Applications of machine learning for COVID-19 misinformation: a systematic review.

The inflammable growth of misinformation on social media and other platforms during pandemic situations like COVID-19 can cause significant damage to the physical and mental stability of the people. To detect such misinformation, researchers have been applying various machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. The objective of this study is to systematically review, assess, and synthesize state-of-the-art research articles that have used different ML and DL techniques to detect COVID-19 misinformation. A structured literature search was conducted in the relevant bibliographic databases to ensure that the survey was solely centered on reproducible and high-quality research. We reviewed 43 papers that fulfilled our inclusion criteria out of 260 articles found from our keyword search. We have surveyed a complete pipeline of COVID-19 misinformation detection. In particular, we have identified various COVID-19 misinformation datasets and reviewed different data processing, feature extraction, and classification techniques to detect COVID-19 misinformation. In the end, the challenges and limitations in detecting COVID-19 misinformation using ML techniques and the future research directions are discussed.

Adjustment of key lane change parameters to develop microsimulation models for representative assessment of safety and operational impacts of adverse weather using SHRP2 naturalistic driving data.

INTRODUCTION: Adverse weather has a considerable negative impact on safety and mobility of transportation networks. Microsimulation models are one of the potential tools that could be used to evaluate the safety and operational impacts of adverse weather. The development of a realistic microsimulation model requires the adjustment of driving behavior parameters with disaggregate trajectory-level data. This study presented a novel approach to update and adjust lane change model parameters for the development of realistic microsimulation models in different weather conditions by leveraging the trajectory-level data from SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS). METHOD: Representative key lane change parameters in various weather conditions were extracted from an automatic identification algorithm. These lane change parameters were used to develop microsimulation models in VISSIM in an attempt to assess the safety and operational impacts of adverse weather on a freeway weaving segment. RESULTS: The evaluation of safety impacts of adverse weather with regard to three Surrogate Measures of Safety (SMoS) namely Time-to-Collision (TTC), Post Encroachment Time (PET), and Deceleration Rate to Avoid Collision (DRAC) suggested that extreme adverse weather (including heavy rain, heavy snow, and heavy fog) produced a higher total number of simulated conflicts compared to clear weather. The operational analysis results revealed that adjusted parameters in most of the adverse weather produced lower average speeds with higher total travel times and total delays than clear weather. CONCLUSIONS: The outcomes of safety and operational assessments for the adjusted parameters showed that the development of microsimulation models should be based on weather-specific, rather than default parameters. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: The methodology presented in this study could be adopted by transportation agencies to develop weather-specific microsimulation models. Moreover, the demonstrated approach could be used to evaluate different Connected Vehicle (CV) applications related to lane change in terms of safety and operations in microsimulation platforms.

ABCanDroid: A Cloud Integrated Android App for Noninvasive Early Breast Cancer Detection Using Transfer Learning.

Many patients affected by breast cancer die every year because of improper diagnosis and treatment. In recent years, applications of deep learning algorithms in the field of breast cancer detection have proved to be quite efficient. However, the application of such techniques has a lot of scope for improvement. Major works have been done in this field, however it can be made more efficient by the use of transfer learning to get impressive results. In the proposed approach, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is complemented with Transfer Learning for increasing the efficiency and accuracy of early detection of breast cancer for better diagnosis. The thought process involved using a pre-trained model, which already had some weights assigned rather than building the complete model from scratch. This paper mainly focuses on ResNet101 based Transfer Learning Model paired with the ImageNet dataset. The proposed framework provided us with an accuracy of 99.58%. Extensive experiments and tuning of hyperparameters have been performed to acquire the best possible results in terms of classification. The proposed frameworks aims to be an efficient tool for all doctors and society as a whole and help the user in early detection of breast cancer.

Impacts of COVID-19 on the Education, Life and Mental Health of Students in Bangladesh.

COVID-19's unanticipated consequences have resulted in the extended closure of various educational institutions, causing significant hardship to students. Even though many institutions rapidly transitioned to online education programs, various issues have emerged that are impacting many aspects of students' lives. An online survey was conducted with students of Bangladesh to understand how COVID-19 impacted their study, social and daily activities, plans, and mental health. A total of 409 Bangladeshi students took part in a survey. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, 13.7% of all participants are unable to focus on their studies, up from 1.2% previously. More than half of the participants (54%) have spent more time on social media than previously. We found that 45% of the participants have severe to moderate level depression. In addition, 48.6% of the students are experiencing severe to moderate level anxiety. According to our findings, students' inability to concentrate on their studies, their increased use of social media and electronic communications, changing sleep hours during the pandemic, increased personal care time, and changes in plans are all correlated with their mental health.

Global lessons learned from naturalistic driving studies to advance traffic safety and operation research: A systematic review.

