Enhancing Marathi Handwritten Character Recognition Using Ensemble Learning

In the current era, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model plays a vital role in converting images of handwritten characters or words into text editable script. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students' performance is assessed based on multiple-choice questions and handwritten answers so, in this situation, the need for handwritten recognition has become acute. Handwritten answers in any regional language need the OCR model to transform the readable machine-encoded text for automatic assessment which will reduce the burden of manual assessment. The single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm recognizes the handwritten characters but its accuracy is suppressed when dataset volume is increased. In proposed work stacking and soft voting ensemble mechanisms that address multiple CNN models to recognize the handwritten characters. The performance of the ensemble mechanism is significantly better than the single CNN model. This proposed work ensemble VGG16, Alexnet and LeNet-5 as base classifiers using stacking and soft voting ensemble approaches. The overall accuracy of the proposed work is 98.66% when the soft voting ensemble has three CNN classifiers. © 2023 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.

Increased Emergency Department Visits for Foreign Body Ingestions Requiring Hospitalizations during the Covid-19 Pandemic in the Pediatric Population

Background: Foreign body ingestions (FBI) are most commonly seen in children aged 6 months to 4 years and occur at home. Most foreign bodies pass through the gastrointestinal tract without causing any injury. However, 10-20% of cases require endoscopic intervention and <1% require surgery. On March 4th, 2020, a state of emergency in California was announced in response to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, including closure of all county public schools on March 13th, 2020, and a shelter-in-place order ceasing all non-essential business and travel on March 16th, 2020. Despite the breadth of data on FBIs prior to the pandemic, and others outlining findings from surgical perspectives or in other countries during the pandemic, there is limited data on FBIs and the COVID-19 pandemic in a US pediatric Level 1 Trauma Center in a state with extended and strict mandated shutdowns. Method(s): We used the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) data set for a single large tertiary center, retrospective analysis of FBI, patient demographics, and patient disposition between 3/16/2019-3/15/2021 to better characterize FBI prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our primary outcome measure was the number of patients presenting to our emergency department (ED) and admitted to our hospital for FBI. High Risk FBI were events involving button batteries, magnets, lead-based objects, or sharp objects (broken glass, needles, nails). We also conducted a secondary chart review to collect demographic data on FBI patients who required admission. All automatically collected data was qualitatively screened and systematically categorized for more effective data presentation. Result(s): While the overall number of presentations to the ED remained similar (279 to 268), there was a higher rate of admissions (8.9% vs 12.3%) during the pandemic. The average age of patients with an ingestion was 42.5 months pre-pandemic, 52.7 months during pandemic;the average age of patients admitted for an FBI was 35.4 months pre-pandemic, 50.9 months during pandemic. The number of high-risk ingestions during the pandemic (10.8% vs 14.2%) was higher. Of children who needed to be admitted, a greater number required endoscopic procedures during the pandemic (29.9% vs 38.5%). There was also a larger proportion of patients belonging to ethnic minorities (Black, Asian, Hispanic/Latino) that were admitted during the pandemic (45.5% vs 63.0%). Conclusion(s): Both ED and hospital admission data reflect the disruption to the home and work environments that the general population experienced in the pandemic. The increased average age of a FBI-presenting and FBI-admitted patient could reflect the increased incidence in older, possibly school-aged children, in light of the state-wide shutdown of schools and children being at home full-time. The increase in high risk and admission rates in the pandemic also suggests that mandates placing children in the home increase their exposure to harmful materials and increased risk of serious injury requiring invasive procedures. We serve a particularly vulnerable population;the majority of our patients are insured by Medicaid and of lower socioeconomic status (SES), and we would expect that the increase in FBI is correlated to SES. Moving forward, we would like to further investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic may have further exacerbated pediatric health disparities by analyzing health outcomes based on patients' preferred language (English or other) and home zip code and corresponding census info (median household income, percent living below the poverty line). In our at-risk population, based on the above data, we propose implementing proactive counseling by primary care providers (PCP) on safety around FBI. Education provided to families at PCP visits on securing dangerous objects in the home may help decrease FBI especially during times when children are required to be at home more often, like during a pandemic.

Study of Resilience in Learning Environments During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a great change in the world. One aspect of the pandemic is its effect on Educational systems. Educators have had to shift to a pure online based system. This shift has been sudden and without any prior warning. Despite this the Educational system has survived and exhibited resilience. The resilience of a system can be determined if the system continues to operate or function as effectively as before a change. Resilience in a system implies the ability to work and develop when the forces in the environment are unexpected, abrupt and sudden as well. The environment may change or evolve but the underlying system must keep functioning, developing and responding. Resilience is a trait in a system. It is a set of characteristics in the system that enables it to sustain itself in the face of change. A resilient system can cope and prosper in the face of change. For the domain of education, the Covid-19 pandemic served as a phenomenal change event and a wakeup call to the education fraternity. As a social system, resilience meant that the people in the educational environment continued to function albeit differently. The environment, meaning the processes, hierarchy and the intricate social ties in the system contributed to the resiliency of the system. Thus the measure of resilience in education has three major facets—people, the technology which facilitates the process and the process environment. This work aims to understand the resilience of the teachers due to the Covid-19 pandemic, especially how learning continued and what contributed to this continuity. Resilience research and understanding is as important as the pedagogical and technological aspects in an Educational system as it is a trait that encompasses the people, the socio-economic system and their relationships. In this work, we analyzed resilience as trait, its relevance in an Educational system, factors that make up resilience in an Educational system and finally the relevant research about resilience in Education during Covid-19. Based on the results of our literature review we formed a model for Educators. A survey was conducted among educators of three countries namely Malaysia, Fiji, and India to determine the essential elements of resilience that were relevant to the continuity of an educational system from the point of view of teachers. We arrived at a set of factors that are relevant to the teachers in the educational systems which can be an impetus for policy makers to focus on and develop. The major results from the study are the need for Educational systems to focus on three facets—internal, interpersonal and external aspects of teachers and strengthen factors such as support for teachers, strong academic leadership, trust of teachers, increase self-motivation, enhance communication with stakeholders and emphasize systems that enhance student-teacher communication. The future areas of research are also discussed in the work. Copyright © 2022 Raghunathan, Darshan Singh and Sharma.