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Sustainable freight transportation is one of the essential concepts in the smart city. Under this concept, many people connected with mobile devices produce location data and potential opportunities for transporting small objects in a more environmentally friendly and sustainable way. Crowdshipping, which utilises public people as transportation, is one of the terminal solutions in the last mile delivery scenario. Nevertheless, precisely assigning the delivery to the right crowd willing to accept the job is challenging because the solution space is too large to perform a full search. This article proposes a trajectory feature extraction algorithm and a task‐to‐crowd matching (T2CM) algorithm for coping with the job‐to‐crowd assignment problem. A simulation based on the real‐world dataset is conducted on three different scenarios to justify the outcome from our proposed method to the job assignment results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the development and evaluation of short-term traffic prediction models using unidirectional and bidirectional deep learning long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. The unidirectional LSTM (Uni-LSTM) model provides high performance through its ability to recognize longer sequences of traffic time series data. In this work, Uni-LSTM is extended to bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) networks which train the input data twice through forward and backward directions. The paper presents a comparative evaluation of the two models for short-term speed and traffic flow prediction using a common dataset of field observations collected from multiple freeways in Australia. The results showed BiLSTM performed better for variable prediction horizons for both speed and flow. Stacked and mixed Uni-LSTM and BiLSTM models were also investigated for 15-minute prediction horizons resulting in improved accuracy when using 4-layer BiLSTM networks. The optimized 4-layer BiLSTM model was then calibrated and validated for multiple prediction horizons using data from three different freeways. The validation results showed a high degree of prediction accuracy exceeding 90% for speeds up to 60-minute prediction horizons. For flow, the model achieved accuracies above 90% for 5- and 10-minute prediction horizons and more than 80% accuracy for 15- and 30-minute prediction horizons. These findings extend the set of AI models available for road operators and provide them with confidence in applying robust models that have been tested and evaluated on different freeways in Australia., Author(s): Rusul L. Abduljabbar (corresponding author) [1]; Hussein Dia [1]; Pei-Wei Tsai [2] 1. Introduction Freeway short-term traffic prediction models have been researched extensively in the literature [1-8]. The strong [...]

In recent years, researchers have conducted various studies on applying wireless networking technology and mobile devices in education settings. However, research on behavioral patterns in learners' online asynchronous discussions with mobile devices is limited. The purposes of this study are to develop a mobile learning system, mobile interactive teaching feedback system (MITFS), linked to both mobile devices and the internet, to support learners with online asynchronous discussion, and combine content analysis and sequential analysis to compare and contrast the social knowledge construction behavioral patterns of problem-based asynchronous discussion in e-learning and m-learning environments. This study investigated four weeks of online discussions in an "Introduction to Computer Science" course involving forty first year university students. The control group (online asynchronous discussion without mobile devices) and the experimental group (online asynchronous discussion with mobile devices) in the group discussions were explored. By using content analysis and sequential analysis for the problem-based online asynchronous discussion of the behavioral patterns and differences between students in control and experimental group, the results showed that using mobile devices in online asynchronous discussion influenced students' learning performance. Some interesting results were found. Firstly, when the students used mobile devices in discussion situations, they could more engage in reflecting thinking, sharing more information, and further facilitating social knowledge construction among group members. Secondly, the experimental group performed better than the control group in terms of participation and diversity in knowledge construction behavioral patterns. Finally, based upon the findings, some implications are proposed for further research. (Contains 9 figures and 10 tables.)

Data heterogeneity is the obstacle for the resource sharing on Semantic Web (SW), and ontology is regarded as a solution to this problem. However, since different ontologies are constructed and maintained independently, there also exists the heterogeneity problem between ontologies. Ontology matching is able to identify the semantic correspondences of entities in different ontologies, which is an effective method to address the ontology heterogeneity problem. Due to huge memory consumption and long runtime, the performance of the existing ontology matching techniques requires further improvement. In this work, an extended compact genetic algorithm-based ontology entity matching technique (ECGA-OEM) is proposed, which uses both the compact encoding mechanism and linkage learning approach to match the ontologies efficiently. Compact encoding mechanism does not need to store and maintain the whole population in the memory during the evolving process, and the utilization of linkage learning protects the chromosome's building blocks, which is able to reduce the algorithm's running time and ensure the alignment's quality. In the experiment, ECGA-OEM is compared with the participants of ontology alignment evaluation initiative (OAEI) and the state-of-the-art ontology matching techniques, and the experimental results show that ECGA-OEM is both effective and efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fundamental utility of the Large-Scale Visual Sensor Networks (LVSNs) is to monitor specified events and to transmit the detected information back to the sink for achieving the data aggregation purpose. However, the events of interest are usually not uniformly distributed but frequently detected in certain regions in real-world applications. It implies that when the events frequently picked up by the sensors in the same region, the transmission load of LVSNs is unbalanced and potentially cause the energy hole problem. To overcome this kind of problem for network lifetime, a Comprehensive Visual Data Gathering Network Architecture (CDNA), which is the first comparatively