The state of practice of investigating traffic safety and operation is primarily based on traditional data sources, such as spot sensors, loop detectors, and historical crash data. Recently, researchers have utilized transportation data from instrumented vehicles, driving simulators, and microsimulation modeling. However, these data sources might not represent the actual driving environment at a trajectory level and might introduce bias due to their experimental control. The shortcomings of these data sources can be overcome via Naturalistic Driving Studies (NDSs) considering the fact that NDS provides detailed real-time driving data that would help investigate the safety and operational impacts of human behavior along with other factors related to weather, traffic, and roadway geometry in a naturalistic setting. With the enormous potential of the NDS data, this study leveraged the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyzes (PRISMA) approach to shortlist the most relevant naturalistic studies out of 2304 initial studies around the world with a focus on traffic safety and operation over the past fifteen years (2005-2020). A total of 117 studies were systematically reviewed, which were grouped into seven relevant topics, including driver behavior and performance, crash/near-crash causation, driver distraction, pedestrian/bicycle safety, intersection/traffic signal related studies, detection and prediction using NDSs data, based on their frequency of appearance in the keywords of these studies. The proper deployment of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) require an appropriate level of human behavior integration, especially at the intimal stages where both CAV and human-driven vehicles will interact and share the same roadways in a mixed traffic environment. In order to integrate the heterogeneous nature of human behavior through behavior cloning approach, real-time trajectory-level NDS data is essential. The insights from this study revealed that NDSs could be effectively leveraged to perfect the behavior cloning to facilitate rapid and safe implementation of CAV.

Determination of potential inhibitors based on isatin derivatives against SARS-CoV-2 main protease (mpro): a molecular docking, molecular dynamics and structure-activity relationship studies.

SARS-COV-2, the novel coronavirus and root of global pandemic COVID-19 caused a severe health threat throughout the world. Lack of specific treatments raised an effort to find potential inhibitors for the viral proteins. The recently invented crystal structure of SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) and its key role in viral replication; non-resemblance to any human protease makes it a perfect target for inhibitor research. This article reports a computer-aided drug design (CADD) approach for the screening of 118 compounds with 16 distinct heterocyclic moieties in comparison with 5 natural products and 7 repurposed drugs. Molecular docking analysis against Mpro protein were performed finding isatin linked with a oxidiazoles (A2 and A4) derivatives to have the best docking scores of -11.22 kcal/mol and -11.15 kcal/mol respectively. Structure-activity relationship studies showed a good comparison with a known active Mpro inhibitor and repurposed drug ebselen with an IC50 value of -0.67 µM. Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations for 50 ns were performed for A2 and A4 supporting the stability of the two compounds within the binding pocket, largely at the S1, S2 and S4 domains with high binding energy suggesting their suitability as potential inhibitors of Mpro for SARS-CoV-2.

Federated learning based Covid-19 detection.

The world is affected by COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Tests are necessary for everyone as the number of COVID-19 affected individual's increases. So, the authors developed a basic sequential CNN model based on deep and federated learning that focuses on user data security while simultaneously enhancing test accuracy. The proposed model helps users detect COVID-19 in a few seconds by uploading a single chest X-ray image. A deep learning-aided architecture that can handle client and server sides efficiently has been proposed in this work. The front-end part has been developed using StreamLit, and the back-end uses a Flower framework. The proposed model has achieved a global accuracy of 99.59% after being trained for three federated communication rounds. The detailed analysis of this paper provides the robustness of this work. In addition, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) will improve the ease of access to the aforementioned health services. IoMT tools and services are rapidly changing healthcare operations for the better. Hopefully, it will continue to do so in this difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic and will help to push the envelope of this work to a different extent.

Applications of polysaccharides in topical and transdermal drug delivery: A recent update of literature

Abstract The main aim of transdermal drug delivery (TDD) is to deliver a specific dose of drug across the skin and to reach systemic circulation at a controlled rate. On the other hand skin is the target for topical drug delivery. Mentioned drug delivery systems (DDS) have numerous advantages compared to oral and parenteral routes. Avoidance of first-pass metabolism, prevent drug degradation due to harsh environment of the stomach, allow controlled drug delivery, provide patient compliance, and pain-free administration are a few of them. To achieve all of them, a DDS with suitable polymer is the primary requisite. Based on the recent trends, natural polymers have been more popular in comparison to synthetic polymers because the former possesses favourable properties including nontoxic, biodegradable, biocompatible, low cost, sustainable and renewable resources. In this context polysaccharides, composed of chains of monosaccharides bound together by glycosidic bonds, have been successfully employed to augment drug delivery into and across the skin with various formulations such as gel, membrane, patches, nanoparticles, nanofibres, nanocomposite, and microneedles. In this chapter, various polysaccharides such as cellulose, chitosan, and their semisynthetic derivatives, alginate, pectin, carrageenan etc, were discussed with their diverse topical and TDD applications. In addition, various formulations based on polysaccharides and limitations of polysaccharides were also briefly discussed.

