Cough Detection for Prevention Against the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper proposes a novel and robust technique for remote cough recognition for COVID-19 detection. This technique is based on sound and image analysis. The objective is to create a real-time system combining artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, embedded systems, and network of sensors to detect COVID-19-specific cough and identify the person who coughed. Remote acquisition and analysis of sounds and images allow the system to perform both detection and classification of the detected cough using AI algorithms and image processing to identify the coughing person. This will give the ability to distinguish between a normal person and a person carrying the COVID-19 virus. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Collaborative E-Learning Process Discovery in Multi-tenant Cloud

With the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice of e-learning in the cloud makes it possible to: avoid the problem of overloading the institutions infrastructure resources, manage a large number of learners and improve collaboration and synchronous learning. In this paper, we propose a new e-leaning process management approach in cloud named CLP-in-Cloud (for Collaborative Learning Process in Cloud). CLP-in-Cloud is composed of two steps: i) design general, configurable and multi-tenant e-Learning Process as a Service (LPaaS) that meets different needs of institutions. ii) to fulfill the user needs, developpe a functional and non-functional awareness LPaaS discovery module. For functional needs, we adopt the algorithm A* and for non-functional needs we adopt a linear programming algorithm. Our developed system allows learners to discover and search their preferred configurable learning process in a multi-tenancy Cloud architecture. In order to help to discover interesting process, we come up with a recommendation module. Experimentations proved that our system is effective in reducing the execution time and in finding appropriate results for the user request.

Covid-19 Control: Face Mask Detection Using Deep Learning for Balanced and Unbalanced Dataset

Facemask wearing is becoming a norm in our daily lives to curb the spread of Covid-19. Ensuring facemasks are worn correctly is a topic of concern worldwide. It could go beyond manual human control and enforcement, leading to the spread of this deadly virus and many cases globally. The main aim of wearing a facemask is to curtail the spread of the covid-19 virus, but the biggest concern of most deep learning research is about who is wearing the mask or not, and not who is incorrectly wearing the facemask while the main objective of mask wearing is to prevent the spread of the covid-19 virus. This paper compares three state-of-the- art object detection approaches: Haarcascade, Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks (MTCNN), and You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLOv4) to classify who is wearing a mask, who is not wearing a mask, and most importantly, who is incorrectly wearing the mask in a real-time video stream using FPS as a benchmark to select the best model. Yolov4 got about 40 Frame Per Seconds (FPS), outperforming Haarcascade with 16 and MTCNN with 1.4. YOLOv4 was later used to compare the two datasets using Intersection over Union (IoU) and mean Average Precision (mAP) as a comparative measure;dataset2 (balanced dataset) performed better than dataset1 (unbalanced dataset). Yolov4 model on dataset2 mapped and detected images of masks worn incorrectly with one correct class label rather than giving them two label classes with uncertainty in dataset1, this work shows the advantage of having a balanced dataset for accuracy. This work would help decrease human interference in enforcing the COVID-19 face mask rules and create awareness for people who do not comply with the facemask policy of wearing it correctly. Hence, significantly reducing the spread of COVID-19.

Relationship between Risk Perception, Emotion, and Coping Behavior during Public Health Emergencies: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Complex mechanisms exist between public risk perception, emotions, and coping behaviors during health emergencies. To unravel the relationship between these three phenomena, a meta-analytic approach was employed in this study. Using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis 3.0, 81 papers were analyzed after selection. The results of the meta-analysis showed that (1) risk perception (perceived severity, perceived susceptibility) and negative emotions (especially fear) are both correlated with coping behaviors;(2) risk perception is strongly correlated with fear and moderately correlated with anxiety;and (3) anxiety predicts the adoption of coping behaviors. The existing research provided an empirical basis for implementing effective coping behavior interventions and implied that management decisionmakers need to consider reasonable interventions through multiple channels to maintain the public's risk perception and emotions within appropriate levels. Finally, future research directions are suggested.

