AutoRet: A Self-Supervised Spatial Recurrent Network for Content-Based Image Retrieval.

Image retrieval techniques are becoming famous due to the vast availability of multimedia data. The present image retrieval system performs excellently on labeled data. However, often, data labeling becomes costly and sometimes impossible. Therefore, self-supervised and unsupervised learning strategies are currently becoming illustrious. Most of the self/unsupervised strategies are sensitive to the number of classes and can not mix labeled data on availability. In this paper, we introduce AutoRet, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) based self-supervised image retrieval system. The system is trained on pairwise constraints. Therefore, it can work in self-supervision and can also be trained on a partially labeled dataset. The overall strategy includes a DCNN that extracts embeddings from multiple patches of images. Further, the embeddings are fused for quality information used for the image retrieval process. The method is benchmarked with three different datasets. From the overall benchmark, it is evident that the proposed method works better in a self-supervised manner. In addition, the evaluation exhibits the proposed method's performance to be highly convincing while a small portion of labeled data are mixed on availability.

Time series predicting of COVID-19 based on deep learning.

COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on 11th March 2020. Many researchers have, in the past, attempted to predict a COVID outbreak and its effect. Some have regarded time-series variables as primary factors which can affect the onset of infectious diseases like influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). In this study, we have used public datasets provided by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control for developing a prediction model for the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak to and throughout Malaysia, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. We have made use of certain effective deep learning (DL) models for this purpose. We assessed some specific major features for predicting the trend of the existing COVID-19 outbreak in these three countries. In this study, we also proposed a DL approach that includes recurrent neural network (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for predicting the probable numbers of COVID-19 cases. The LSTM models showed a 98.58% precision accuracy while the RNN models showed a 93.45% precision accuracy. Also, this study compared the number of coronavirus cases and the number of resulting deaths in Malaysia, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Thereafter, we predicted the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths for a subsequent seven days. In this study, we presented their predictions using the data that was available up to December 3rd, 2020.

Distributed Consensus Tracking Control of Chaotic Multi-Agent Supply Chain Network: A New Fault-Tolerant, Finite-Time, and Chatter-Free Approach.

Over the last years, distributed consensus tracking control has received a lot of attention due to its benefits, such as low operational costs, high resilience, flexible scalability, and so on. However, control methods that do not consider faults in actuators and control agents are impractical in most systems. There is no research in the literature investigating the consensus tracking of supply chain networks subject to disturbances and faults in control input. Motivated by this, the current research studies the fault-tolerant, finite-time, and smooth consensus tracking problems for chaotic multi-agent supply chain networks subject to disturbances, uncertainties, and faults in actuators. The chaotic attractors of a supply chain network are shown, and its corresponding multi-agent system is presented. A new control technique is then proposed, which is suitable for distributed consensus tracking of nonlinear uncertain systems. In the proposed scheme, the effects of faults in control actuators and robustness against unknown time-varying disturbances are taken into account. The proposed technique also uses a finite-time super-twisting algorithm that avoids chattering in the system's response and control input. Lastly, the multi-agent system is considered in the presence of disturbances and actuator faults, and the proposed scheme's excellent performance is displayed through numerical simulations.

On the Design of Thermal-Aware Duty-Cycle MAC Protocol for IoT Healthcare.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are designed to provide connectivity among diverse miniature body sensors that support different Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare applications. Among diverse body sensors, WBANs exploit in-vivo sensor nodes that detect and collect the required biometric data of certain physiological change inside the human body, and transmits the sensed data utilizing wireless communication. However, sensing and wireless communication activities of in-vivo sensors produce heat and could result thermal damage to the human tissue if the sensing and communication continues for a long period. Furthermore, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for diverse traffic types is another striking requirement for WBANs. These pressing yet conflicting concerns trigger the design of ThMAC-a Thermal aware duty cycle MAC protocol for IoT healthcare. The protocol regulates the communication operation of a body sensor based on estimated temperature surrounding a tissue to maintain moderate temperature level in a body, also avoiding hotspot. Exploiting both contention-based and contention free channel access mechanisms, ThMAC introduces a superframe structure, where disjoint periods are allocated for diverse traffic types to achieve QoS provisioning. Moreover, ThMAC ensures a reliable and timely delivery of sporadically generated emergency data through an emergency data management mechanism. ThMAC performance is evaluated through computer simulations in terms of thermal rise, energy consumption as well as QoS metrics such as delay and reliability. The results show superior performance of ThMAC compared to that of IEEE 802.15.6.

Scale based entropy measures and deep learning methods for analyzing the dynamical characteristics of cardiorespiratory control system in COVID-19 subjects during and after recovery.

