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Summary: Automatic identification system (AIS) is a vessel-based system for the automatic broadcast and reception of vessel information, and it also supports data for trajectory prediction. Since the vessel’s sailing route is flexible and changeable and the AIS broadcast is unconfirmed, the trajectory varies greatly and the original AIS data contains some noisy trajectory, which leads to low prediction accuracy and stability. Therefore, to solve the above problem, this paper proposes a trajectory prediction method based on bidirectional gate recurrent unit (BiGRU) and trajectory direction vector (TDV) with attention mechanism. This paper firstly proposes a TDV to associate latitude and longitude with the course and speed. Then the paper proposes an attention mechanism to self-adaptively update weight to the TDV in different stages to eliminate unreasonable predicted trajectory points. Finally, this paper combines the TDV attention mechanism and the BiGRU network to train a vessel trajectory prediction model.

Summary: In scenarios involving the treatment of complex or coexisting diseases with multiple drugs, the potential for severe adverse drug reactions in patients necessitates the identification of potential drug-drug interactions (DDIs). Most existing computational methods have not taken into account the asymmetry and relation types of drug interactions caused by the relation information between drugs, which may lead to missing information in embedded learning. Therefore, this paper proposes a directed relation graph attention aware network (DRGATAN) to predict asymmetric drug interactions. DRGATAN leverages an encoder to learn multi-relational role embeddings of drugs across different types of relations. The experimental results show that DRGATAN’s performance is superior to recognized advanced methods. The visualization demonstrates the effect of utilizing asymmetric information, and the case analysis validates the reliability of the proposed method. This study provides guidance for predicting asymmetric drug interactions.

Summary: The prediction of drug-target interactions (DTIs) is a critical phase in the sustainable drug development process, especially when the research focus is to capitalize on the repositioning of existing drugs. Computational approaches to predicting DTIs can provide important insights into drug mechanisms of action. However, current methods for predicting DTIs based on the structural information of the knowledge graph may suffer from the sparseness and incompleteness of the knowledge graph and neglect the latent type information of the knowledge graph. In this paper, we propose TTModel, a knowledge graph embedding model for DTI prediction. By exploiting biomedical text and type information, TTModel can learn latent text semantics and type information to improve the performance of representation learning. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly on the task of DTI prediction.

Summary: Materials science literature has grown exponentially in recent years making it difficult for individuals to master all of this information. This constrains the formulation of new hypotheses that scientists can come up with. In this work, we explore whether materials science knowledge can be automatically inferred from textual information contained in journal papers. Using a data set of 0.5 million polymer papers, we show, using natural language processing methods that vector representations trained for every word in our corpus can indeed capture this knowledge in a completely unsupervised manner. We perform time-based studies through which we track popularity of various polymers for different applications and predict new polymers for novel applications based solely on the domain knowledge contained in our data set. Using co-relations detected automatically from literature in this manner thus, opens up a new paradigm for materials discovery.

For research domains such as life sciences, which pursue fundamental scientific understanding and applications intended for immediate use, academic entrepreneurship has played a pivotal role in commercialization. This paper presents an evaluation method of researchers related to user-inspired fundamental research, using global databases of startup finances and academic research papers of ''startup readiness.'' Case studies of startups related to biopharmaceutical research topics suggest that the biopharmaceutical field has rich opportunities stemming from scientific research, commercialization, and entrepreneurship. This evaluation method sorts specific industry segments by which financing activities are active, and by which related growing research topics attract increased academic attention. We constructed networks of author citation and co-authorship from paper citation networks related to research topics in industry segments in the biopharmaceutical domain. Results obtained across all research topics we surveyed demonstrated that authors in the top 10% of degree centrality ranking in both networks are far more likely to be startup participants than other authors. Our computational approach might provide convenient, dynamic, global, and real-time understanding of the “startup readiness” of researchers working with research topics for which academic attention is emerging in actively financed biopharmaceutical fields.

Eye gaze tracking has been used to study the influence of visual stimuli on consumer behavior and attentional processes. Eye gaze tracking techniques have made substantial contributions in advertisement design, human computer interaction, virtual reality and disease diagnosis. Eye gaze estimation is considered critical for prediction of human attention, and hence indispensable for better understanding human activities. In this paper, Latent Semantic Analysis is used to develop an information model for identifying emerging research trends within eye gaze estimation techniques. An exhaustive collection of 423 titles and abstracts of research papers published during 2005–2018 were used. Five major research areas and ten research trends were classified based upon this study.

This paper presents software fault detection, which is dependent upon the effectiveness of the testing and debugging team. A more skilled testing team can achieve higher rates of debugging success, and thereby removing a larger fraction of faults identified without introducing additional faults. A complex software is often subject to two or more stages of testing that exhibits distinct rates of fault discovery. This paper proposes a two-stage Enhanced neighborhood-based particle swarm optimization (NPSO) technique with the assimilation of the three conventional non homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) based growth models of software reliability by introducing an additional fault introduction parameter. The proposed neuro and swarm recurrent neural network model is compared with similar models, to demonstrate that in some cases the additional fault introduction parameter is appropriate. Both the theoretical and predictive measures of goodness of fit are used for demonstration using data sets through NPSO.