Advanced Dance Choreography System Using Bidirectional LSTMs

Recently, the craze of K-POP contents is promoting the development of Korea's cultural and artistic industries. In particular, with the development of various K-POP contents, including dance, as well as the popularity of K-POP online due to the non-face-to-face social phenomenon of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) era, interest in Korean dance and song has increased. Research on dance Artificial Intelligent (AI), such as artificial intelligence in a virtual environment, deepfake AI that transforms dancers into other people, and creative choreography AI that creates new dances by combining dance and music, is being actively conducted. Recently, the dance creative craze that creates new choreography is in the spotlight. Creative choreography AI technology requires the motions of various dancers to prepare a dance cover. This process causes problems, such as expensive input source datasets and the cost of switching to the target source to be used in the model. There is a problem in that different motions between various dance genres must be considered when converting. To solve this problem, it is necessary to promote creative choreography systems in a new direction while saving costs by enabling creative choreography without the use of expensive motion capture devices and minimizing the manpower of dancers according to consideration of various genres. This paper proposes a system in a virtual environment for automatically generating continuous K-POP creative choreography by deriving postures and gestures based on bidirectional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM). K-POP dance videos and dance videos are collected in advance as input. Considering a dance video for defining a posture, users who want a choreography, a 3D dance character in the source movie, a new choreography is performed with Bi-LSTM and applied. For learning, considering creativity and popularity at the same time, the next motion is evaluated and selected with probability. If the proposed method is used, the effort for dataset collection can be reduced, and it is possible to provide an intensive AI research environment that generates creative choreography from various existing online dance videos.

Trading Risk Spillover Mechanism of Rare Earth in China: New Perspective Based on Time-Varying Connectedness Approach

Our research contributes a new point of view on China's rare earth dynamic risk spillover measurement;this was performed by combining complex network and multivariate nonlinear Granger causality to construct the time-varying connectedness complex network and analyze the formation mechanism using the impulse response. First, our empirical research found that for the dynamic characteristics of China's rare earth market, due to instability, uncertainty, and geopolitical decisions, disruption can be captured well by the TVP-VAR-SV model. Second, except for praseodymium, oxides are all risk takers and are more affected by the impact of other assets, which means that the composite index and catalysts are main sources of risk spillovers in China's rare earth trading complex network system. Third, from the perspective of macroeconomic variables, there are significant multivariate nonlinear impacts on the total connectedness index of China's rare earth market, and they exhibit asymmetric shock characteristics. These findings indicate that the overall linkage of the risk contagion in China's rare earth trading market is strong. Strengthening the interconnections among the rare earth assets is of important practical significance. Empirical results also provide policy recommendations for establishing trading risk protection measures under macro-prudential supervision. Especially for investors and regulators, rare earth oxides are important assets for risk mitigation. When rare earth systemic trading risk occur, the allocation of oxide rare earth assets can hedge part of the trading risk.

A Comprehensive Review of Machine Learning Techniques for Predicting the Outbreak of Covid-19 Cases

At present, the whole world is experiencing a huge disturbance in social, economic, and political levels which may mostly attributed to sudden outbreak of Covid-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it as Public Health crisis and global pandemic. Researchers across the globe have already proposed different outbreak models to impose various control measures fight against the novel corona virus. In order to overcome various challenges for the prediction of Covid-19 outbreaks, different mathematical and statistical approaches have been recommended by the researchers. The approaches used machine learning and deep learning based techniques which are capable of prediction of hidden patterns from large and complex datasets. The purpose of the present paper is to study different machine learning and deep learning based techniques used to identify and predict the pattern and performs some comparative analysis on the techniques. This paper contains a detailed summary of 40 paper based on this issue along with the use of method they applied to obtain the purpose. After the review it has been found that no model is fully capable of predicting it with accuracy. So, a hybrid model with better training should be employed for better result. This paper also studies different performance measures that researchers have used to show the efficiency of their proposed model.

Building a Real-Time System to Monitor Students Electronically Based on Digital Images of Face Movement

The spread of the Corona Virus pandemic on a global scale had a great impact on the trend towards e-learning. In the virtual exams the student can take his exams online without any papers, in addition to the correction and electronic monitoring of the exams. Tests are supervised and controlled by a camera and proven cheat-checking tools. This technology has opened the doors of academic institutions for distance learning to be wide spread without any problems at all. In this paper, a proposed model was built by linking a computer network using a server/client model because it is a system that distributes tasks between the two. The main computer that acts as a server (exam observer) is connected to a group of sub-computers (students) who are being tested and these devices are considered the set of clients. The proposed student face recognition system is run on each computer (client) in order to identify and verify the identity of the student. When another face is detected, the program sends a warning signal to the server. Thus, the concerned student is alerted. This mechanism helps examinees reduce cheating cases in early time. The results obtained from the face recognition showed high accuracy despite the large number of students' faces. The performance speed was in line with the test performance requirements, handling 1,081 real photos and adding 960 photos. © 2022 IEEE.

