments conducted on real-life and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared with state-of-the-art approaches. We used the statistical log score to assess the model’s prediction accuracy and employed the estimation error of the objective trust as indicated by referees relative to the one calculated by the multi-round simulation. The ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves are finally used to measure the accuracy of the classifier used in the proposed trust bootstrapping mechanism in providing accurate initial trust values. The main findings of the paper are around the new trust model of cloud, fog and IoT services considering their dynamically changing environments. The first finding is that the prediction of the provided QoS shows better results when it is dynamic and responds to context environment changes by leveraging the dynamic dependency network linking the QoS metrics and context variables of the environment. The second finding is that the objective trust performs better when it is resilient to collusion attacks by leveraging the power of mass collaboration among referees. The third finding is that the bootstrapping mechanism that observes the behaviours of new comer services with no trust resources using the concept of social adoption to estimate their initial trust values excels by being resilient to white watching attacks.

Color image segmentation is the primary step to elicit detailed information of the image with RGB color space. The key to acquire the region of interest is the straightforward, instinctual technique called thresholding. Bi-level thresholding can be assessed concretely for simple images, whereas revealing various classes from a complex image is achieved only through multiple threshold values. Hence, multilevel thresholding with the most propitious maximizing objective functions such as Kapur, Otsu and Minimum Cross Entropy (MCE) to extract the precise threshold are employed in this paper. As the segmentation level increases, execution of non-parametric objective functions leads to exponential increase in computational time. Several researches to enhance the speed of objective functions along with various metaheuristics such as Krill Herd Algorithm (KHA), Teaching-Learning Based Optimization (TLBO) and Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) are performed. The need to unlock the computational complexity drifted our view towards the most powerful, robust, recently introduced metaheuristic Exchange Market Algorithm (EMA). EMA involves exchange of shares among investors to gain profit. The strategic approach of share members in stable and unstable modes of the market results in precise exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, low fitness shareholders gaining experience from their high and moderate counterparts, stands out as an exceptional step to reduce the time consumption. This concept is utilized in our paper for the first time to obtain the exact details from the image without any delay. Empirical outcome of the results indicates that exceptional image segmentation is achieved by EMA in less time compared to extensive search techniques such as KHA, TLBO and CSA. Quantitative and qualitative validation furnished by metrics such as Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), computational time, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and statistical Wilcoxon test affirm that Otsu, Kapur and MCE based EMA outperforms the existing techniques to analyze the real-world images.

In computer vision, significant advances have been made on object detection with the rapid development of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). This paper provides a comprehensive review of recently developed deep learning methods for small object detection. We summarize challenges and solutions of small object detection, and present major deep learning techniques, including fusing feature maps, adding context information, balancing foreground-background examples, and creating sufficient positive examples. We discuss related techniques developed in four research areas, including generic object detection, face detection, object detection in aerial imagery, and segmentation. In addition, this paper compares the performances of several leading deep learning methods for small object detection, including YOLOv3, Faster R-CNN, and SSD, based on three large benchmark datasets of small objects. Our experimental results show that while the detection accuracy on small objects by these deep learning methods was low, less than 0.4, Faster R-CNN performed the best, while YOLOv3 was a close second.

Today, many companies do not restrict their manufacturing activities to their home countries and are increasingly seeking new locations from which to operate cross-border production sharing. The location decisions involved in production fragmentation represent a strategic issue that has a significant impact on a company’s income and success. The location selection process considers many criteria, especially when the process involves international locations. Most criteria are difficult to assess precisely and quantitatively, and a rating scale may need to be employed. However, such scales, which are often based on linguistic variables, are not typically standardized across various decision-makers, making them dependent upon subjective judgments. To tackle such complications, fuzzy logic is adopted to reduce the uncertainties in group decision-making in such an environment. The purpose of this paper is to apply a fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (fuzzy TOPSIS) regarding the locations to be used in the international production fragmentation of an electronics company located in Thailand. This paper first examines the important criteria influencing location decisions for international production fragmentation. Fuzzy set theory is then applied to manipulate linguistic vagueness, ambiguities, and imprecise information and knowledge in such a manner as to determine weights for multiple criteria. The significant criteria for international production fragmentation are then identified and ranked through expert judgments. The results reveal that skill and competency level of labor force, adequacy of energy and electricity, and taxation and tax incentives are the most important criteria. The potential locations are finally ranked based on their overall performances. The paper also provides implications for management practices in international operations in terms of critical location criteria, decision-making methods, and uncertain situations.