An experimental study was conducted to predict the student's awareness of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Mobile Technology (MT) in Indian and Hungarian university's students. A primary dataset was gathered from two popular universities located in India and Hungary in the academic year 2017–2018. This paper focuses on the prediction of two major parameters from dataset such as usability and educational benefits using four machine learning classifiers multilayer perceptron (ANN), Support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Discriminant (DISC). The multi-classification problem was solved with test, train and validated datasets using machine learning classifiers. One hand, feature aggregation with the train-test-validation technique improved the ANN's prediction accuracy of educational benefits for both countries. Another hand, ANN's accuracy decreases significantly in the prediction of usability. Further, SVM and ANN outperformed the KNN and the DISC in the prediction of awareness level towards ICT and MT in India and Hungary. Also, this paper reveals that the future awareness level for the educational benefits will be Very High or Moderate in both countries. Also, the awareness level is predicted as High and Moderate for usability parameter in both countries. Further, ANN and SVM accuracy and prediction time is compared with T-test at 0.05 significance level which distinguished CPU training time is taken by ANN and SVM using K-fold and Hold out method. Also, K-fold enhanced the significant prediction accuracy of SVM and ANN. the authors also used a STAC web platform to compare the accuracy datasets using T-test and ANOVA test at 0.05 significant level and we found ANN and SVM classifier has no significant difference in prediction accuracy in each dataset. Also, the authors recommend presented predictive models to be deployed as a real-time module of the institute's website for the real-time prediction of ICT & MT awareness level.

Studies conducted on resource management in wireless sensor networks have identified energy efficient routing protocols as one of the energy saving mechanisms that can be used to manage the consumption of networks’ available energy and extend network lifetime. Routing protocols assist in finding paths for transmission of sensed events, and they must be able to extend the lifetime of a network despite some of the limitations of sensor nodes in a network and the harsh environments in which the sensor nodes are to operate. In this paper, we survey and compare existing routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. We start by introducing the different solutions that can be used to improve the network lifetime and focus on energy efficient routing protocols as the area of the survey, in addition to network topology modeling. We also model the network regarding energy consumption, sensing and event extraction analysis in the network. Categorization of the routing protocols into homogeneous and heterogeneous was performed, for which, sub-classification into static and mobile and other behavioral patterns of the routing protocols was done. The second phase of the paper presents models and simulations of selected routing protocols and comparisons of their performances. We conclude this paper by discussing future work directions with highlights on some futuristic applications.

In recent years, researchers have made tremendous progress to address an important question of how to provide security and privacy in Internet of Things systems. Privacy protection refers to safeguarding leakage of private information of the customers. In the context of Smart Grid, majority of the studies are based on addressing consumer side privacy. A recent research work has revealed that consumer side network has evolved into prosumer side network. Prosumer refers to consumer and producer, which means a dual role of a customer in the smart grid network. In this paper, we attempt to address the security and privacy issues at the prosumer side of smart grid network. Our work is different from the previous works in two ways. The paper proposes a lightweight encryption based privacy preservation scheme; Lightweight R-LWE-based Secure and Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Prosumer side network (LRSPPP). In LRSPPP, a new messaging scheme is defined which effectively minimizes the number of messages thus making it lightweight. Furthermore, the proposed privacy preservation scheme is using Learning With Errors over Rings (R-LWE) lattice cryptography. There is no previous evidence of use of R-LWE based encryption for prosumer's privacy protection in smart grid. The security and performance analysis shows that the LRSPPP is superior compared to three other existing schemes.

Open source software (OSS) is increasingly being integrated into educational institutions, and many countries require the use of OSS in government departments. However, not much focus is placed on integrating it into the educational sector in a strategic and productive manner. This paper examines the existing literature on the use of OSS in terms of the potential enhancements it can provide for computer science studies in high schools in general, and those in the UAE more specifically. It also details a survey conducted among 400 high school teachers after teaching them about multiple types of OSS that might enhance their teaching experience. After examining more than 69 different research papers and taking the survey findings into account, we drafted a roadmap that can be used by any educational institute—especially high schools—to strategically integrate OSS into the educational system.

Today, there is a great urge to “Go Green” in many facets in our life, such as reducing the consumption of energy and creating more eco-friendly products as a solution to reduce the crisis that we might face in the future. Computing devices are quickly spreading in our world. Thinking of the amount of devices that are harming the environment through their energy consumption and their toxic wastes urges us to think of a solution that preserves the environment and our well-being. With “quality education” a major issue for the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, it is a must that we loop together the “quality education” with education per se. It is imperative that we engage the youth in attaining this objective, for it is not enough that we empower them with the tools, we must encourage them to look at the current issues outside the box, through a worldwide view, where the focus nowadays is on the environment, be it in reducing fuel usage, decreasing air and water pollution, and recycling, in brief, being environment friendly. In this paper, we stress the increased number of mobile devices usage and show the importance of having green applications to save the environment and preserve our health. The paper proposes a model with four metrics – energy, economic metric, performance, and energy/performance metric that aims to provide a design for mobile applications that address some of the concerns related to the environment. The proposed model was implemented on a mobile application and the results are compared to a regular application that does not take into consideration the “green” environment. The results proved that the application that follows the defined metrics preserves the environment and performs better than the regular application design. Thus, it presents a stepping stone towards linking learning technology while at the same time sustaining the environment.