A Multivariate Deep Learning Model with Coupled Human Intervention Factors for COVID-19 Forecasting

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology plays a crucial role in infectious disease outbreak prediction and control. Many human interventions can influence the spread of epidemics, including government responses, quarantine, and economic support. However, most previous AI-based models have failed to consider human interventions when predicting the trend of infectious diseases. This study selected four human intervention factors that may affect COVID-19 transmission, examined their relationship to epidemic cases, and developed a multivariate long short-term memory network model (M-LSTM) incorporating human intervention factors. Firstly, we analyzed the correlations and lagged effects between four human factors and epidemic cases in three representative countries, and found that these four factors typically delayed the epidemic case data by approximately 15 days. On this basis, a multivariate epidemic prediction model (M-LSTM) was developed. The model prediction results show that coupling human intervention factors generally improves model performance, but adding certain intervention factors also results in lower performance. Overall, a multivariate deep learning model with coupled variable correlation and lag outperformed other comparative models, and thus validated its effectiveness in predicting infectious diseases.

Design of an Intelligent Educational Evaluation System Using Deep Learning

Nowadays, online education has been a more general demand in context of COVID-19 epidemic. The intelligent educational evaluation systems assisted by intelligent techniques are in urgent demand. To deal with this issue, this paper introduces the strong information processing ability of deep learning, and proposes the design of an intelligent educational evaluation system using deep learning. Inside the algorithm part, the low-complexity offset minimal sum (OMS) is selected as the front-end processor of deep neural network, so as to reduce following computational complexity in deep neural network. And the deep neural network is adopted as the major calculation backbone. In this paper, our OMS deep neural network parameters are 23 and 57 compared with other parameters, which can save about 59.64% of the network parameters, and the training time is 11270 s and 25000 s respectively, which saves the training time 54.92%. It can be also reflected from experiments that the proposal further improves the performance of unbalanced data classification in this problem scenario. © 2013 IEEE.

Multi Criteria Decision Making based Approach to Assist Marketers for Targeting BoPs Regarding Packaging Influenced Purchase during Covid-19

This study has a novel approach to capture the attitude of Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) consumers towards Packaging Influenced Purchase (PIP) during the Covid-19 crisis. Over the years, BoPs consumers have established themselves as an emerging market with ample growth and opportunities. The authors suggested a Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) based framework to assist marketers in targeting both urban and rural BoP consumers regarding PIP. Packaging elements and influence of family, extended family, peers have been included in the framework for gaining in-depth understanding. With a sample size of 100 from West Bengal, this focus group-based study can fulfil the BoP literature's existing prominent research gap. Results indicate the difference in attitude for urban and rural BoPs towards PIP during this crisis. The fusion of MCDM based approach and relevant machine learning-based technique aims to assist marketers in identifying, formulating, and redefining an action plan.

BoPCOVIPIP: Capturing the Dynamics of Marketing Mix Among Bottom of Pyramid Consumers during COVID-19

The behaviour of consumers mostly follows the guidelines derived from marketing theories and models. But under some unavoidable circumstances, the consumers show a complete deviation compared to their existing consumption pattern, purchase behaviour, decision-making and so on. Under similar circumstances, this study aims to capture both urban and rural Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) consumers' perceptions of various marketing mixes during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. With a sample size of 378 and 282, the perception towards different marketing mixes has been captured for Pre-COVID and During-COVID periods, respectively. The adopted quantitative analysis indicates a difference in perception towards marketing mix During COVID compared to Pre-COVID. Moreover, the selection of West Bengal, India, as an area of research fulfills the BoP literature's existing prominent research gap. This study also comes with the potential to assist marketers and the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry in framing strategies to target BoP consumers.