With the rapid development of location-based services, a large amount of moving object trajectory data has been generated. Mining users’ stay area from moving trajectory data can not only improve location-based service, but also take precautions to ensure personal safety to better promote the development of location-based services. However, the research on trajectory of indoor moving objects is still in its infancy, and there is a lack of relevant research in this field. It is urgent to meet the needs of the location service industry. We have done some novel work on the stay area in indoor trajectories. Firstly, a novel algorithm named SVBDSA is proposed for the stability value-based discovery of stay area. The stability value is calculated from the distance and velocity between the two points. By comparing the stability value with the threshold value, the two points are judged whether they are in a stable state, and then the point in the stable state is extended. Thus, the stay area in the moving trajectories can be discovered. Secondly, this paper proposes an improved algorithm named T - O P T I C S , which adds the time attribute and puts forward the concept of difference value, so that abnormal stay points can be detected in the discovered stay area. Finally, the trajectory generation tool Vita is used to conduct experiments and analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in this paper is verified. Discovery of stay area is not only a new and difficult scientific issue that has not been studied in the field of indoor trajectories of the moving object, but also has important academic value and research significance in location-based service industry.

The problem of influence maximization in social networks has been widely investigated, but most previous studies have usually ignored the dynamic nature of propagation and the effects of local aggregation factors on diffusion. This paper presents a Dynamic algorithm based on cohesive Entropy for Influence Maximization (DEIM), the goal of which is to find the most influential nodes in social networks. Firstly, the Community Overlap Propagation Algorithm based on Cohesive Entropy (CECOPA) is put forward for the discovery of overlapping communities in networks, and potential nodes in the gathering area are selected to construct the candidate seed set. Then, the Optional Dynamic influence Propagation algorithm (ODP) is designed based on narrowing down the selection range of seeds. It utilizes a variety of entropy calculations to obtain the cohesive power between neighboring nodes and then determines whether the node has the ability to become a propagable pioneer of another node; thus, information continues to diffuse effectively. Finally, via many times experiments on several data sets, it is confirmed that the proposed DEIM algorithm in this paper can successfully affect the ideal number of users in different scenarios.

The paper considers a problem of forecasting of news feeds content. Analysis of existing approaches to this problem solution reveals the need for development of methods with enhanced forecasting capabilities. A method is proposed with expanded accounting for space and time relationships of the processed data. The method is revealed through an example of a neural network forecasting system that implements it. Implementation includes data retrieval from news feeds, their special preprocessing, coding and forecasting of words sets and their interconnections, followed by highlighting news topics and describing the of news feeds content. Some variants of stream recurrent neural networks with spiral layer structures were investigated with due regard to their forecasting capabilities under direction and strength control of the associative call of signals from the network memory. The paper also presents and discusses experimental results, a description of the methodological contribution and recommendations on the method practical application.

This paper provides a multi-stage medical scheme selection process to obtain the suitable scheme in the referral system. Firstly, considering the uncertainty of the experts and physicians, the preference relations (PRs) under the probabilistic linguistic term environment are introduced to the system. Then, this paper checks the consistency of the PRs and selects out the inconsistent PRs. For the inconsistent one, this paper provides alternative evaluations by repairing the most inconsistent element. Then, let experts choose from the alternative evaluation set. Next, by introducing the Bonferroni mean (BM) operator and Choquet integral, this paper integrates the historical data and the evaluations with stage weights to obtain the comprehensive assessment. The weights are calculated by the provided discrete and continuous stage weight functions or the programming model. Finally, the medical scheme selection process for the lung cancer and its simulation experiment are investigated to demonstrate the effectiveness and application of provided methods. The simulation experiments on sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis with existing methods are also conducted to validate the provided method.

This paper presents a small-sample faulty line detection method for a small current grounded system (SCGS) using improved generative adversarial networks (GANs) to overcome the problems of low accuracy and poor economy associated with traditional methods. First, we collected real-time fault data of the dispatching system as the original sample and used the linear interpolation and normalization methods to preprocess the data. We extracted and labeled the features of the original sample to construct a feature vector that represents the single-phase grounded fault. Then, to solve the problem of insufficient faulty samples, this paper used the GAN to generate synthetic samples to expand the training sample size. To stabilize the GAN training, the Wasserstein distance was introduced to improve the GAN loss function (WGAN). Finally, for the synthetic samples, we used Batch Normalization (BN) and an Early Stopping algorithm to train the lightweight depthwise separable convolutional network (DSCN) classifier and obtain a faulty line detection model with fast convergence and high accuracy. With the data of an actual dispatching system in China as an example, the proposed method determined the faulty line within 100–200 ms with an accuracy of more than 96%, which is approximately 26% higher than the accuracy of traditional methods. Compared with mainstream machine learning algorithms, the proposed method realizes the self-extraction of faulty features and simplifies the algorithm. Moreover, the accuracy of the proposed method is much higher than that of other machine learning algorithms on small samples. It is worth noting that this method needs only the existing real-time dispatching data and does not need to install additional data acquisition and fault detection equipment, eliminating the complicated equipment installation and debugging process and greatly reducing equipment costs human operations and maintenance costs. The proposed method has been implemented in an actual power system in China for two years. The results show that it is highly accurate and cost-effective, performs well in real time, and has bright prospects for future applications.