The strategy of Divide-and-Conquer (D&C) is one of the frequently used programming patterns to design efficient algorithms in computer science, which has been parallelized on shared memory systems and distributed memory systems. Tzeng and Owens specifically developed a generic paradigm for parallelizing D&C algorithms on modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). In this paper, by following the generic paradigm proposed by Tzeng and Owens, we provide a new and publicly available GPU implementation of the famous D&C algorithm, QuickHull, to give a sample and guide for parallelizing D&C algorithms on the GPU. The experimental results demonstrate the practicality of our sample GPU implementation. Our research objective in this paper is to present a sample GPU implementation of a classical D&C algorithm to help interested readers to develop their own efficient GPU implementations with fewer efforts.

Summary: In forensic investigations, forensic intelligence is required for illicit drug profiling in order to allow police officers and law enforcements to recognize crime developments and adjust their actions. In the present paper, we propose a novel framework for Digital Forensic Drug Intelligence (DFDI) by fusing digital forensic and drug profiling data through intelligent cycles, where a targeted and iterative collection of evidence from diverse sources is a core step in the process of drug profiling. Drug profiling data combined with digital data from seized devices collected, examined, and analyzed will allow authorities to generate valuable information about illicit drug trafficking routes and manufacturing. Such data can be stored in seized illicit drug databases to build in an intelligent way, all findings, hypotheses and recommendations, allowing law enforcement to make decisions. Our framework will potentially provide a better understanding of profiling, trafficking and distribution of illicit drugs.

Summary: Severe weather conditions pose a significant challenge for computer vision algorithms in autonomous driving applications, particularly regarding robustness. Image rain-removal algorithms have emerged as a potential solution by leveraging the power of neural networks to restore rain-free backgrounds in images. However, existing research overlooks the vulnerability concerns in neural networks, which exposes a potential threat to the intelligent perception of autonomous vehicles in rainy conditions. This paper proposes a universal rain-removal attack (URA) that exploits the vulnerability of image rain-removal algorithms. By generating a non-additive spatial perturbation, URA significantly diminishes scene restoration similarity and image quality. The imperceptible and generic perturbation employed by URA makes it a crucial tool for vulnerability detection in image rain-removal algorithms and a potential real-world AI attack method. Experimental results demonstrate that URA can reduce scene repair capability by 39.5% and image generation quality by 26.4%, effectively targeting state-of-the-art rain-removal algorithms.

Summary: Social media and online navigation bring us enjoyable experiences in accessing information, and simultaneously create information cocoons (ICs) in which we are unconsciously trapped with limited and biased information. We provide a formal definition of IC in the scenario of online navigation. Subsequently, by analyzing real recommendation networks extracted from Science, PNAS, and Amazon websites, and testing mainstream algorithms in disparate recommender systems, we demonstrate that similarity-based recommendation techniques result in ICs, which suppress the system navigability by hundreds of times. We further propose a flexible recommendation strategy that addresses the IC-induced problem and improves retrieval accuracy in navigation, which are demonstrated by simulations on real data and online experiments on the largest video website in China. This paper quantifies the challenge of ICs in recommender systems and presents a viable solution, which offer insights into the industrial design of algorithms, future scientific studies, as well as policy making.

Summary: One of the top priorities in any laboratory is archiving experimental data in the most secure, efficient, and errorless way. It is especially important to those in chemical and biological research, for it is more likely to damage experiment records. In addition, the transmission of experiment results from paper to electronic devices is time-consuming and redundant. Therefore, we introduce an open-source no-code electronic laboratory notebook, Elegancy, a cloud-based/standalone web service distributed as a Docker image. Elegancy fits all laboratories but is specially equipped with several features benefitting biochemical laboratories. It can be accessed via various web browsers, allowing researchers to upload photos or audio recordings directly from their mobile devices. Elegancy also contains a meeting arrangement module, audit/revision control, and laboratory supply management system. We believe Elegancy could help the scientific research community gather evidence, share information, reorganize knowledge, and digitize laboratory works with greater ease and security.

Summary: Achieving human-level performance on some of the machine reading comprehension (MRC) datasets is no longer challenging with the help of powerful pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, the internal mechanism of these artifacts remains unclear, placing an obstacle to further understand these models. This paper focuses on conducting a series of analytical experiments to examine the relations between the multi-head self-attention and the final MRC system performance, revealing the potential explainability in PLM-based MRC models. To ensure the robustness of the analyses, we perform our experiments in a multilingual way on top of various PLMs. We discover that passage-to-question and passage understanding attentions are the most important ones in the question answering process, showing strong correlations to the final performance than other parts. Through comprehensive visualizations and case studies, we also observe several general findings on the attention maps, which can be helpful to understand how these models solve the questions.

Since the end of the 20th century, the digitalization of society, including the educational systems, has been growing exponentially. At the same time, education systems have been evolving towards competency-based assessment. Likewise, at the beginning of this century, the idea of Computational Thinking was resurrected by J. Wing, for solving problems and designing systems using concepts of computer science. Today, we can see how all these questions are taking shape in a new competence, called Computational Thinking, related to others that already exist. In this paper, we have studied the skills of Computational Thinking in university students, focusing on abstraction and its possible relationship with other factors. Results conclude that the students fail in relation to abstraction and in algorithmic thinking. Although the ability of abstraction is not easy to measure, a linear regression analysis has been carried out in order to determine its possible study.