Risk Connectedness among International Stock Markets: Fresh Findings from a Network Approach

In this study, we analyze the upside and downside risk connectedness among international stock markets. We characterize the connectedness among international stock returns using the Diebold and Yilmaz spillover index approach and compute the upside and downside value-at-risk. We document that the connectedness level of the downside risk is higher than that of the upside risk and stock markets are more sensitive when the stock market declines. We also find that specific periods (e.g., the global financial crisis, the European debt crisis, and the COVID-19 turmoil) intensified the spillover effects across international stock markets. Our results demonstrate that DE, UK, EU, and US acted as net transmitters of dynamic connectedness;however, Japan, China, India, and Hong Kong acted as net receivers of dynamic connectedness during the sample period. These findings provide significant new information to policymakers and market participants.

A modern online interview platform for recruitment system

Video conferencing applications have become an integral part of today's world for attending interviews, classes, meetings, and assorted gatherings as well in the COVID-19 era. Alongside the increased use of such applications to facilitate the process of conducting interviews, the quality interview has taken a hit overall. This is largely because prospective candidates resort to fraud by switching tabs and using their phones during the course of an interview, and so come through with flying colors despite a clear lack of skills. Consequently, deserving candidates with the requisite skill set lose out to impostors who manage to clear the interviews. In this paper, we propose an approach to make interviews straightforward and fair to all candidates. Our Online Interview Platform, a web application built using Node.js and Express.js, offers indispensable features that are prerequisites for an interview. These include a real-time collaborative code editor that uses an operational transformation algorithm which allows users to collaborate in real time, test and run code;a video/audio conferencing feature using Peer JS;a chat box for communication, and a real-time collaborative whiteboard that lets users design or draw diagrams. The features are included in the same tab, thus ensuring that the candidate does not switch tabs. Using this application, candidates will be screened based on their technical knowledge, appropriately assessed, and performance-based hiring decisions made. The proposed approach proved that the malpractices strictly restricted while comparing with existing approaches. © 2021

Femvertising and COVID-19—What Did Brand Owners Broadcast during the Lockdown?

The aim of this study was to analyze, from a gender perspective, advertising broadcasts during a time of crisis. A holistic perspective of the stereotypes, roles, professions, and gender relations represented is offered by utilizing a content analysis of all the advertisements and their corresponding images during broadcast. Methods: a content analysis of 20 variables was conducted;of these, 7 variables were obtained from under the gender perspective of 1.350 images, corresponding to 71 audiovisual spots on YouTube that were broadcasted during the lockdown. Results: this analysis showed the special sensitivity of advertisers when balancing male and female presences, and in projecting an equitable and co-responsible vision between both genders, with special emphasis on gender professions, teleworking, and childcare. Corporate advertising predominates over commercial advertising, which may explain why the discourse and images blur inequalities and imbalances with respect to official statistics. Conclusions: advertisers seem to have noticed the strategic role of introducing gender perspectives into advertising, thus assuming a more social function that better connects them with today's society while also supporting the advances and challenges of equal opportunities.

Customer Attitude toward Digital Wallet Services

The goal of this study is to examine and identify the factors influencing customer attitude toward and intention to use digital wallets (electronic wallets, e-wallets) during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 257 correctly fulfilled questionnaires from an online survey were summarized. The main features of e-wallet payment systems were classified with a focus on consumer satisfaction via the integration of classic and modern data analysis methods. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was preferred to reveal the dependencies between the variables from e-wallets users' perspective. The designed model can discover and explain the underlying relationships that determine the e-wallets' adoption mechanism. The obtained results lead to specific recommendations to stakeholders in the value chain of payment processing. Financial regulatory authorities could employ the presented results in planning the development of payment systems. E-commerce marketers could utilize the proposed methodology to assess, compare and select an alternative way for order payment. E-wallet service providers could establish a reliable multi-criteria system for the evaluation of digital wallet adoption. Being aware of the most important components of e-wallets value, managers can more effectively run and control payment platforms, enhance customer experience, and thus improve the company's competitiveness. As the perceived value of customer satisfaction is subjective and dynamic, measurements and data analysis should be conducted periodically.

