Framework for biometric iris recognition in video, by deep learning and quality assessment of the iris-pupil region

In the current world scenario the influence of the COVID19 pandemic has reached universal proportions affecting almost all countries. In this sense, the need has arisen to wear gloves or to reduce direct contact with objects (such as sensors for capturing fingerprints or palm prints) as a sanitary measure to protect against the virus. In this new reality, it is necessary to have a biometric identification method that allows safe and rapid recognition of people at borders, or in quarantine controls, or in access to places of high biological risk, among others. In this scenario, iris biometric recognition has reached increasing relevance. This biometric modality avoids all the aforementioned inconveniences with proven high efficiency. However, there are still problems associated with the iris capturing and segmentation in real time that could affect the effectiveness of a System of this nature and that it is necessary to take into account. This work presents a framework for real time iris detection and segmentation in video as part of a biometric recognition system. Our proposal focuses on the stages of image capture, iris detection and segmentation in RGB video frames under controlled conditions (conditions of border and access controls, where people collaborate in the recognition process). The proposed framework is based on the direct detection of the iris-pupil region using the YOLO network, the evaluation of its quality and the semantic segmentation of iris by a Fully Convolutional Network. (FCN). The proposal of an evaluation step of the quality of the iris-pupil region reduce the passage to the system of images with problems of out of focus, blurring, occlusions, light changing and pose of the subject. For the evaluation of image quality, we propose a measure that combines parameters defined in ISO/IEC 19794-6 2005 and others derived from the systematization of the knowledge of the specialized literature. The experiments carried out in four different reference databases and an own video data set demonstrates the feasibility of its application under controlled conditions of border and access controls. The achieved results exceed or equal state-of-the-art methods under these working conditions.

Uncertain hypothesis test for uncertain differential equations

Uncertain hypothesis test is a statistical tool that uses uncertainty theory to determine whether some hypotheses are correct or not based on observed data. As an application of uncertain hypothesis test, this paper proposes a method to test whether an uncertain differential equation fits the observed data or not. In order to demonstrate the test method, some numerical examples are provided. Finally, both uncertain currency model and stochastic currency model are used to model US Dollar to Chinese Yuan (USD–CNY) exchange rates. As a result, it is shown that the uncertain currency model fits the exchange rates well, but the stochastic currency model does not.

Efficacy of the confinement policies on the COVID-19 spread dynamics in the early period of the pandemic

Spread dynamics and the confinement policies of COVID-19 exhibit different patterns for different countries. Numerous factors affect such patterns within each country. Examining these factors, and analyzing the confinement practices allow government authorities to implement effective policies in the future. In addition, they help the authorities to distribute healthcare resources optimally without overwhelming their systems. In this empirical study, we use a clustering-based approach, Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) on time-series data to capture the spread patterns at various countries. We particularly investigate the confinement policies adopted by different countries and their impact on the spread patterns of COVID-19. We limit our investigation to the early period of the pandemic, because many governments tried to respond rapidly and aggressively in the beginning. Moreover, these governments adopted diverse confinement policies based on trial-and-error in the beginning of the pandemic. We found that implementations of the same confinement policies may exhibit different results in different countries. Specifically, lockdowns become less effective in densely populated regions, because of the reluctance to comply with social distancing measures. Lack of testing, contact tracing, and social awareness in some countries forestall people from self-isolation and maintaining social distance. Large labor camps with unhealthy living conditions also aid in high community transmissions in countries depending on foreign labor. Distrust in government policies and fake news instigate the spread in both developed and under-developed countries. Large social gatherings play a vital role in causing rapid outbreaks almost everywhere. An early and rapid response at the early period of the pandemic is necessary to contain the spread, yet it is not always sufficient.

Three-way investment decisions during the epidemic with Choquet-based bi-projection method

The outbreak of epidemic has had a big impact on the investment market of China. Facing the turbulence in the investment market, many enterprises find it difficult to judge the development prospects of investment projects and make the right investment decisions. The three-way decisions offer a novel study perspective to solve this problem. Then the developed model is applied to select the investment projects. Firstly, some relevant attributes of the project are described with the double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets. And a double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic information system is constructed for each project. Secondly, the weights of attributes are determined with the Choquet integral method. And the closeness degree calculated by Choquet-based bi-projection method is taken as the conditional probability that the project will be profitable. Next, considering the influence of the bounded rationality of decision makers, the threshold parameters are calculated based on prospect theory. Finally, the decision results about investment projects during four stages are deduced based on the principle of maximum-utility, which demonstrates the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed model.