An electroencephalogram (EEG) measures and records the electrical activity of the brain. It provides valuable information that can be used to identify epileptic abnormalities. However, the visual identification of such abnormalities from EEG signals by expert neurologists is time consuming. Therefore, several researchers have proposed using deep neural networks (DNNs) to automate the identification of these abnormalities. Their studies have examined the use of different numbers of layers, different numbers of parameters, and various operation types arranged in different architectures. This paper presents the shallowest 11-layer DNN architecture capable of classifying three classes of EEG signals: normal, preictal, and seizure. When the proposed architecture was applied to the standard University of Bonn EEG signal dataset, it achieved accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity values of 99.43%, 99.57%, and 99.10%, respectively. It not only had a better performance than the state of the art DNN architectures, but also had shallower layers with fewer parameters. This allowed it to more quickly identify epileptic abnormalities. Experiments were also conducted where the length of the EEG signals was reduced to 65% (2,662 samples with a period of 15.26 s), which in turn minimised the total parameters of the proposed architecture so that it was comparable to the smallest state-of-the-art architecture and decreased the lag time for identification. Even in these experiments, it was capable of producing equal performance measures, with the execution time reduced to only 69% of that when employing the full length of EEG signals.

Dimension reduction is often a preliminary step in the analysis of data sets with a large number of variables. Most classical, both supervised and unsupervised, dimension reduction methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA) or sliced inverse regression (SIR) can be formulated using one, two or several different scatter matrix functionals. Scatter matrices can be seen as different measures of multivariate dispersion and might highlight different features of the data and when compared might reveal interesting structures. Such analysis then searches for a projection onto an interesting (signal) part of the data, and it is also important to know the correct dimension of the signal subspace. These approaches usually make either no model assumptions or work in wide classes of semiparametric models. Theoretical results in the literature are however limited to the case where the sample size exceeds the number of variables which is hardly ever true for data sets encountered in bioinformatics. In this paper, we briefly review the relevant literature and explore if the dimension reduction tools can be used to find relevant and interesting subspaces for small-n-large-p data sets. We illustrate the methods with a microarray dataset of prostate cancer patients and healthy controls.

Malaysia and many other developing countries progressively adopting massively open online course (MOOC) in their national higher education approach. We have observed an increasing need for facilitating MOOC monitoring that is associated with the rising adoption of MOOCs. Our observation suggests that recent adoption cases led analyst and instructors to focus on monitoring enrolment and learning activities. Visual analytics in MOOC support education analysts in analyzing MOOC data via interactive visualization. Existing literature on MOOC visualization focuses on enabling visual analysis on MOOC data from forum and course material. We found limited studies that investigate and characterize domain problems or design requirements of visual analytics for MOOC. This paper aims to present the empirical problem characterization and abstraction for visual analytics in MOOC learner's support monitoring. Detailed characterization and abstraction of the domain problem help visualization designer to derive design requirements in generating appropriate visualization solution. We examined the literature and conducted a case study to elicit a problem abstraction based on data, users, and tasks. We interviewed five Malaysian MOOC experts from three higher education institutes using semi-structured questions. Our case study reveals the priority of enabling MOOC analysis on learner's progression and course completion. There is an association between design and analysis priority with the pedagogical type of implemented MOOC and users. The characterized domain problems and requirements offer a design foundation for visual analytics in MOOC monitoring analysis.

Given a dataset of careers and incomes, how large a difference of incomes between any pair of careers would be? Given a dataset of travel time records, how long do we need to spend more when choosing a public transportation mode A instead of B to travel? In this paper, we propose a framework that is able to infer orders of categories as well as magnitudes of difference of real numbers between each pair of categories using an estimation statistics framework. Our framework not only reports whether an order of categories exists, but it also reports magnitudes of difference of each consecutive pair of categories in the order. In a large dataset, our framework is scalable well compared with existing frameworks. The proposed framework has been applied to two real-world case studies: 1) ordering careers by incomes from 350,000 households living in Khon Kaen province, Thailand, and 2) ordering sectors by closing prices from 1,060 companies in NASDAQ stock market between years 2000 and 2016. The results of careers ordering demonstrate income inequality among different careers. The stock market results illustrate dynamics of sector domination that can change over time. Our approach is able to be applied in any research area that has category-real pairs. Our proposed Dominant-Distribution Network provides a novel approach to gain new insight of analyzing category orders. A software of this framework is available for researchers or practitioners in an R CRAN package: EDOIF.

Summary: Machine learning has been heavily researched and widely used in many disciplines. However, achieving high accuracy requires a large amount of data that is sometimes difficult, expensive, or impractical to obtain. Integrating human knowledge into machine learning can significantly reduce data requirement, increase reliability and robustness of machine learning, and build explainable machine learning systems. This allows leveraging the vast amount of human knowledge and capability of machine learning to achieve functions and performance not available before and will facilitate the interaction between human beings and machine learning systems, making machine learning decisions understandable to humans. This paper gives an overview of the knowledge and its representations that can be integrated into machine learning and the methodology. We cover the fundamentals, current status, and recent progress of the methods, with a focus on popular and new topics. The perspectives on future directions are also discussed.