COVID-19, known as Coronavirus Disease 2019 primarily targets the respiratory system and can impact the cardiovascular system, leading to a range of cardiorespiratory complications. The current forefront in analyzing the dynamical characteristics of physiological systems and aiding clinical decision-making involves the integration of entropy-based complexity techniques with artificial intelligence. Entropy-based measures offer promising prospects for identifying disturbances in cardiorespiratory control system (CRCS) among COVID-19 patients by assessing the oxygen saturation variability (OSV) signals. In this investigation, we employ scale-based entropy (SBE) methods, including multiscale entropy (MSE), multiscale permutation entropy (MPE), and multiscale fuzzy entropy (MFE), to characterize the dynamical characteristics of OSV signals. These measurements serve as features for the application of traditional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches in the context of classifying OSV signals from COVID-19 patients during their illness and subsequent recovery. We use the Beurer PO-80 pulse oximeter which non-invasively acquired OSV and pulse rate data from COVID-19 infected patients during the active infection phase and after a two-month recovery period. The dataset comprises of 88 recordings collected from 44 subjects(26 men and 18 women), both during their COVID-19 illness and two months post-recovery. Prior to analysis, data preprocessing is performed to remove artifacts and outliers. The application of SBE measures to OSV signals unveils a reduction in signal complexity during the course of COVID-19. Leveraging these SBE measures as feature sets, we employ two DL techniques, namely the radial basis function network (RBFN) and RBFN with dynamic delay algorithm (RBFNDDA), for the classification of OSV data collected during and after COVID-19 recovery. To evaluate the classification performance, we employ standard metrics such as sensitivity, specificity, false positive rate (FPR), and the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUC). Among the three scale-based entropy measures, MFE outperformed MSE and MPE by achieving the highest classification performance using RBFN with 13 best features having sensitivity (0.84), FPR (0.30), specificity (0.70) and AUC (0.77). The outcomes of our study demonstrate that SBE measures combined with DL methods offer a valuable approach for categorizing OSV signals obtained during and after COVID-19, ultimately aiding in the detection of CRCS dysfunction.

Complexity reduction of oxygen saturation variability signals in COVID-19 patients: Implications for cardiorespiratory control.

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory illness that leads to severe acute respiratory syndrome and various cardiorespiratory complications, contributing to morbidity and mortality. Entropy analysis has demonstrated its ability to monitor physiological states and system dynamics during health and disease. The main objective of the study is to extract information about cardiorespiratory control by conducting a complexity analysis of OSV signals using scale-based entropy measures following a two-month timeframe after recovery. METHODS: This prospective study collected data from subjects meeting specific criteria, using a Beurer PO-80 pulse oximeter to measure oxygen saturation (SpO2) and pulse rate. Excluding individuals with a history of pulmonary/cardiovascular issues, the study analyzed 88 recordings from 44 subjects (26 men, 18 women, mean age 45.34 ± 14.40) during COVID-19 and two months post-recovery. Data preprocessing and scale-based entropy analysis were applied to assess OSV signals. RESULTS: The study found a significant difference in mean OSV during illness (95.08 ± 0.15) compared to post-recovery (95.59 ± 1.03), indicating reduced cardiorespiratory dynamism during COVID-19. Multiscale entropy analyses (MSE, MPE, MFE) confirmed lower entropy values during illness across all time scales, particularly at higher scales. Notably, the maximum distinction between illness and recovery phases was seen at specific time scales and similarity criteria for each entropy measure, showing statistically significant differences. CONCLUSIONS: The study demonstrates that the loss of complexity in OSV signals, quantified using scale-based entropy measures, has the potential to detect malfunctioning of cardiorespiratory control in COVID-19 patients. This finding suggests that OSV signals could serve as a valuable indicator for assessing the cardiorespiratory status of COVID-19 patients and monitoring their recovery progress.

Studying Dynamical Characteristics of Oxygen Saturation Variability Signals Using Haar Wavelet.

An aim of the analysis of biomedical signals such as heart rate variability signals, brain signals, oxygen saturation variability (OSV) signals, etc., is for the design and development of tools to extract information about the underlying complexity of physiological systems, to detect physiological states, monitor health conditions over time, or predict pathological conditions. Entropy-based complexity measures are commonly used to quantify the complexity of biomedical signals; however novel complexity measures need to be explored in the context of biomedical signal classification. In this work, we present a novel technique that used Haar wavelets to analyze the complexity of OSV signals of subjects during COVID-19 infection and after recovery. The data used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms comprised recordings of OSV signals from 44 COVID-19 patients during illness and after recovery. The performance of the proposed technique was compared with four, scale-based entropy measures: multiscale entropy (MSE); multiscale permutation entropy (MPE); multiscale fuzzy entropy (MFE); multiscale amplitude-aware permutation entropy (MAMPE). Preliminary results of the pilot study revealed that the proposed algorithm outperformed MSE, MPE, MFE, and MMAPE in terms of better accuracy and time efficiency for separating during and after recovery the OSV signals of COVID-19 subjects. Further studies are needed to evaluate the potential of the proposed algorithm for large datasets and in the context of other biomedical signal classifications.

On Application of Lightweight Models for Rice Variety Classification and Their Potential in Edge Computing.