Jaya Honey Badger optimization-based deep neuro-fuzzy network structure for detection of (SARS-CoV) Covid-19 disease by using respiratory sound signals

PurposeThe Covid-19 prediction process is more indispensable to handle the spread and death occurred rate because of Covid-19. However early and precise prediction of Covid-19 is more difficult because of different sizes and resolutions of input image. Thus these challenges and problems experienced by traditional Covid-19 detection methods are considered as major motivation to develop JHBO-based DNFN.Design/methodology/approachThe major contribution of this research is to design an effectual Covid-19 detection model using devised JHBO-based DNFN. Here, the audio signal is considered as input for detecting Covid-19. The Gaussian filter is applied to input signal for removing the noises and then feature extraction is performed. The substantial features, like spectral roll-off, spectral bandwidth, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), spectral flatness, zero crossing rate, spectral centroid, mean square energy and spectral contract are extracted for further processing. Finally, DNFN is applied for detecting Covid-19 and the deep leaning model is trained by designed JHBO algorithm. Accordingly, the developed JHBO method is newly designed by incorporating Honey Badger optimization Algorithm (HBA) and Jaya algorithm.FindingsThe performance of proposed hybrid optimization-based deep learning algorithm is estimated by means of two performance metrics, namely testing accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 0.9176, 0.9218 and 0.9219.Research limitations/implicationsThe JHBO-based DNFN approach is developed for Covid-19 detection. The developed approach can be extended by including other hybrid optimization algorithms as well as other features can be extracted for further improving the detection performance.Practical implicationsThe proposed Covid-19 detection method is useful in various applications, like medical and so on.Originality/valueDeveloped JHBO-enabled DNFN for Covid-19 detection: An effective Covid-19 detection technique is introduced based on hybrid optimization–driven deep learning model. The DNFN is used for detecting Covid-19, which classifies the feature vector as Covid-19 or non-Covid-19. Moreover, the DNFN is trained by devised JHBO approach, which is introduced by combining HBA and Jaya algorithm.

Mapping Mindset about Gamification: Teaching Learning Perspective in UAE Education System and Indian Education System

One can observe the dramatic change in the ongoing global pandemic impacts, and the speed of advancement in the educational learning system, particularly in virtual teaching learning process, has been extremely quick. Teachers' use of technology to deliver instruction to students via a variety of platforms has a significant impact on how well those students learn. A variety of factors influence how well students learn and how well teachers teach, including how well they use the most effective teaching technique. Teachers' and students' perspectives on instructional strategies should take precedence. Empirical study will be undertaken to demonstrate that there are tactics and approaches, such as Gamification, that teachers may use to improve their teaching. The proposed study looked into teachers' reported usage and implementation of these instructional tactics in their classrooms in different schools in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) & India. The parents also adopted the strategies for digital transformation of their children. Participants in the research included teachers from schools in the United Arab Emirates and India. Motivation is to find and reveal that teachers are employing ICT approaches such as Gamification and are also extremely aware of and comfortable with new teaching methodologies. Other findings show that teachers in both countries agree on the necessity of using digital tools to improve the learning outcomes of their students.

Machine Learning Approaches Used for Air Quality Forecast: A Review

Air Quality Index (AQI) is an indicator of the pollution level of our surroundings and household. Prediction of the AQI values from the historical values can help us analyze and mitigate the pollution levels. The AQI values can be classified into predetermined categories and machine learning algorithms can be made use of to improve the classification accuracy of the Air Quality Index value calculated. The main objective of the paper is to provide the potential researchers, with the importance of various Machine Learning approaches used for the forecast of the Air Quality Index. This paper analyzes various strategies used for the prediction, classification of AQI incorporating machine learning techniques. The air quality index can be calculated using Machine learning-based methods. Some of the methods to be considered are logistic regression, decision tree, support vector regression, support vector classifier, random forest tree, Naive Bayes classifier, and K-nearest neighbor. Application of these methods on the Air Quality Index datasets may yield different Accuracy, Recall, and F1 Score. Different algorithms that can be used for the said purpose with their strengths are summarized in a comparison table.