Digital signage is widely utilized in digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertising for marketing and business. Recently, the combination of the digital camera and digital signage enables the advertiser to gather the audience demographic for audience measurement. Audience measurement is useful for the advertiser to understand the audience's behavior and improve their business strategies. When an audience is facing the digital display, the vision-based DOOH system will process the audience's face and broadcast a personalized advertisement. Most of the digital signage is available in an uncontrolled environment of public areas. Thus, it poses two main challenges for the vision-based DOOH system to track the audience's movement, which are multiple adjacent faces and occlusion by passer-by. In this paper, a new framework is proposed to combine the digital signage with a depth camera for tracking multi-face in the three-dimensional (3D) environment. The proposed framework extracts the audience's face centroid position (x, y) and depth information (z) and plots into the aerial map to simulate the audience's movement that is corresponding to the real-world environment. The advertiser can further measure the advertising effectiveness through the audience's behavior.

Gene prediction has been increasingly important in genome annotation due to advancements in sequencing technology. Genome annotation further helps in determining the structure and function of these genes. Translation initiation site prediction (TIS) in human genomic sequences is one of the fundamental and essential steps in gene prediction. Thus, accurate prediction of TIS in these sequences is highly desirable. Although many computational methods were developed for this problem, none of them focused on finding these sites in human genomic sequences. In this paper, a new TIS prediction method is proposed by incorporating global sequence based features. Support vector machine is used to assess the prediction power of these features. The proposed method achieved accuracy of above 90% when tested for genomic as well as cDNA sequences. The experimental results indicate that the method works well for both genomic and cDNA sequences. The method can be integrated into gene prediction system in future.

Femoral-tibial alignment is a prominent risk factor for Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) incidence and progression. One way of assessing alignment is by determining the Femoral-Tibial Angle (FTA). Several studies have investigated FTA determination; however, methods of assessment of FTA still present challenges. This paper introduces a new method for semi-automatic measurement of FTA as part of KOA research. Our novel approach combines preprocessing of X-ray images and the use of Active Shape Model (ASM) as the femoral and tibial segmentation method, followed by a thinning process. The result of the thinning process is used to predict FTA automatically by measuring the angle between the intersection of the two vectors of branching points on the femoral and tibial areas. The proposed method is trained on 10 x-ray images and tested on 50 different x-ray images of the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) dataset. The outcomes of this approach were compared with manually obtained FTA measurements from the OAI dataset as the ground truth. Based on experiments, the difference in measurement results between the FTA of the OAI and the FTA obtained using our method is quite small, i.e., below 0.81° for the right FTA and below 0.77° for the left FTA with minimal average errors. This result indicates that this method is clinically suitable for semi-automatic measurement of the FTA.

This paper presents a new educational package based on e-learning called TermolabUA integrated by three programs, which are VOLCONTROL focused on the analysis of steady-state flow devices, CarnotCycle aimed to analyze reversible and irreversible processes, and CombustionUA to study combustion processes. The educational package was designed for both, to promote significant learning on some thermodynamic topics in undergraduate students, and to help the student to reach the cognitive competencies of interpreting, arguing and proposing, and interacting with the different graphical user interfaces to solve relevant cases studies. Also, the teaching-learning activity helps them to understand the influence of a specific variable on the energy and entropy behavior of the selected systems, which is traditionally studied manually in a classroom. The results of the t-Student tests showed that the average grades obtained by the students in the problems using the software were higher than the average grade without using the software. The estimate for the average grade difference was 0.56 with a P-value = 3.31E-13 for Problem 1 and 0.631 with a P-value = 3.31E-13 for Problem 2 in the Workshop- VOLCONTROL. Similar results were obtained for the problems reported in the CarnotCycle and CombustionUA Workshop with an estimate for average grade differences and P-values lower than 0.79 and 0.05, respectively. It means that the new software package significantly improved the learning skills of the students.

This paper presents an optimal method for optimizing network reconfiguration (NR) problems in a power distribution system (PDS) for the purpose of power loss reduction and voltage profile (VP) improvement. Furthermore, a modified algorithm was presented to address this problem in order to provide a more efficient PDS. Various works which used NR to improve VP and reduce power loss were discussed and summarized in detail. In particular, a modified Selective particle swarm optimization (SPSO) method was used for NR in existing networks considering different loading conditions. The main objective of this study is to minimize real power losses and enhance VP of a distribution system using the proposed SPSO method. The SPSO method was programmed in MATLAB R2016b software and tested using IEEE 33-bus radial distribution system (RDS). The obtained test results show that the real power was enhanced by 99.341%, 97.289%, and 95.389% for the light, normal, and heavy load conditions, respectively. Also, the minimum voltage level in the worst case was significantly enhanced from 0.8841 p.u. to 0.9510 p.u. Towards the end, a comparative analysis of the proposed SPSO with existing methods for distribution network reconfiguration (DNR) is presented. The comparative results show that the proposed SPSO was found to be more efficient in reducing voltage deviation (VD) and power losses in the system.

