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The governments of developing economies incentivize the cultivators of their most strategic crops by offering them minimum support price for their yield. This study aims at identifying distinctively the short-run dynamics and the long-run causal linkage of support price and yield rates for two major food crops of the country; wheat and sugarcane. Employing advance time-series econometric estimators of Error Correction Model (ECM) and Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS) cointegration regression, results indicate the valid existence of hypothesized relationship over both short and longer time horizons. Each year, the short-term divergence of two crop yields from their long-run equilibrium paths turns out to be corrected with high speed of adjustment. The long-run association between two variables is also found evident with decent magnitude and high degree of statistical significance. These findings favour the use of support prices as a long-term policy tool for encouraging cultivation of wheat and sugarcane crops in country. However, the overall welfare consequences of such a policy should never be over-rated in a society like Pakistan which is largely characterized by horrific levels of corruption and innumerable administrative bottlenecks.

Recent strides in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with production systems align with the trend towards highly automated manufacturing, demanding smarter machinery. This dovetails with the overarching vision of Industry 4.0, moving beyond conventional models towards employing AI for real-time modeling of production processes, enabling adaptable and learning-enabled models. This study focuses on leveraging cutting-edge deep learning techniques to monitor and classify tool wear using authentic image data from machining processes. Various deep learning algorithms, including CNN, AlexNet, EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, CoAtNet-0, and ResNet18, are explored for monitoring and measuring wear through images of machining chips. The collected images of machining chips are categorized as ‘Accepted’, ‘Unaccepted’, and ‘Optimal’. Due to imbalanced datasets, the study investigates two distinct strategies: upsampling and downsampling. The study also aimes to enhance sensitivity for a specific minority class to meet industrial requirements. The study showed that upsampling enhanced accuracy and almost fulfilled the stated requirements, whereas downsampling did not achieve the desired outcomes. The study evaluates and compares the effectiveness of recently introduced deep learning algorithms with other CNN-based architectures in classifying tool wear states in real-world scenarios. It sheds light on the challenges faced by the machining industry, particularly the prevalent issue of class imbalance in real-world machining data. The observed results indicate that ResNet18 and AlexNet outperform other algorithms, achieving a weighted average accuracy of 96% for both multiclass and binary classification problems when considering upsampled datasets. Consequently, the study concludes that both ResNet18 and AlexNet demonstrate adaptability to class imbalances, generalization to real-world machining scenarios, and competitive accuracy.

The application of Machine Learning (ML) in healthcare has opened unprecedented avenues for predictive analytics, diagnostics, and personalized medicine. However, the sensitivity of healthcare data and the ethical dilemmas associated with automated decision-making necessitate a rigorous ethical framework. This review paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing ethical frameworks that guide ML in healthcare and evaluates their adequacy in ad-dressing ethical challenges. Specifically, this article offers an in-depth examination of prevailing ethical constructs that oversee healthcare ML, spotlighting pivotal concerns: data protection, in-formed assent, equity, and patient autonomy. Various analytical approaches including quantitative metrics, statistical methods for bias detection, and qualitative thematic analyses are applied to address these challenges. Insights are further enriched through case studies of Clinical Decision Support Systems, Remote Patient Monitoring, and Telemedicine Applications. Each case is evaluated against existing ethical frameworks to identify limitations and gaps. Based on our com-prehensive review and evaluation, we propose actionable recommendations for evolving ethical guidelines. The paper concludes by summarizing key findings and underscoring the urgent need for robust ethical frameworks to guide ML applications in sensitive healthcare environments. Future work should focus on the development and empirical validation of new ethical frameworks that can adapt to emerging technologies and ethical dilemmas in healthcare ML.

Ontology development plays a vital role as it provides a structured way to represent and organize knowledge. It has the potential to connect and integrate data from different sources, enabling a new class of AI-based services and systems such as decision support systems and recommender systems. However, in large manufacturing industries, the development of such ontology can be challenging. This paper presents a use case of an application ontology development based on machine breakdown work orders coming from a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). Here, the ontology is developed using a Knowledge Meta Process: Methodology for Ontology-based Knowledge Management. This ontology development methodology involves steps such as feasibility study, requirement specification, identifying relevant concepts and relationships, selecting appropriate ontology languages and tools, and evaluating the resulting ontology. Additionally, this ontology is developed using an iterative process and in close collaboration with domain experts, which can help to ensure that the resulting ontology is accurate, complete, and useful for the intended application. The developed ontology can be shared and reused across different AI systems within the organization, facilitating interoperability and collaboration between them. Overall, having a well-defined ontology is critical for enabling AI systems to effectively process and understand information.

Heart failure is a complex cardiovascular condition characterized by the heart's inability to pump blood effectively, leading to a cascade of physiological changes. Predicting survival in heart failure patients is crucial for optimizing patient care and resource allocation. This research aims to develop a robust survival prediction model for heart failure patients using advanced machine learning techniques. We analyzed data from 299 hospitalized heart failure patients, addressing the issue of imbalanced data with the Synthetic Minority Oversampling (SMOTE) method. Additionally, we proposed a novel transfer learning-based feature engineering approach that generates a new probabilistic feature set from patient data using ensemble trees. Nine fine-tuned machine learning models are built and compared to evaluate performance in patient survival prediction. Our novel transfer learning mechanism applied to the random forest model outperformed other models and state-of-the-art studies, achieving a remarkable accuracy of 0.975. All models underwent evaluation using 10-fold crossvalidation and tuning through hyperparameter optimization. The findings of this study have the potential to advance the field of cardiovascular medicine by providing more accurate and personalized prognostic assessments for individuals with heart failure.