Differentiating Between COVID-19 and Tuberculosis Using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

Over 10 million people around the world are affected by tuberculosis (TB) every year, making it a major global health concern. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, TB services in many countries have been temporarily disrupted, leading to a potential delay in the diagnosis of TB cases and many cases going under the radar. Since both diseases sometimes present similarly and generally affect the lungs, there is also a risk of misdiagnosis. This study aims to analyse the differences between COVID-19 and TB in different patients, as a first step in the creation of a TB screening tool. 180 COVID-19 and 215 TB case reports were collected from ScienceDirect. Using Natural Language Processing tools, the patient's age, gender, and symptoms were extracted from each report. Tree-based machine learning algorithms were then used to classify each case report as belonging to either disease. Overall, the cases included 252 male and 117 female patients, with 26 cases not reporting the patient's sex. The patients' ages ranged from 0 to 95 years old, with a median age of 41.5. There were 33 cases with missing age values. The most frequent symptom in the TB cases was weight loss while most COVID-19 cases listed fever as a symptom. Of all algorithms implemented, XGBoost performed best in terms of ROC AUC (86.9 %) and F1-score macro (78%). The trained model is a good starting point, which can be used by medical staff to aid in referring potential TB patients in a timely manner. This could reduce the delay in TB diagnosis as well as the TB death toll, especially in highly infected countries.

Arabic Language Modeling Based on Supervised Machine Learning

Misinformation and misleading actions have appeared as soon as COVID-19 vaccinations campaigns were launched, no matter what the country's alphabetization level or growing index is. In such a situation, supervised machine learning techniques for classification appears as a suitable solution to model the value & veracity of data, especially in the Arabic language as a language used by millions of people around the world. To achieve this task, we had to collect data manually from SM platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Arabic news websites. This paper aims to classify Arabic language news into fake news and real news, by creating a Machine Learning (ML) model that will detect Arabic fake news (DAFN) about COVID-19 vaccination. To achieve our goal, we will use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, which is especially challenging since NLP libraries support for Arabic is not common. We will use NLTK package of python to preprocess the data, and then we will use a ML model for the classification.

Research Acceleration in Self-Driving Labs: Technological Roadmap toward Accelerated Materials and Molecular Discovery

The urgency of finding solutions to global energy, sustainability, and healthcare challenges has motivated rethinking of the conventional chemistry and material science workflows. Self-driving labs, emerged through integration of disruptive physical and digital technologies, including robotics, additive manufacturing, reaction miniaturization, and artificial intelligence, have the potential to accelerate the pace of materials and molecular discovery by 10–100X. Using autonomous robotic experimentation workflows, self-driving labs enable access to a larger part of the chemical universe and reduce the time-to-solution through an iterative hypothesis formulation, intelligent experiment selection, and automated testing. By providing a data-centric ion to the accelerated discovery cycle, in this perspective article, the required hardware and software technological infrastructure to unlock the true potential of self-driving labs is discussed. In particular, process intensification as an accelerator mechanism for reaction modules of self-driving labs and digitalization strategies to further accelerate the discovery cycle in chemical and materials sciences are discussed.

Epidemic Prediction using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models on COVID-19 Data

A catastrophic epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus, commonly recognised as COVID-19, introduced a worldwide vulnerability to human community. All nations around the world are making enormous effort to tackle the outbreak towards this deadly virus through various aspects such as technology, economy, relevant data, protective gear, lives-risk medications and all other instruments. The artificial intelligence-based researchers apply knowledge, experience and skill set on national level data to create computational and statistical models for investigating such a pandemic condition. In order to make a contribution to this worldwide human community, this paper recommends using machine-learning and deep-learning models to understand its daily accelerating actions together with predicting the future reachability of COVID-19 across nations by using the real-time information from the Johns Hopkins dashboard. In this work, a novel Exponential Smoothing Long-Short-Term Memory Networks Model (ESLSTM) learning model is proposed to predict the virus spread in the near future. The results are evaluated using RMSE and R-Squared values.