A Platform for the Necessities Distribution and Circulation of Residents in the Control Community During COVID-19 Outbreak Period

The ravages of the COVID-19 and the continuous mutation of the COVID-19 make this war without gunpowder smoke unstoppable. With the continuous epidemic prevention and control, the resident closure and isolation by community is an effective way to block the large-scale development of the COVID-19. However, the shortage of daily necessities for residents during the lockdown period requires timely arrangements and deployment by local departments to ensure the basic living of the residents under lockdown. A necessary distribution and circulation system in the epidemic prevention and control community was designed and developed in this paper. The proposed necessity distribution and circulation system is mainly to help the government distribute supplies to residents and the circulation of necessities between residents more efficiently. The design process of the system includes the software development process of demand analysis, overall design, detailed design and programming;it was adopted CS three-tier architecture software development mode and the software development technology of .Net + SQLSERVER. The main business modules of the system are including necessity circulation between residents, government supply management, and volunteer necessity delivery business. The system can also be applied to the necessity circulation subsystem of the community healthy life service platform for the daily life of residents. © 2022 ACM.

Memory Augmented Distributed Monte Carlo Tree Search Algorithm-Based Content Popularity Aware Content Recommendation Using Content Centric Networks

The rapid advancements of social media networks have created the problem of overloaded information. As a result, the service providers push multiple redundant contents and advertisements to the users without adequate analysis of the user interests. The content recommendation without user interests reduces the probability of users reading them and the wastage rate of network load increases. This problem can be alleviated by providing accurate content recommendations with consideration of users' precise interests and content similarity. Content centric networking has been developed as the trending framework to satisfy these requirements and improve access to relevant information and reception by the desired user. The uses of message entity by giving a proper name, the users' real-time interests are identified and then the accurate and popular contents with high contextual similarity are recommended. An efficient content recommendation scheme is presented in this paper using Memory Augmented Distributed Monte Carlo Tree Search (MAD-MCTS) algorithm for ensuring minimum energy consumption in the CCN. The big data context of the users' social media data is considered in this study so that the complexity can be visualized and controlled to minimize the network complexities. Experiments are conducted on a benchmark as well as an offline collected Twitter dataset on Covid-19 and the results implied that the accuracy and convergence of the proposed MAD-MCTS outperform the other content recommendation algorithms. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

A Blockchain-Based Crowdsourcing Loan Platform for Funding Higher Education in Developing Countries

In developing countries, funding is a significant obstacle to receiving higher education. Brilliant but needy students cannot complete their studies since their parents are unemployed and their countries' economies are poor. As a result, the students' talents are not harnessed to their full potential. In order to help students obtain higher education and harness their full potential, governments provide student loans to students in higher education. The government provides loans to students through the ministry of education. The students pay back the loan with interest when they start working. Governments have been the sole funders of student loans. The emergence of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war have resulted in a global economic crisis. Because of the global economic crisis, the government's spending has increased. In order to help reduce the burden of government and thereby reduce spending, we intend to revolutionize the student loan program through blockchain and crowdsourcing. This work presents a blockchain-based crowdsourcing decentralized loan platform where investors will be brought on board to provide funds for students in higher education. The platform will allow students to apply for loans from investors through registered financial institutions. The students will pay back the loans with interest when they enter the workforce. The proposed platform will allow students to fund their education, investors will get interest on the money they invest, and governments can channel the money they put into student loan programs into other avenues. We perform a thorough security analysis and back the efficiency of our work with numerical results. © 2013 IEEE.

A study of Real-Time Non-invasive Detection Techniques to Identify COVID-19 contagious person

The whole world has witnessed the global pandemic situation caused and hampered very badly due to COVID-19. We had seen the adverse effect globally, in terms of health, economy, social lifestyle. So, it's an urgent need to find a rapid detection technique/test to avoid the spread of the virus. The most effective and world-wide accepted detection method of COVID-19 is the RT-PCR. But due to its slow detection time and False-negative rates, researchers and scientists are trying different detection methods such as use of GC-MS, E-nose, Electrochemical method, use of nanomaterial-based sensor arrays. But all these have limitations in terms of real time sensing, detection time, sample preparation, etc. In order to overcome said drawbacks and to get real-time analysis, we are proposing a concept for COVID-19 detection based on the reported literature. As per recent advancement researchers have evident the presence of VOCs in COVID-19 infected person's breath by GC-MS method. A real time system is very much necessary to detect the VOCs in the Exhaled breath of the COVID-19 infected person to minimize the burden of healthcare system. In this article we will discuss and propose the probable detection techniques for real time sensing of the VOCs presence in the Exhaled breath of the COVID-19 infected person. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.