integrated architecture for LVSNs is designed in this paper. In CDNA, a novel α-hull based event location algorithm, which is oriented from the geometric model of α-hull, is designed for accurately and efficiently detect the location of the event. In addition, the Chi-Square distribution event-driven gradient deployment method is proposed to reduce the unbalanced energy consumption for alleviating energy hole problem. Moreover, an energy hole repairing method containing an efficient data gathering tree and a movement algorithm is proposed to ensure the efficiency of transmitting and solving the energy hole problem. Simulations are made for examining the performance of the proposed architecture. The simulation results indicate that the performance of CDNA is better than the previous algorithms in the realistic LVSN environment, such as the significant improvement of the network lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data gathering is a fundamental task in Wireless Visual Sensor Networks (WVSNs). Features of directional antennas and the visual data make WVSNs more complex than the conventional Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The virtual backbone is a technique, which is capable of constructing clusters. The version associating with the aggregation operation is also referred to as the virtual backbone tree. In most of the existing literature, the main focus is on the efficiency brought by the construction of clusters that the existing methods neglect local-balance problems in general. To fill up this gap, Directional Virtual Backbone based Data Aggregation Scheme (DVBDAS) for the WVSNs is proposed in this paper. In addition, a measurement called the energy consumption density is proposed for evaluating the adequacy of results in the cluster-based construction problems. Moreover, the directional virtual backbone construction scheme is proposed by considering the local-balanced factor. Furthermore, the associated network coding mechanism is utilized to construct DVBDAS. Finally, both the theoretical analysis of the proposed DVBDAS and the simulations are given for evaluating the performance. The experimental results prove that the proposed DVBDAS achieves higher performance in terms of both the energy preservation and the network lifetime extension than the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial information is often expressed using qualitative terms such as natural language expressions instead of coordinates; reasoning over such terms has several practical applications, such as bus routes planning. Representing and reasoning on trajectories is a specific case of qualitative spatial reasoning that focuses on moving objects and their paths. In this work, we propose two versions of a trajectory calculus based on the allowed properties over trajectories, where trajectories are defined as a sequence of non-overlapping regions of a partitioned map. More specifically, if a given trajectory is allowed to start and finish at the same region, 6 base relations are defined (TC-6). If a given trajectory should have different start and finish regions but cycles are allowed within, 10 base relations are defined (TC-10). Both versions of the calculus are implemented as ASP programs; we propose several different encodings, including a generalised program capable of encoding any qualitative calculus in ASP. All proposed encodings are experimentally evaluated using a real-world dataset. Experiment results show that the best performing implementation can scale up to an input of 250 trajectories for TC-6 and 150 trajectories for TC-10 for the problem of discovering a consistent configuration, a significant improvement compared to previous ASP implementations for similar qualitative spatial and temporal calculi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper titled "Quasiconformal Mapping Kernel Machine Learning-Based Intelligent Hyperspectral Data Classification for Internet Information Retrieval" by J. Liu and Y. Qiao focuses on the proposed intelligent data classification algorithm based on machine learning. AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) is a relatively new term that has recently become a hot topic that combines two of the hottest acronyms, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IoT (Internet of Things). AI can multiply the value of IoT; conversely, IoT can promote the learning and intelligence of AI. [Extracted from the article]

The wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of a set of sensor nodes. It is deemed suitable for deploying with large-scale in the environment for variety of applications. Recent advances in WSN have led to many new protocols specifically for reducing the power consumption of sensor nodes. A new scheme for predetermining the optimized routing path is proposed based on the enhanced parallel cat swarm optimization (EPCSO) in this paper. This is the first leading precedent that the EPCSO is employed to provide the routing scheme for the WSN. The experimental result indicates that the EPCSO is capable of generating a set of the predetermined paths and of smelting the balanced path for every sensor node to forward the interested packages. In addition, a scheme for deploying the sensor nodes based on their payload and the distance to the sink node is presented to extend the life cycle of the WSN. A simulation is given and the results obtained by the EPCSO are compared with the AODV, the LD method based on ACO, and the LD method based on CSO. The simulation results indicate that our proposed method reduces more than 35% power consumption on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a kind of fuzzy robustness design for nonlinear time-delay systems based on the fuzzy Lyapunov method, which is defined in terms of fuzzy blending quadratic Lyapunov functions. The basic idea of the proposed approach is to construct a fuzzy controller for nonlinear dynamic systems with disturbances in which the delay-independent robust stability criterion is derived in terms of the fuzzy Lyapunov method. Based on the robustness design and parallel distributed compensation (PDC) scheme, the problems of modeling errors between nonlinear dynamic systems and Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy models are solved. Furthermore, the presented delay-independent condition is transformed into linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) so that the fuzzy state feedback gain and common solutions are numerically feasible with swarm intelligence algorithms. The proposed method is illustrated on a nonlinear inverted pendulum system and the simulation results show that the robustness controller cannot only stabilize the nonlinear inverted pendulum system, but has the robustness against external disturbance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an