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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many higher education institutes shifted to online learning with the precautionary measures taken by governments. This transition was very rapid and sudden, which brought challenges to all learning methods in all disciplines while opening up new opportunities. Different studies have been carried out to evaluate experiences of online migration and study its effect on stakeholders in education. This paper is aimed to rationally evaluate the transition to online learning in PNU from the student perspective. Five thousand ten student responses to an online survey were collected. The survey results indicate that the majority of students were satisfied by the quality of the delivered courses during this crisis period as they have received adequate support from instructors, IT, and leaders. Moreover, student satisfaction can be explained by the readiness and preparedness of PNU for such circumstances. Indeed, students and instructors are poised to adopt new learning modalities as they were familiar with new technologies and innovation in learning and teaching so far.

In recent years, the technological landscape has undergone a profound metamorphosis catalyzed by the widespread integration of drones across diverse sectors. Essential to the drone manufacturing process is comprehensive testing, typically conducted in controlled laboratory settings to uphold safety and privacy standards. However, a formidable challenge emerges due to the inherent limitations of GPS signals within indoor environments, posing a threat to the accuracy of drone positioning. This limitation not only jeopardizes testing validity but also introduces instability and inaccuracies, compromising the assessment of drone performance. Given the pivotal role of precise GPS-derived data in drone autopilots, addressing this indoor-based GPS constraint is imperative to ensure the reliability and resilience of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This paper delves into the implementation of an Indoor Positioning System (IPS) leveraging computer vision. The proposed system endeavors to detect and localize UAVs within indoor environments through an enhanced vision-based triangulation approach. A comparative analysis with alternative positioning methodologies is undertaken to ascertain the efficacy of the proposed system. The results obtained showcase the efficiency and precision of the designed system in detecting and localizing various types of UAVs, underscoring its potential to advance the field of indoor drone navigation and testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast cancer is a major cause of female deaths, especially in underdeveloped countries. It can be treated if diagnosed early and chances of survival are high if treated appropriately and timely. For timely and accurate automated diagnosis, machine learning approaches tend to show better results than traditional methods, however, accuracy lacks the desired level. This study proposes the use of an ensemble model to provide accurate detection of breast cancer. The proposed model uses the random forest and support vector classifier along with automatic feature extraction using an optimized convolutional neural network (CNN). Extensive experiments are performed using the original, as well as, CNN-based features to analyze the performance of the deployed models. Experimental results involving the use of the Wisconsin dataset reveal that CNN-based features provide better results than the original features. It is observed that the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 99.99% for breast cancer detection. Performance comparison with existing state-of-the-art models is also carried out showing the superior performance of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental sustainability is the rate of renewable resource harvesting, pollution control, and non-renewable resource exhaustion. Air pollution is a significant issue confronted by the environment particularly by highly populated countries like India. Due to increased population, the number of vehicles also continues to increase. Each vehicle has its individual emission rate; however, the issue arises when the emission rate crosses the standard value and the quality of the air gets degraded. Owing to the technological advances in machine learning (ML), it is possible to develop prediction approaches to monitor and control pollution using real time data. With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data Analytics (BDA), there is a huge paradigm shift in how environmental data are employed for sustainable cities and societies, especially by applying intelligent algorithms. In this view, this study develops an optimal AI based air quality prediction and classification (OAI-AQPC) model in big data environment. For handling big data from environmental monitoring, Hadoop MapReduce tool is employed. In addition, a predictive model is built using the hybridization of ARIMA and neural network (NN) called ARIMA-NN to predict the pollution level. For improving the performance of the ARIMA-NN algorithm, the parameter tuning process takes place using oppositional swallow swarm optimization (OSSO) algorithm. Finally, Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) classifier is used to classify the air quality into pollutant and non-pollutant. A detailed experimental analysis is performed for highlighting the better prediction performance of the proposed ARIMA-NN method. The obtained outcomes pointed out the enhanced outcomes of the proposed OAI-AQPC technique over the recent state of art techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical sensors are implanted within the vital organs of the human body to record and monitor the vital signs of pulse rate, heartbeat, electrocardiogram, body mass index, temperature, blood pressure, etc. to ensure their effective functioning. These are monitored to detect the patient's health from anywhere and at any time. The wireless sensor networks are embedded in the form of body area nets and are capable of sensing and storing the information on a digital device. Later this information could be inspected or even sent to a remotely located storage device specifically (server or any public or private cloud for analysis) so that a medical doctor can diagnose the present medical condition of a person or a patient. Such a facility would be of immense help in the event of an emergency such as a sudden disaster or natural calamity where communication is damaged, and the potential sources become inaccessible. The aim of this paper is to create a mobile platform using mobile ad hoc network to support healthcare connectivity and treatment in emergency situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient methods that enable high and rapid image retrieval are continuously needed, especially with the large mass of images that are generated from different sectors and domains like business, communication media, and entertainment. Recently, deep neural networks are extensively proved higher-performing models compared to other traditional models. Besides, combining hashing methods with a deep learning architecture improves the image retrieval time and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel image retrieval method that employs locality-sensitive hashing with convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract different types of features from different model layers. The aim of this hybrid framework is focusing on both the high-level information that provides semantic content and the low-level information that provides visual content of the images. Hash tables are constructed from the extracted features and trained to achieve fast image retrieval. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, a variety of experiments and computational performance analysis are carried out on the CIFRA-10 and NUS-WIDE datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method surpasses most existing hash-based image retrieval methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, many rapid developments in digital medical imaging have made further contributions to health care systems. The segmentation of regions of interest in medical images plays a vital role in assisting doctors with their medical diagnoses. Many factors like image contrast and quality affect the result of image segmentation. Due to that, image contrast remains a challenging problem for image segmentation. This study presents a new image enhancement model based on fractional Rényi entropy for the segmentation of kidney MRI scans. The proposed work consists of two stages: enhancement by fractional Rényi entropy, and MRI Kidney deep segmentation. The proposed enhancement model exploits the pixel's probability representations for image enhancement. Since fractional Rényi entropy involves fractional calculus that has the ability to model the non-linear complexity problem to preserve the spatial relationship between pixels, yielding an overall better details of the kidney MRI scans. In the second stage, the deep learning kidney segmentation model is designed to segment kidney regions in MRI scans. The experimental results showed an average of 95.60% dice similarity index coefficient, which indicates best overlap between the segmented bodies with the ground truth. It is therefore concluded that the proposed enhancement model is suitable and effective for improving the kidney segmentation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]