Swarm intelligence-based model for improving prediction performance of low-expectation teams in educational software engineering projects.

Software engineering is one of the most significant areas, which extensively used in educational and industrial fields. Software engineering education plays an essential role in keeping students up to date with software technologies, products, and processes that are commonly applied in the software industry. The software development project is one of the most important parts of the software engineering course, because it covers the practical side of the course. This type of project helps strengthening students' skills to collaborate in a team spirit to work on software projects. Software project involves the composition of software product and process parts. Software product part represents software deliverables at each phase of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) while software process part captures team activities and behaviors during SDLC. The low-expectation teams face challenges during different stages of software project. Consequently, predicting performance of such teams is one of the most important tasks for learning process in software engineering education. The early prediction of performance for low-expectation teams would help instructors to address difficulties and challenges related to such teams at earliest possible phases of software project to avoid project failure. Several studies attempted to early predict the performance for low-expectation teams at different phases of SDLC. This study introduces swarm intelligence -based model which essentially aims to improve the prediction performance for low-expectation teams at earliest possible phases of SDLC by implementing Particle Swarm Optimization-K Nearest Neighbours (PSO-KNN), and it attempts to reduce the number of selected software product and process features to reach higher accuracy with identifying less than 40 relevant features. Experiments were conducted on the Software Engineering Team Assessment and Prediction (SETAP) project dataset. The proposed model was compared with the related studies and the state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) classifiers: Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Simple Linear Regression (SLR), Naïve Bayes (NB), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), standard KNN, and J48. The proposed model provides superior results compared to the traditional ML classifiers and state-of-the-art studies in the investigated phases of software product and process development.

A Real-Time Electrical Load Forecasting in Jordan Using an Enhanced Evolutionary Feedforward Neural Network.

Power system planning and expansion start with forecasting the anticipated future load requirement. Load forecasting is essential for the engineering perspective and a financial perspective. It effectively plays a vital role in the conventional monopolistic operation and electrical utility planning to enhance power system operation, security, stability, minimization of operation cost, and zero emissions. Two Well-developed cases are discussed here to quantify the benefits of additional models, observation, resolution, data type, and how data are necessary for the perception and evolution of the electrical load forecasting in Jordan. Actual load data for more than a year is obtained from the leading electricity company in Jordan. These cases are based on total daily demand and hourly daily demand. This work's main aim is for easy and accurate computation of week ahead electrical system load forecasting based on Jordan's current load measurements. The uncertainties in forecasting have the potential to waste money and resources. This research proposes an optimized multi-layered feed-forward neural network using the recent Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO). The problem of power forecasting is formulated as a minimization problem. The experimental results are compared with popular optimization methods and show that the proposed method provides very competitive forecasting results.

A Multi-Layer Classification Approach for Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks Based on Deep Learning.

The security of IoT networks is an important concern to researchers and business owners, which is taken into careful consideration due to its direct impact on the availability of the services offered by IoT devices and the privacy of the users connected with the network. An intrusion detection system ensures the security of the network and detects malicious activities attacking the network. In this study, a deep multi-layer classification approach for intrusion detection is proposed combining two stages of detection of the existence of an intrusion and the type of intrusion, along with an oversampling technique to ensure better quality of the classification results. Extensive experiments are made for different settings of the first stage and the second stage in addition to two different strategies for the oversampling technique. The experiments show that the best settings of the proposed approach include oversampling by the intrusion type identification label (ITI), 150 neurons for the Single-hidden Layer Feed-forward Neural Network (SLFN), and 2 layers and 150 neurons for LSTM. The results are compared to well-known classification techniques, which shows that the proposed technique outperforms the others in terms of the G-mean having the value of 78% compared to 75% for KNN and less than 50% for the other techniques.

Investigating users' experience on social media ads: perceptions of young users.

Social media platforms changed from being socialization platforms to serve businesses through advertisements. This research aims at investigating active young users' experience with social media ads by studying the personalization and the usefulness of the ads, and the role of the host architecture of the used platform. The results prove that users' experience was affected by the designated variables: personalization, perceived usefulness, and the host architecture. Specifically, It was found that social media users find social media ads useful, and personalized, and that the perceived usefulness and personalization significantly affect the usage of host architecture which significantly affects users' experience. Additionally, a significant difference is found between clusters of student answers in terms of personalization and perceived usefulness effect on user experience.

Identifying ß-thalassemia carriers using a data mining approach: The case of the Gaza Strip, Palestine.

Thalassemia is considered one of the most common genetic blood disorders that has received excessive attention in the medical research fields worldwide. Under this context, one of the greatest challenges for healthcare professionals is to correctly differentiate normal individuals from asymptomatic thalassemia carriers. Usually, thalassemia diagnosis is based on certain measurable characteristic changes to blood cell counts and related indices. These characteristic changes can be derived easily when performing a complete blood count test (CBC) using a special fully automated blood analyzer or counter. However, the reliability of the CBC test alone is questionable with possible candidate characteristics that could be seen in other disorders, leading to misdiagnosis of thalassemia. Therefore, other costly and time-consuming tests should be performed that may cause serious consequences due to the delay in the correct diagnosis. To help overcoming these challenging diagnostic issues, this work presents a new novel dataset collected from Palestine Avenir Foundation for persons tested for thalassemia. We aim to compile a gold standard dataset for thalassemia and make it available for researchers in this field. Moreover, we use this dataset to predict the specific type of thalassemia known as beta thalassemia (ß-thalassemia) based on hybrid data mining model. The proposed model consists of two main steps. First, to overcome the problem of the highly imbalanced class distribution in the dataset, a balancing technique called SMOTE is proposed and applied to handle this problem. In the second step, four classification models, namely k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), naïve Bayesian (NB), decision tree (DT) and the multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network are used to differentiate between normal persons and those patients carrying ß-thalassemia. Different evaluation metrics are used to assess the performance of the proposed model. The experimental results show that the SMOTE oversampling method can effectively improve the identification ratio of ß-thalassemia carriers in a highly imbalanced class distribution. The results reveal also that the NB classifier achieved the best performance in differentiating between normal and ß-thalassemia carriers at oversampling SMOTE ratio of 400%. This combination shows a specificity of 99.47% and a sensitivity of 98.81%.