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Diabetic retinopathy is considered one of the most common diseases that can lead to blindness in the working age, and the chance of developing it increases as long as a person suffers from diabetes. Protecting the sight of the patient or decelerating the evolution of this disease depends on its early detection as well as identifying the exact levels of this pathology, which is done manually by ophthalmologists. This manual process is very consuming in terms of the time and experience of an expert ophthalmologist, which makes developing an automated method to aid in the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy an essential and urgent need. In this paper, we aim to propose a new hybrid deep learning method based on a fine-tuning vision transformer and a modified capsule network for automatic diabetic retinopathy severity level prediction. The proposed approach consists of a new range of computer vision operations, including the power law transformation technique and the contrast-limiting adaptive histogram equalization technique in the preprocessing step. While the classification step builds up on a fine-tuning vision transformer, a modified capsule network, and a classification model combined with a classification model, The effectiveness of our approach was evaluated using four datasets, including the APTOS, Messidor-2, DDR, and EyePACS datasets, for the task of severity levels of diabetic retinopathy. We have attained excellent test accuracy scores on the four datasets, respectively: 88.18%, 87.78%, 80.36%, and 78.64%. Comparing our results with the state-of-the-art, we reached a better performance., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The upsurge of autonomous vehicles in the automobile industry will lead to better driving experiences while also enabling the users to solve challenging navigation problems. Reaching such capabilities will require significant technological attention and the flawless execution of various complex tasks, one of which is ensuring robust localization and mapping. Recent surveys have not provided a meaningful and comprehensive description of the current approaches in this field. Accordingly, this review is intended to provide adequate coverage of the problems affecting autonomous vehicles in this area, by examining the most recent methods for mapping and localization as well as related feature extraction and data security problems. First, a discussion of the contemporary methods of extracting relevant features from equipped sensors and their categorization as semantic, non-semantic, and deep learning methods is presented. We conclude that representativeness, low cost, and accessibility are crucial constraints in the choice of the methods to be adopted for localization and mapping tasks. Second, the survey focuses on methods to build a vehicle's environment map, considering both the commercial and the academic solutions available. The analysis proposes a difference between two types of environment, known and unknown, and develops solutions in each case. Third, the survey explores different approaches to vehicle localization and also classifies them according to their mathematical characteristics and priorities. Each section concludes by presenting the related challenges and some future directions. The article also highlights the security problems likely to be encountered in self-driving vehicles, with an assessment of possible defense mechanisms that could prevent security attacks in vehicles. Finally, the article ends with a debate on the potential impacts of autonomous driving, spanning energy consumption and emission reduction, sound and light pollution, integration into smart cities, infrastructure optimization, and software refinement. This thorough investigation aims to foster a comprehensive understanding of the diverse implications of autonomous driving across various domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The price prediction is valuable in energy management system (EMS) because it allows making informed decisions and solving the problem of the uncertainty related to the future ignorance based only on the past knowledge. To this goal, we present in this paper a two-steps EMS in order to control the different operations of a micro-grid (MG). In the first step, we exploit the advantages of the Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) deep learning model to predict the next daily electricity price based on time series. In the second step, we use a type-2 fuzzy logic controller to decide which energy source will exploit the excess energy produced or meet the MG need. Real data is used in this paper to test the effectiveness of the proposed EMS whose superiority is proved through the test period. The BiLSTM forecasting model better performs compared to other related algorithms designed to the electricity price prediction. In addition, the proposed decision-making process can reduce the total MG cost and protect the batteries against the deep discharge and maximum charge in order to prolong their lifespan. We expect that this work can contribute to meet the real-world needs in the management of the electrical system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, integrating wind energy forecasting is an important area of research due to the erratic nature of wind. To achieve this goal, we propose a new model of wind speed prediction based on graph attention networks (GAT), we added a new attention mechanism and a learnable