Rice is one of the fundamental food items that comes in many varieties with their associated benefits. It can be sub-categorized based on its visual features like texture, color, and shape. Using these features, the automatic classification of rice varieties has been studied using various machine learning approaches for marketing and industrial use. Due to the outstanding performance of deep learning, several models have been proposed to assist in vision tasks like classification and detection. Regardless of their best results on accuracy metrics, they have been observed as overly excessive for computational resources and expert supervision. To address these challenges, this paper proposes three deep learning models that offer similar performance with 10% lighter computational overhead in comparison to existing best models. Moreover, they have been trained for end-to-end flow to demonstrate minimum expert supervision for pre-processing and feature engineering sub-tasks. The results can be observed as promising for classifying rice among five varieties, namely Arborio, Basmati, Ipsala, Jasmine, and Karacadag. The process and performance of the trained models can be extended for edge and mobile devices for field-specific tasks autonomously.

E-learning intention material using TAM: A case study.

COVID-19 pandemic has impacted various walks of life. A critical aspect of human development is education, which has been transformed from traditional face-to-face to online education. Various researchers have studied the impact of online modes of education on the learning curve of students. This research envisions identifying the intention among students on whether to continue e-learning or revert to face-to-face mode. Factors like Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and Behavioral Intention is studied through Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). To evaluate the model, structure analysis was conducted. Two hundred ninety-one students participated and responded to the questionnaire specially designed for this study. Based on the results obtained, academic motivation is positively related to Behavioral Intention, which is completely related to Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use. Knowledge Quality and Technology Fit are other salient factors that impact the students' perceived usefulness and ease of use. On the other hand, the relationships between Information Quality and Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use and Behavioral Intention, and Social Influence and Behavioral were not supported because of insignificant relationships.

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Mathematical Models to Analyze Forecasting and Epidemiology of COVID-19: A Systematic Literature Review.

COVID-19 is a disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 and has been declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization due to its rapid spread. Since the first case was identified in Wuhan, China, the battle against this deadly disease started and has disrupted almost every field of life. Medical staff and laboratories are leading from the front, but researchers from various fields and governmental agencies have also proposed healthy ideas to protect each other. In this article, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is presented to highlight the latest developments in analyzing the COVID-19 data using machine learning and deep learning algorithms. The number of studies related to Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and mathematical models discussed in this research has shown a significant impact on forecasting and the spread of COVID-19. The results and discussion presented in this study are based on the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. Out of 218 articles selected at the first stage, 57 met the criteria and were included in the review process. The findings are therefore associated with those 57 studies, which recorded that CNN (DL) and SVM (ML) are the most used algorithms for forecasting, classification, and automatic detection. The importance of the compartmental models discussed is that the models are useful for measuring the epidemiological features of COVID-19. Current findings suggest that it will take around 1.7 to 140 days for the epidemic to double in size based on the selected studies. The 12 estimates for the basic reproduction range from 0 to 7.1. The main purpose of this research is to illustrate the use of ML, DL, and mathematical models that can be helpful for the researchers to generate valuable solutions for higher authorities and the healthcare industry to reduce the impact of this epidemic.

Attractivity criterion on a delayed tick population dynamics equation with a reproductive function $ f(u) = ru

The aim of this article is to analyze the delay influence on the attraction for a scalar tick population dynamics equation accompanying two disparate delays. Taking advantage of the fluctuation lemma and some dynamic inequalities, we derive a criterion to assure the persistence and positiveness on the considered model. Furthermore, a time-lag-dependent condition is proposed to insure the global attractivity for the addressed model. Besides, we give some simulation diagrams to substantiate the validity of the theoretical outcomes.

Success indicators for an efficient utilization of cloud computing in healthcare organizations: Saudi healthcare as case study.

The population in Saudi Arabia is expected to reach 40 million by 2025. Consequently, healthcare information will become critical to manage. Despite the fact that adopting cloud computing in the Saudi healthcare organizations can facilitate cost reduction, capacity building, institutional interoperability, and get access to data analytics, the adoption rate is very low. Hence, a new model is proposed to adopt cloud computing in the Saudi healthcare organization. The novelty of this work comes from using a quantitative method to test users' attitudes, data security, data control, data privacy, compliance, and reliability influence on the cloud computing adoption intention in the context of Saudi Arabian healthcare organizations. Partial Least Squares (PLS) method based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used for model development. About 160 respondents from the relevant health organizations participated. The result shows that the attitude towards using technology, data security, compliance, and reliability of the cloud computing services are important determining factors in the adoption of cloud computing in Saudi healthcare organizations. However, the distinction in the findings regarding Data privacy and Data control in the Saudi healthcare organizational context is a clear manifestation of the fact that there is a need for policy formation for data privacy, data control, and data protection legislation in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, raising awareness regarding the practice of data privacy and data control policies among IT managers is essential. Future study should use a more holistic and industry-specific framework such as the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework to find new influencing factors from the domains of technological context, the organizational context, and the environmental context.