The immense capabilities provided by virtual reality for enhancing empathy and altering social behaviors, make it possible to use virtual reality for the promotion of the understanding between individuals. A social issue that needs to be addressed is the discrimination and marginalization of people with Asperger's syndrome (AS) from the working force, stemming from the lack of recognition and justification of their oddities. In this paper, the effectiveness of a virtual reality simulation, raising awareness on this specific issue, is evaluated. Awareness is a term used in this research to refer to the combination of conceptual knowledge and sensitization on a specific issue. An experiment with between-group design has been carried out, where half of the participants used the simulation via a VR headset device and the other half was given a transcript of relevant medical articles instead. The comparison between the two groups indicates that the group which used the simulation gained more knowledge on AS than the group which used the transcript. Moreover, the parameter of sensitization indicates positive correlations with place illusion in the VR group.

Nanofluids possess higher thermal properties than the other conventional base fluids. Many investigators suggested that the nanofluids have the potential to apply in various engineering fields. In real time situation it is challenging to determine the thermal conductivity of nanofluids with accuracy as they have many depending factors. Moreover, numerous experimental tests are required to acquire the thermal conductivity of nanofluids accurately. In this research paper, thermal conductivity ratio and dynamic viscosity ratio of Al2O3/H2O nanofluid are predicted accurately by using Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) methods. The input predictor variables used in this model are temperature, volume fraction and size of the nanoparticles. 222 experimental data sets are taken to predict the thermal conductivity ratio (TCR), dynamic viscosity ratio (DVR) and also the effectiveness of the predictor variables in predicting the response variables are extensively studied and found that the temperature is the crucial factor to enhance the thermal conductivity ratio. The proposed modeling is performed by using MATLAB software. The predictions were evaluated by various evaluation criterions. It is observed that an optimized Gaussian process regression (GPR) method with matern kernel function shows an accurate agreement with experimental data with Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) value of 0.000126 for TCR and squared exponential kernel function show good agreement with experimental data with Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) value of 0.000045 for DVR. Regression coefficient value (R2) is 0.99; nearer to one hence the predicted results are reliable.

In the most advanced technology nodes, leakage has become a major concern for integrated circuits designers. In addition, the leakage calculation using SPICE simulations takes a large amount of time for the entire library of standard cells for the different PVT (Process, Voltage, and Temperature) conditions. However IC Designers usually need a fast access to the leakage current estimation in order to validate their designs. In this context, the present paper proposes a new approach of the leakage estimation. The aim of this methodology is to predict the leakage of a standard cell accurately and in a short amount of time. This method is applied to all the cells of the used standard cell library and is based on mathematical models developed from the leakage physical equation. The results of the leakage calculated with this technique shows an average error of 5%. The context of this work is part of a fast generation of a full liberty file of a standard cell library using the curve fitting method.

Environmental exposure to man-made electromagnetic field (EMF) has been rising as modern technologies have grown and changes in social behavior have generated more synthetic sources. For safety of human health, EMF levels need to be regulated. The level of EMF should be well below levels where there might be harm, hence we do not expect to see any health effects at these levels. Current regulations fail to place a strict limit on EMF in situations where multiple nearby devices transmit simultaneously. The way these regulations are expressed needs great care because it will have an effect on the design of wireless communication systems. In this paper, it is argued that transmitted power constraints on wireless communication devices should be expressed in a different way, namely that devices should limit the EMF spectral density that they generate to the difference between the maximum allowed, by the standard, and the amount currently present, as measured by the device, in the spectral region where it is active. Note that the limit on EMF should be expressed in terms of its EMF spectral density rather than as a total EMF over each of a series of separate bands. If all devices limit their own EMF spectral density, in the spectral region where they are active, in such a way that total EMF spectral density is below the regulated limit in that region, then it is certain that the aggregate EMF spectral density will be below the regulated limit at all frequencies.

Similarity measure, also called information measure, is a concept used to distinguish different objects. It has been studied from different contexts by employing mathematical, psychological, and fuzzy approaches. Image steganography is the art of hiding secret data into an image in such a way that it cannot be detected by an intruder. In image steganography, hiding secret data in the plain or non-edge regions of the image is significant due to the high similarity and redundancy of the pixels in their neighborhood. However, the similarity measure of the neighboring pixels, i.e., their proximity in color space, is perceptual rather than mathematical. Thus, this paper proposes an interval type-2 fuzzy logic system (IT2 FLS) to determine the similarity between the neighboring pixels by involving an instinctive human perception through a rule-based approach. The pixels of the image having high similarity values, calculated using the proposed IT2 FLS similarity measure, are selected for embedding via the least significant bit (LSB) method. We term the proposed procedure of steganography as ‘IT2 FLS-LSB method’. Moreover, we have developed two more methods, namely, type-1 fuzzy logic system based least significant bits (T1FLS-LSB) and Euclidean distance based similarity measures for least significant bit (SM-LSB) steganographic methods. Experimental simulations were conducted for a collection of images and quality index metrics, such as PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio), UQI (universal quality index), and SSIM (structural similarity measure) are used. All the three steganographic methods are applied on dataset and the quality metrics are calculated. The obtained stego images and results are shown and thoroughly compared to determine the efficacy of the IT2 FLS-LSB method. We have also demonstrated the high payload capacity of our proposed method. Finally, we have done a comparative analysis of the proposed approach with the existing well-known steganographic methods to show the effectiveness of our proposed steganographic method.