adjacency matrix to the GAT structure to obtain attention scores for each weather variable. The results of the GAT-based model are merged with the bi-directional deep learning long and short-term memory (BiLSTM) layer to take advantage of the geographic and temporal properties of historical weather data. The experiments and analyzes are carried out using precise meteorological data collected from wind farms in the Moroccan city of Tetouan. We show that the proposed model can learn complex input-output correlations of meteorological data more efficiently than previous wind speed prediction algorithms. Due to the resulting attention weights, the model also provides more information about the main weather factors for the evaluated forecast work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electric vehicles (EVs) are a sustainable transportation solution with environmental benefits and energy efficiency. However, their popularity has raised challenges in locating appropriate charging stations, especially in cities with limited infrastructure and dynamic charging demands. To address this, we propose a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) method for optimal EV charging station recommendations, considering real-time traffic conditions. Our approach aims to minimize total travel time in a stochastic environment for efficient smart transportation management. We adopt a centralized learning and decentralized execution strategy, treating each region of charging stations as an individual agent. Agents cooperate to recommend optimal charging stations based on various incentive functions and competitive contexts. The problem is modeled as a Markov game, suitable for analyzing multi-agent decisions in stochastic environments. Intelligent transportation systems provide us with traffic information, and each charging station feeds relevant data to the agents. Our MADDPG method is challenged with a substantial number of EV requests, enabling efficient handling of dynamic charging demands. Simulation experiments compare our method with DDPG and deterministic approaches, considering different distributions and EV numbers. The results highlight MADDPG's superiority, emphasizing its value for sustainable urban mobility and efficient EV charging station scheduling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spammers have created a new kind of electronic mail (e-mail) called image-based spam to bypass text-based spam filters. Unfortunately, these images contain harmful links that can infect the user's computer system and take a long time to be deleted, which can hamper users' productivity and security. In this paper, a hybrid deep neural network architecture is suggested to address this problem. It is based on the convolution neural network (CNN), which has been enhanced with the convolutional block attention module (CBAM). Initially, CNN enhanced with CBAM is used to extract the most crucial information from each image-based e-mail. Then, the generated feature vectors are fed to the support vector machine (SVM) model to classify them as either spam or ham. Four datasets—including Image Spam Hunter (ISH), Annadatha, Chavda Approach 1, and Chavda Approach 2—are used in the experiments. The obtained results demonstrated that in terms of accuracy, our model exceeds the existing state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-driving vehicles need a robust positioning system to continue the revolution in intelligent transportation. Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are most commonly used to accomplish this task because of their ability to accurately locate the vehicle in the environment. However, recent publications have revealed serious cases where GNSS fails miserably to determine the position of the vehicle, for example, under a bridge, in a tunnel, or in dense forests. In this work, we propose a framework architecture of explaining deep learning LiDAR-based (XDLL) models that predicts the position of the vehicles by using only a few LiDAR points in the environment, which ensures the required fastness and accuracy of interactions between vehicle components. The proposed framework extracts non-semantic features from LiDAR scans using a clustering algorithm. The identified clusters serve as input to our deep learning model, which relies on LSTM and GRU layers to store the trajectory points and convolutional layers to smooth the data. The model has been extensively tested with short- and long-term trajectories from two benchmark datasets, Kitti and NCLT, containing different environmental scenarios. Moreover, we investigated the obtained results by explaining the contribution of each cluster feature by using several explainable methods, including Saliency, SmoothGrad, and VarGrad. The analysis showed that taking the mean of all the clusters as an input for the model is enough to obtain better accuracy compared to the first model, and it reduces the time consumption as well. The improved model is able to obtain a mean absolute positioning error of below one meter for all sequences in the short- and long-term trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a stand-alone system, the use of renewable energies, load changes, and interruptions to transmission lines can cause voltage drops, impacting its reliability. A way to offset a change in the nature of hybrid renewable energy immediately is to utilize energy storage without needing to turn on other plants. Photovoltaic panels, a wind turbine, and a wallbox unit (responsible for providing