Metaverse: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions for Scalable and Realtime Virtual Worlds (preprint)

With the emergence of Cloud computing, Internet of Things-enabled Human-Computer Interfaces, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and high-accurate Machine and Deep-learning recognition and predictive models, along with the Post Covid-19 proliferation of social networking, and remote communications, the Metaverse gained a lot of popularity. Metaverse has the prospective to extend the physical world using virtual and augmented reality so the users can interact seamlessly with the real and virtual worlds using avatars and holograms. It has the potential to impact people in the way they interact on social media, collaborate in their work, perform marketing and business, teach, learn, and even access personalized healthcare. Several works in the literature examine Metaverse in terms of hardware wearable devices, and virtual reality gaming applications. However, the requirements of realizing the Metaverse in realtime and at a large-scale need yet to be examined for the technology to be usable. To address this limitation, this paper presents the temporal evolution of Metaverse definitions and captures its evolving requirements. Consequently, we provide insights into Metaverse requirements. In addition to enabling technologies, we lay out architectural elements for scalable, reliable, and efficient Metaverse systems, and a classification of existing Metaverse applications along with proposing required future research directions.

ML-SocMedEmot: Machine Learning Event-based Social Media Emotion Detection Proactive Framework Addressing Mental Health: A Novel Twitter Dataset and Case Study of COVID-19 (preprint)

Global rapidly evolving events, e.g., COVID-19, are usually followed by countermeasures and policies. As a reaction, the public tends to express their emotions on social media platforms. Therefore, predicting emotional responses to events is critical to put a plan to avoid risky behaviors. This paper proposes a machine learning-based framework to detect public emotions based on social media posts in response to specific events. It presents a precise measurement of population-level emotions which can aid governance in monitoring public response and guide it to put in place strategies such as targeted monitoring of mental health, to react to a rise in negative emotions in response to lockdowns, or information campaigns, for instance in response to elevated rates of fear in response to vaccination programs. We evaluate our framework by extracting 15,455 tweets. We annotate and categorize the emotions into 11 categories based on Plutchik’s study of emotion and extract the features using a combination of Bag of Words and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency. We filter 813 COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets and use them to demonstrate our framework’s effectiveness. Numerical evaluation of emotions prediction using Random Forest and Logistic Regression shows that our framework predicts emotions with an accuracy up to 95%.

Forecasting COVID-19 Infections in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries using Machine Learning (preprint)

COVID-19 has infected more than 68 million people worldwide since it was first detected about a year ago. Machine learning time series models have been implemented to forecast COVID-19 infections. In this paper, we develop time series models for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using the public COVID-19 dataset from Johns Hopkins. The dataset set includes the one-year cumulative COVID-19 cases between 22/01/2020 to 22/01/2021. We developed different models for the countries under study based on the spatial distribution of the infection data. Our experimental results show that the developed models can forecast COVID-19 infections with high precision.

Towards a Deep Learning Pain-Level Detection Deployment at UAE for Patient-Centric-Pain Management and Diagnosis Support: Framework and Performance Evaluation (preprint)

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the criticality of timely intervention in a situation exacerbated by a shortage in medical staff and equipment. Pain-level screening is the initial step toward identifying the severity of patient conditions. Automatic recognition of state and feelings help in identifying patient symptoms to take immediate adequate action and providing a patient-centric medical plan tailored to a patient's state. In this paper, we propose a framework for pain-level detection for deployment in the United Arab Emirates and assess its performance using the most used approaches in the literature. Our results show that a deployment of a pain-level deep learning detection framework is promising in identifying the pain level accurately.