In optical networks, such as OPS/OBS, the network results into significant loss in the network layer. When the loss significantly deteriorates the QoS by increasing the Bit Error Rate (BER), a viable approach can be used to increase the performance. This paper presents state of the art of Quality of Service (QoS) schemes used for improving the performance of optical networks. Furthermore, some possible applications and performance data are summarized based on Packet Loss Rate (PLR), secrecy, survivability and other parameters. The different states of art methods proposed by several authors are compared with Coded Packet Transport (CPT) scheme. We believe that this study is valuable to researchers envisaging a novel approach to enhance the performance of optical networks for telecommunications networks of the future.

Many Javanese manuscripts in Indonesia are stored in museums and libraries. Most of these manuscripts were written using local scripts that are rarely used in everyday life, and hence a software application that can help and improve the reading of these manuscripts is valuable. An essential step in automatic manuscript image transliteration is post-processing, which involves editing and concatenating syllables into words. The main problem of post-processing is that there exists no symbol for space between words in a sentence, which is called the scriptio-continua problem. This paper proposes methods based on the backtracking algorithm to solve the scriptio continua in the post-processing step of Javanese manuscript image transliteration. The proposed methods use a depth-first search in seeking relevant candidate words to determine whether to merge a new syllable or not. The results of the proposed methods to concatenate 17,687 syllables from the Hamong Tani book using a dictionary containing 49,801 words are found to be satisfactory in terms of computation and accuracy. The accuracy of the implemented greedy and brute-force methods is both 81.64%. However, the greedy-based method is more efficient and has a better performance than the brute-force method.

The task of drug-target interaction prediction holds significant importance in pharmacology and therapeutic drug design. In this paper, we present FRnet-DTI, an auto-encoder based feature manipulation and a convolutional neural network based classifier for drug target interaction prediction. Two convolutional neural networks are proposed: FRnet-Encode and FRnet-Predict. Here, one model is used for feature manipulation and the other one for classification. Using the first method FRnet-Encode, we generate 4096 features for each of the instances in each of the datasets and use the second method, FRnet-Predict, to identify interaction probability employing those features. We have tested our method on four gold standard datasets extensively used by other researchers. Experimental results shows that our method significantly improves over the state-of-the-art method on three out of four drug-target interaction gold standard datasets on both area under curve for Receiver Operating Characteristic (auROC) and area under Precision Recall curve (auPR) metric. We also introduce twenty new potential drug-target pairs for interaction based on high prediction scores. The source codes and implementation details of our methods are available from https://github.com/farshidrayhanuiu/FRnet-DTI/ and also readily available to use as an web application from http://farshidrayhan.pythonanywhere.com/FRnet-DTI/.

Malaria and typhoid fever are revered for their ability to individually or jointly cause high mortality rate. Both malaria and typhoid fever have similar symptoms and are famous for their co-existence in the human body, hence, causes problem of under-diagnosis when doctors tries to determine the exact disease out of the two diseases. This paper proposes a Bioinformatics Based Decision Support System (BBDSS) for malaria, typhoid and malaria typhoid diagnosis. The system is a hybrid of expert system and global alignment with constant penalty. The architecture of the proposed system takes input diagnosis sequence and benchmark diagnosis sequences through the browser, store these diagnosis sequences in the Knowledge base and set up the IF-THEN rules guiding the diagnosis decisions for malaria, typhoid and malaria typhoid respectively. The matching engine component of the system receives as input the input sequence and applies global alignment technique with constant penalty for the matching between the input sequence and the three benchmark sequences in turns. The global alignment technique with constant penalty applies its pre-defined process to generate optimal alignment and determine the disease condition of the patient through alignment scores comparison for the three benchmark diagnosis sequences. In order to evaluate the proposed system, ANOVA was used to compare the means of the three independent groups (malaria, typhoid and malaria typhoid) to determine whether there is statistical evidence that the associated values on the diagnosis variables means are significantly different. The ANOVA results indicated that the mean of the values on diagnosis variables is significantly different for at least one of the disease status groups. Similarly, multiple comparisons tests was further used to explicitly identify which means were different from one another. The multiple comparisons results showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the values on the diagnosis variables to diagnose the disease conditions between the groups of malaria and malaria typhoid. Conversely, there were no differences between the groups of malaria and typhoid fever as well as between the groups of typhoid fever and malaria typhoid. In order to show mean difference in the diagnosis scores between the orthodox and the proposed diagnosis system, t-test statistics was used. The results of the t-test statistics indicates that the mean values of diagnosis from the orthodox system differ from those of the proposed system. Finally, the evaluation of the proposed diagnosis system is most efficient at providing diagnosis for malaria and malaria typhoid at 97% accuracy.

In this digital era, transmitting data through a computer network has become common. Moreover, some applications have also been developed to do it. Nevertheless, users may not be aware of the security aspect of this data transmission, which can lead to disclosing this private message. In a case when a sensitive message is the object to transmit, a security mechanism should be applied. Data hiding is one of the methods introduced to work for this issue. In this algorithm, the message is embedded into the cover, such as an audio file, before being transmitted; on the other side, the recipient extracts it. However, the size of the message and the quality of the resulted stego data are still challenging. In this paper, we focus on these two problems by considering some factors: embedding space, embedding process, reducing, and smoothing steps. Firstly, the audio signal is discretized to obtain audio samples. Next, these samples are interpolated to provide spaces for hiding the secret. Considering that the quality of the generated stego audio is likely to drop, reducing and smoothing steps are designed. The experimental results show that this approach can improve the quality of the stego based on the specified payload capacity. That is, there is an increase in PSNR value of at least 10 dB, depending on the payload size and the methods.