the vehicle's electrical need) are the components of the proposed system; in addition to being a power source, batteries also serve as a storage unit. Taking advantage of deep learning, particularly convolutional neural networks, and this new system will take advantage of recent advances in machine learning. By employing algorithms for deep Q-learning, the agent learns from the data of the various elements of the system to create the optimal policy for enhancing performance. To increase the learning efficiency, the reward function is implemented using a fuzzy Mamdani system. Our proposed experimental results shows that the new system with fuzzy reward using deep Q-learning networks (DQN) keeps the battery and the wallbox unit optimally charged and less discharged. Moreover confirms the economic advantages of the proposed approach performs better approximate to +25% Moreover, it has dynamic response capabilities and is more efficient over the existing optimization approach using deep learning without fuzzy logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a new intelligent system based on multi-agent system for energy management in micro-grid with grid-connected mode and mainly based on wind energy. The main contribution of this work is to present a model for wind power prediction for the next hour using the wind speed values of previous hours. It is a model based on a deep recurrent neural network with Long Short Term Memory which takes as input a number of previous values of the wind speed and as output the wind power produced for the next hour. The proposed model is compared to a Multi-Layer Perceptron with the same inputs and output. Both models aim to find a hidden correlation between historical weather data (previous wind speeds) and the next wind power produced. Using as a case study the dataset from a real site located in Tetouan city in Morocco, experimental results show that Long Short Term Memory based prediction model yields good results and successfully achieve high accuracy compared to Multi-Layer Perceptron based model. To establish a robust energy management strategy, a fuzzy logic controller is used as decision-making tool to manage the different energy flows in the micro-grid and to control the amount of electricity delivered or taken from the distribution network in order to reduce the costs and maximize the profits. • A MAS for modelling a MG where each component is treated as an autonomous agent able to interact with other agents. • A deep LSTM wind power prediction model to predict the hourly wind power based on previous values of wind speed. • A fuzzy decision-making method to establish a robust energy management in order to maximize the benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a novel face-based random walk method aimed at addressing the 3D semantic segmentation issue. Our method utilizes a one-dimensional convolutional neural network for detailed feature extraction from sequences of triangular faces and employs a stacked gated recurrent unit to gather information along the sequence during training. This approach allows us to effectively handle irregular meshes and utilize the inherent feature extraction potential present in mesh geometry. Our study's results show that the proposed method achieves competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods in mesh segmentation. Importantly, it requires fewer training iterations and demonstrates versatility by applying to a wide range of objects without the need for the mesh to adhere to manifold or watertight topology requirements. • Segment 3D meshes using a hybrid architecture, gated recurrent units, and 1D convolutional neural networks. • Extraction of geometric features from 3D mesh faces using mathematical algorithms; random walks. • Apply deep learning algorithms to irregular 3D data without considering whether each mesh is a manifold or closed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A hybrid model based on neural networks for the detection of deceptive opinion spam. • The model representations are effective for the detection deceptive opinions. • The experiments show that our model outperform the state-of-the-art models. Opinion review is of great importance for both customers and organizations. Indeed, it helps customers in buying decisions and represents a valuable feedback for the companies, allowing them to improve their productions. However, numerous greedy companies resort to fake reviews in order to influence the customer and brighten the brand image, or to defame the one of their competitors. Various models are proposed in order to detect deceptive opinion reviews. Most of these models adopt traditional methods focusing on feature extraction and traditional classifiers. Unfortunately, these models do not capture the semantic aspect while ignoring the opinion's context. In order to tackle this issue, we propose a new approach based on Paragraph Vector Distributed Bag of Words (PV-DBOW) and the Denoising Autoencoder (DAE). The proposed customized model provides a strong representation which is based on a global representation of the opinions while preserving their semantics. Indeed, the embedding vectors capture the semantic meaning of all words in the context of each opinion. The generated review representations are fed into a fully connected neural network in order to detect deceptive opinion spam. The obtained results concerning the deception dataset show that our model is effective and outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]