Detecting lane change maneuvers using SHRP2 naturalistic driving data: A comparative study machine learning techniques.

Lane change has been recognized as a challenging driving maneuver and a significant component of traffic safety research. Developing a real-time continuous lane change detection system can assist drivers to perform and deal with complex driving tasks or provide assistance when it is needed the most. This study proposed trajectory-level lane change detection models based on features from vehicle kinematics, machine vision, roadway characteristics, and driver demographics under different weather conditions. To develop the models, the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) and Roadway Information Database (RID) datasets were utilized. Initially, descriptive statistics were utilized to investigate the lane change behavior, which revealed significant differences among different weather conditions for most of the parameters. Six data fusion categories were introduced for the first time, considering different data availability. In order to select relevant features in each category, Boruta, a wrapper-based algorithm was employed. The lane change detection models were trained, validated, and comparatively evaluated using four Machine Learning algorithms including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and eXtrem Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). The results revealed that the highest overall detection accuracy was found to be 95.9 % using the XGBoost model when all the features were included in the model. Moreover, the highest overall detection accuracy of 81.9 % using the RF model was achieved considering only vehicle kinematics-based features, indicating that the proposed model could be utilized when other data are not available. Furthermore, the analysis of the impact of weather conditions on lane change detection suggested that incorporating weather could improve the accuracy of lane change detection. In addition, the analysis of early lane change detection indicated that the proposed algorithm could predict the lane changes within 5 s before the vehicles cross the lane line. The developed detection models could be used to monitor and control driver behavior in a Cooperative Automated Vehicle environment.

Using trajectory-level SHRP2 naturalistic driving data for investigating driver lane-keeping ability in fog: An association rules mining approach.

The presence of fog has a significant adverse impact on driving. Reduced visibility due to fog obscures the driving environment and greatly affects driver behavior and performance. Lane-keeping ability is a lateral driver behavior that can be very crucial in run-off-road crashes under reduced visibility conditions. A number of data mining techniques have been adopted in previous studies to examine driver behavior including lane-keeping ability. This study adopted an association rules mining method, a promising data mining technique, to investigate driver lane-keeping ability in foggy weather conditions using big trajectory-level SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) datasets. A total of 124 trips in fog with their corresponding 248 trips in clear weather (i.e., 2 clear trips: 1 foggy weather trip) were considered for the study. The results indicated that affected visibility was associated with poor lane-keeping performance in several rules. Furthermore, additional factors including male drivers, a higher number of lanes, the presence of horizontal curves, etc. were found to be significant factors for having a higher proportion of poor lane-keeping performance. Moreover, drivers with more miles driven last year were found to have better lane-keeping performance. The findings of this study could help transportation practitioners to select effective countermeasures for mitigating run-off-road crashes under limited visibility conditions.

Analyzing the effect of fog weather conditions on driver lane-keeping performance using the SHRP2 naturalistic driving study data.

INTRODUCTION: Driving in foggy weather conditions has been recognized as a major safety concern for many years. Driver behavior and performance can be negatively affected by foggy weather conditions due to the low visibility in fog. A number of previous studies focused on driver performance and behavior in simulated environments. However, very few studies have examined the impact of foggy weather conditions on specific driver behavior in naturalistic settings. METHOD: This study utilized the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP2) Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) dataset to evaluate driver lane-keeping behavior in clear and foggy weather conditions. Preliminary descriptive analysis was conducted and a lane-keeping model was developed using the ordered logistic regression approach to achieve the study goals. RESULTS: This study found that individual variables such as visibility, traffic conditions, lane change, driver marital status, and geometric characteristics, as well as some interaction terms (i.e., weather and gender, surface condition and driving experience, speed limit and mileage last year) significantly affect lane-keeping ability. An important finding of this study illustrated that affected visibility caused by foggy weather conditions decreases lane-keeping ability significantly. More specifically, drivers in affected visibility conditions showed 1.37 times higher Standard Deviation of Lane Position (SDLP) in comparison with drivers who were driving in unaffected visibility conditions. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide a better understanding of driver lane-keeping behavior and driver perception of foggy weather conditions. Moreover, the results might be used to improve Lane Departure Warning (LDW) systems algorithm by allowing them to account for the effects of fog on visibility. Practical Applications: These results provide a better understanding of driver lane-keeping behavior and driver perception of foggy weather conditions. Moreover, the results might be used to improve Lane Departure Warning (LDW) systems algorithm by allowing them to account for the effects of fog on visibility.