Signed social networks which are using both negative and positive links are becoming a popular form of social networks. This paper seeks to gain insight into how a user creates a positive or negative connection towards other users. The sign of connections between the users can be predicted efficiently and reliably using a newly proposed metric. In this paper, a new representation which is named Inverse square Metric is proposed. Inverse square metrics is inspired from Inverse square law which uses node properties and distance-based metrics to represent a connection in social networks. Inverse square metric measures the importance and intensity of a pair of nodes using node properties and defines the distance between two nodes as penalty. 16 variant of networks are created to compute the distance between two nodes in the network. In this study, two main contributions are made. First, a new metric to represent edges is proposed which uses both neighbourhood and distance-based link prediction measures. In addition, a unified framework for sign and link prediction problem based on the new representation is proposed. The experimental results on a group of six large networks including Amazon, Facebook, arXiv ASTRO-PH, Epinions, Slashdot, and Wikipedia prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Peer review is an essential part of scientific communications to ensure the quality of publications and a healthy scientific evaluation process. Assigning appropriate reviewers poses a great challenge for program chairs and journal editors for many reasons, including relevance, fair judgment, no conflict of interest, and qualified reviewers in terms of scientific impact. With a steady increase in the number of research domains, scholarly venues, researchers, and papers in academia, manually selecting and accessing adequate reviewers is becoming a tedious and time-consuming task. Traditional approaches for reviewer selection mainly focus on the matching of research relevance by keywords or disciplines. However, in real-world systems, various factors are often needed to be considered. Therefore, we propose a multilayered approach integrating Topic Network, Citation Network, and Reviewer Network into a reviewer Recommender System (TCRRec). We explore various aspects, including relevance between reviewer candidates and submission, authority, expertise, diversity, and conflict of interest and integrate them into the proposed framework TCRRec. The paper also addresses cold start issues for researchers having unique areas of interest or for isolated researchers. Experiments based on the NIPS and AMiner dataset demonstrate that the proposed TCRRec outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation techniques in terms of standard metrics of precision@k, MRR, nDCG@k, authority, expertise, diversity, and coverage.

With image object detection techniques progressing, video object detection attracts a lot of attention more than ever before. However, the performance of detecting the object from a video suffers a lot as object occlusion can always lead to the object in the presence of appearance deterioration. To deal with this problem, the temporal correlation of video sequences is often used to reduce the effects of object occlusion in video object detection. In this paper, an optical-flow-feature fusion-based video object detection method is proposed with consideration of temporal coherence among video frames. To further reduce computational complexity, this paper also proposes a packet video processing method. Specifically, video frames are grouped first, and all frames in current group share the same optical flow feature map by feature fusion. Then the Target Image can be formed with object information enhanced by fusing the shared feature map with current frame. The proposed method gives rise to effective background information masking, so that the object detection network can focus more on the foreground object. This method effectively improves the object detection performance and the scene migration performance. Experimental results prove that the proposed method significantly improves the detection accuracy to 78.6% on ImageNet VID. In addition, VGG and ResNet are compared to further verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, and the results can be a persuasive evidence with the highest detection accuracy and acceptable time consumption.

In recent years, the rapid development of mobile network and wireless sensor technology has brought opportunities to change the way of the existing taxi business operation. How to improve the operation revenues of taxi drivers has become a topic worthy of research. This paper analyzes and mines taxi operation data to provide taxi drivers with personalized sequence recommendation services, thereby increasing their expected revenues. Different from previous works, the proposed method in this paper recommends a series of future operation orders for taxi drivers, instead of recommending several discrete locations for the current order. In this paper, firstly, by performing spatial-temporal clustering on the origins and destinations of passengers, the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of passengers in the city are identified. Secondly, the origin of the current passenger is used as the root node to construct a top-N high-utility sequence tree, and this process can be divided into two processes: top-down building tree and bottom-up sorting path utility. The two pruning strategies of node utility and path utility are used to reduce the generation of candidate sets. Finally, a series of potential orders based on dynamic context are recommended to taxi drivers, so as to maximize the expected revenues of taxi drivers. The experimental results demonstrate that there is a close relationship between taxi drivers’ operation behavior patterns and their revenues. The proposed system framework and algorithm in this paper can effectively mine global and long-term top-N high-utility operation patterns.

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.