Video surveillance applications have made great strides in making the world a safer place. Extracting visual attributes from a scene, such as the type of shoes, the type of clothing, carrying any object or not, or wearing any accessory etc., is a challenging problem and an efficient solution holds the key to a great number of applications. In this paper, we present a multi-branch convolutional neural network that uses depthwise separable convolution (DSC) layers to solve the pedestrian attribute recognition problem. Researchers have proposed various solutions over the years making use of convolutional neural networks (CNN), however, we introduce DSC layers to the CNN for the problem of pedestrian attribute recognition. In addition, we make a novel use of the different color spaces and create a 3-branch CNN, denoted as 3bCNN, that is efficient, especially with smaller datasets. We experiment on two benchmark datasets and show results with improvement over the state of the art.

Speech recognition has become one of the most significant parts of human-computer interaction due to emergence of new technologies such as smartphone, smart watch and many modern technologies, therefore the need of an ASR for local languages is felt. The basic aim of this paper is to develop an isolated digits recognition for Pashto language, using deep CNN. The database of Pashto digits from 0 to 9 with 50 utterance for each digits is used. Twenty MFCC features extracted for each isolated digit and fed as input to CNN. The network has been used for the proposed system is deep up to 4 convolutional layers, followed by ReLU and max-pooling layers. The network has been trained on the 50% of data and the rest of the data was used for testing. The total average of 84.17% accuracy was achieved for testing which show 7.32% better performance as compared to existing similar works.

In cross-spectral iris recognition, different spectral bands are used to obtain rich information of the human iris. Previous studies on cross-spectral iris recognition are based primarily on feature-based approaches, which are prone to the changes in parameters in the feature extraction process, such as spatial position and iris image acquisition conditions. These parameters can degrade iris recognition performance. In this paper, we present a phase-based approach for cross-spectral iris recognition using phase-only correlation (POC) and band-limited phase-only correlation (BLPOC). A phase-based iris recognition system recognizes an iris using the phase information contained in the iris image; therefore, its performance is not affected by feature extraction parameters. However, the performance of a phase-based cross-spectral iris recognition is strongly influenced by specular reflection. Different illumination conditions may produce different iris images from the same subject. To overcome this challenge, we integrate a photometric normalization technique –homomorphic filtering– with phase-based cross-spectral iris recognition. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique achieved an excellent matching performance with an equal error rate of 0.59% and a genuine acceptance rate of 95%.

This manuscript provides a literature review of connectivism. It presents evidence and thinking in which connectivism, a new learning theory which has typically been used for online learning, is applied to leadership, with a provocative discussion on the yet unexplored opportunities to use connectivism to redefine leadership in the twenty-first century. The paper aims to bridge the gap between the contributions of digital learning in education and the field of leadership theory and development. It seeks to apply the critical tenets of connectivism in education and learning to leadership theory and to stimulate a debate on new forms of leadership.

Smartphones have diffused rapidly across South African society and constitute the most dominant information and communication technologies in everyday use. That being so, it is important to ensure that all South Africans know how to secure their smart devices. Doing so requires a high level of security awareness and knowledge. As yet, there is no formal curriculum addressing cyber security in South African schools. Indeed, it seems to be left to universities to teach cyber security principles, and they currently only do this when students take computing-related courses. The outcome of this approach is that only a very small percentage of South Africans, i.e. those who take computing courses at university, are made aware of cyber security risks and know how to take precautions. In this paper we found that, because this group is overwhelmingly male, this educational strategy disproportionately leaves young South African women vulnerable to cyber-attacks. We thus contend that cyber security ought to be taught as children learn the essential “3 Rs”—delivering requisite skills at University level does not adequately prepare young South Africans for a world where cyber security is an essential skill. Starting to provide awareness and knowledge at primary school, and embedding it across the curriculum would, in addition to ensuring that people have the skills when they need them, also remove the current gender imbalance in cyber security awareness.

Cancer classification based on molecular level investigation has gained the interest of researches as it provides a systematic, accurate and objective diagnosis for different cancer types. Several recent researches have been studying the problem of cancer classification using data mining methods, machine learning algorithms and statistical methods to reach an efficient analysis for gene expression profiles. Studying the characteristics of thousands of genes simultaneously offered a deep insight into cancer classification problem. It introduced an abundant amount of data ready to be explored. It has also been applied in a wide range of applications such as drug discovery, cancer prediction and diagnosis which is a very important issue for cancer treatment. Besides, it helps in understanding the function of genes and the interaction between genes in normal and abnormal conditions. That is done by monitoring the behavior of genes -gene expression data- under different conditions. In this paper, an effective ensemble approach is proposed. Ensemble classifiers increase not only the performance of the classification, but also the confidence of the results. The motivations beyond using ensemble classifiers are that the results are less dependent on peculiarities of a single training set and because the ensemble system outperforms the performance of the best base classifier in the ensemble.