Quantum machine learning framework for virtual screening in drug discovery: a prospective quantum advantage

Machine Learning for ligand based virtual screening (LB-VS) is an important in-silico tool for discovering new drugs in a faster and cost-effective manner, especially for emerging diseases such as COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose framework combining a classical Support Vector Classifier algorithm with quantum kernel estimation for LB-VS on real-world databases, and we argue in favor of its prospective quantum advantage. Indeed, we heuristically prove that our quantum integrated workflow can, at least in some relevant instances, provide a tangible advantage compared to state-of-art classical algorithms operating on the same datasets, showing strong dependence on target and features selection method. Finally, we test our algorithm on IBM Quantum processors using ADRB2 and COVID-19 datasets, showing that hardware simulations provide results in line with the predicted performances and can surpass classical equivalents.

AIDrugApp: artificial intelligence-based Web-App for virtual screening of inhibitors against SARS-COV-2

Currently, there is no effective cure for SARS-COVID-19 diseases. The identification of novel therapeutic targets and drug-like compounds is required for the development of anti-COVID-19 drugs. Virtual screening is currently the most significant component for identifying drug-like molecules from large datasets for drug design and development. However, there are no effective easily available and user-friendly applications for virtual screening of drug leads against SARS-COV-2. Therefore, we have developed a user-friendly web-app named ‘AIDrugApp' for the virtual screening of inhibitor molecules against SARS-CoV-2. AIDrugApp is a novel open-access, deep learning AI-based inhibitory activity prediction and data statistics visualisation platform. Users can predict the inhibitory activities (Active/Inactive) and pIC-50 values of new compounds against SARS-CoV-2 replicase polyprotein, 3CLpro and human angiotensin-converting enzymes. It is also useful for virtual screening of chemical features of molecules towards SARS-COVID-19 clinical trial bioactivities. This paper presents the development and architecture of AIDrugApp. We also present two case studies where large sets of molecules were screened using the ‘Bioactivity Prediction' module of our app. Screened molecules were analysed further for validation by molecular docking and ADME analysis to identify the potential drug candidates.

Synthetic data accelerates the development of generalizable learning-based algorithms for X-ray image analysis

Artificial intelligence (AI) now enables automated interpretation of medical images. However, AI's potential use for interventional image analysis remains largely untapped. This is because the post hoc analysis of data collected during live procedures has fundamental and practical limitations, including ethical considerations, expense, scalability, data integrity and a lack of ground truth. Here we demonstrate that creating realistic simulated images from human models is a viable alternative and complement to large-scale in situ data collection. We show that training AI image analysis models on realistically synthesized data, combined with contemporary domain generalization techniques, results in machine learning models that on real data perform comparably to models trained on a precisely matched real data training set. We find that our model transfer paradigm for X-ray image analysis, which we refer to as SyntheX, can even outperform real-data-trained models due to the effectiveness of training on a larger dataset. SyntheX provides an opportunity to markedly accelerate the conception, design and evaluation of X-ray-based intelligent systems. In addition, SyntheX provides the opportunity to test novel instrumentation, design complementary surgical approaches, and envision novel techniques that improve outcomes, save time or mitigate human error, free from the ethical and practical considerations of live human data collection.Simulated data is an alternative to real data for medical applications where interventional data are needed to train AI-based systems. Gao and colleagues develop a model transfer paradigm to train deep networks on synthetic X-ray data and corresponding labels generated using simulation techniques from CT scans. The approach establishes synthetic data as a viable resource for developing machine learning models that apply to real clinical data.

Application of Artificial Intelligence on Post Pandemic Situation and Lesson Learn for Future Prospects

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has intensively damaged human socio-economic lives and the growth of countries around the world. Many efforts have been made in the direction of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to detect the corona at an early stage and take necessary precautions to stop it from spreading or recovery from the infection. However, the situation and solutions are still challenging. In this paper, we proposed various technological aspects, solutions using a supervised/unsupervised manner and continuous health monitoring with physiological parameters. Finally, the performance of COVID-19 detection with Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM) technique using the voice signal has been demonstrated. The developed system achieves the COVID-19 detection performance in terms of areas under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves in the range 60–67%. Moreover, the various lessons learned from the current COVID-19 crisis are presented for future directions.

A novel design of a smart interactive guiding robot for busy airports

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a massive impact on the global aviation industry. As a result, the airline industry has been forced to embrace new technologies and procedures in order to provide a more secure and bio-safe travel. Currently, the role of smart technology in airport systems has expanded significantly as a result of the contemporary Industry 4.0 context. The article presents a novel construction of an intelligent mobile robot system to guide passengers to take the plane at the departure terminals at busy airports. The robot provides instructions to the customer through the interaction between the robot and the customer utilizing voice communications. The usage of the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API combined with technical machine learning to analyze and understand the customer's requirements are deployed. In addition, we use a face detection technique based on Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks (MTCNN) to predict the distance between the robot and passengers to perform the function. The robot can guide passengers to desired areas in the terminal. The results and evaluation of the implementation process are also mentioned in the article and show promise.

Early diagnosis of COVID-19 patients using deep learning-based deep forest model

Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread all over the world. It is found that the low sensitivity of reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) examinations during the early stage of COVID-19 disease. Thus, efficient models are desirable for early-stage testing of COVID-19 infected patients. Chest X-ray (CXR) images of COVID-19 infected patients have shown some bilateral changes. In this paper, deep transfer learning and a deep forest-based model are proposed to diagnose COVID-19 infection from CXR images. Initially, features of X-ray images are extracted using the well-known deep transfer learning model (i.e., ResNet101), which does not require tuning many parameters compared to the deep convolutional neural network (CNN). After that, the deep forest model is utilised to predict COVID-19 infected patients. The deep forest is based upon ensemble learning and requires a small number of hyper-parameters. Additionally, the proposed model is trained on a multi-class dataset that contains four different classes as COVID-19 (+), pneumonia, tuberculosis, and healthy patients. The comparisons are drawn among the proposed deep transfer learning and deep forest-based models, the competitive models. The obtained results show that the proposed model effectively diagnoses COVID-19 infection with an accuracy of 99.4%.

Efficacy Determination of Various Base Networks in Single Shot Detector for Automatic Mask Localisation in a Post COVID Setup

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the rarest events of global crises where a viral pathogen infiltrates every part of the world, leaving every country face an inevitable threat of having to lock down major cities and economic hubs and put firm restrictions on citizens thus slowing down the economy. The risk of removal of lockdowns is the emergence of new waves of a pandemic causing a surge in new cases. These facts necessitate the containment of the virus when the lockdowns end. Wearing masks in crowded places can help restrict the spread of the virus through minuscule droplets in the air. Through the automatic detection, enumeration, and localisation of masks from closed-circuit television footage, it is possible to keep violations of post-COVID regulations in check. In this paper, we leverage the Single-Shot Detection (SSD) framework through different base convolutional neural networks (CNNs) namely VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, and Xception to compare performance metrics attained by the different variations of the SSD and determine the efficacies for the best base network model for automatic mask detection in a post COVID world. We find that Xception performs best among all the other models in terms of mean average precision.

Multiple face mask wearer detection based on YOLOv3 approach

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a highly infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. In breaking the transmission chain of SARS-CoV-2, the government has made it compulsory for the people to wear a mask in public places to prevent COVID-19 transmission. Hence, an automated face mask detection is crucial to facilitate the monitoring process in ensuring people to wear a face mask in public. This project aims to develop an automated face and face mask detection for multiple people by applying deep learning-based object detection algorithm you only look once version 3 (YOLOv3). YOLOv3 object detection algorithm was concatenated with different backbones including ResNet-50 and Darknet-53 to develop the face and face mask detection model. Datasets were collected from online resources including Kaggle and Github and the images were filtered and labelled accordingly. The models were trained on 4393 images and evaluated based on precision, recall, mean average precision and the detection time. In conclusion, DarkNet53_YOLOv3 was chosen as the better model compared to ResNet50_YOLOv3 model with its good performance on accuracy with a mAP of 95.94% and a fast detection speed with a detection time of 50 seconds on 776 images.