initiative passive continuous authentication (CA) system based on both hard and soft biometrics is presented. Human facial features are used as hard biometric information for the authentication process, and the clothes' color of a user is employed as the soft biometric information. The passive CA system keeps verifying, without interrupting the user from concentrating on his work. It also provides the capacity for the machine to recognize who is in front of the terminal, reduces the potential security leaks, and denies access to the invader with the stolen account and password. In this system, the face recognition core is implemented not only by the Eigenface method, but also assisted by the interactive artificial bee colony optimization algorithm. The proposed method is evaluated by the ORL face database and tested on the prototype CA system for computer security. The experimental results indicate that the accuracy of recognition is raised up to 3.13%, i.e., from 83.75% to 86.88%, with data from the ORL database, and it is improved by 34.53% on average in the real-time continuous authentication environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Simple Summary: Biomedical ontology matching is a large-scale multi-modal multi-objective optimization problem with sparse Pareto optimal solutions. To effectively address this challenging problem, this paper proposes an adaptive multi-modal multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm. First, a novel multi-objective optimization model is constructed to simultaneously optimize both the alignment's f-measure and its conservativity. Then, a problem-specific algorithm is presented, which uses the guiding matrix to adaptively guide the algorithm's convergence and diversity in both objective and decision spaces. The experimental results show that our approach is able to effectively solve the biomedical ontology matching problem and to provide more options for decision makers. To integrate massive amounts of heterogeneous biomedical data in biomedical ontologies and to provide more options for clinical diagnosis, this work proposes an adaptive Multi-modal Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (aMMOEA) to match two heterogeneous biomedical ontologies by finding the semantically identical concepts. In particular, we first propose two evaluation metrics on the alignment's quality, which calculate the alignment's statistical and its logical features, i.e., its f-measure and its conservativity. On this basis, we build a novel multi-objective optimization model for the biomedical ontology matching problem. By analyzing the essence of this problem, we point out that it is a large-scale Multi-modal Multi-objective Optimization Problem (MMOP) with sparse Pareto optimal solutions. Then, we propose a problem-specific aMMOEA to solve this problem, which uses the Guiding Matrix (GM) to adaptively guide the algorithm's convergence and diversity in both objective and decision spaces. The experiment uses Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI)'s biomedical tracks to test aMMOEA's performance, and comparisons with two state-of-the-art MOEA-based matching techniques and OAEI's participants show that aMMOEA is able to effectively determine diverse solutions for decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the wide application of Location-Based Services (LBSs) in our daily life. Although users can enjoy many conveniences from the LBSs, they may lose their trajectory privacy when their location data are collected. Therefore, it is urgent to protect the user's trajectory privacy while providing high quality services. Trajectory k-anonymity is one of the most important technologies to protect the user's trajectory privacy. However, the user's attributes are rarely considered when constructing the k-anonymity set. It results in that the user's trajectories are especially vulnerable. To solve the problem, in this paper, a Spatiotemporal Mobility (SM) measurement is defined for calculating the relationship between the user's attributes and the anonymity set. Furthermore, a trajectory graph is designed to model the relationship between trajectories. Based on the user's attributes and the trajectory graph, the SM based trajectory privacy-preserving algorithm (MTPPA) is proposed. The optimal k-anonymity set is obtained by the simulated annealing algorithm. The experimental results show that the privacy disclosure probability of the anonymity set obtained by MTPPA is about 40% lower than those obtained by the existing algorithms while the same quality of services can be provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research presents an optimization problem associated with scheduling of unrelated parallel machines considering the simultaneous effects of start-time-related deterioration, position-related learning and sequence-related setup times, with the aim to achieve an optimized value for the mean weighted tardiness and power consumption minimization. A workaround is proposed and served as the converter for solving the Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problem by the continuous-based metaheuristic algorithms. Knowing the NP-hard nature of the problem, three metaheuristic algorithms, namely, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO) and Interactive Artificial Bee Colony (IABC), are employed to obtain quality solutions within acceptable computation time. A unique elitism strategy is introduced in the conventional CSO to reduce the computational time of its seeking mode and to provide improved solution, with the new algorithm form called CSO-Elit. Furthermore, a compact solution expression form is proposed for the use of GA, CSO-Elit and IABC to reduce the number of constraints. With the newly proposed model, many essential constraints are automatically built into the solution representation. Accordingly, the efficiency of algorithms is compared with LINGO regarding the quality of solutions, computational time, and overall power consumption using two sets of problems in small and large scales. In solving the small-scale cases, no statistically meaningful difference was observed between LINGO, GA and CSO-Elit, while in large-scale instances CSO-Elit demonstrated higher performance. The contributions of this paper lie in modeling a complex parallel machines problem considering power consumption minimization and proposing a new form of CSO algorithm with elitism strategy to reduce the computational time. • A novel problem has been identified and explored in this paper. • The model includes mathematical modeling and optimization of an unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem. • Several restrictions which are practical and industrially relevant are considered in this paper. • A new metaheuristic approach by adopting an elitism strategy into a metaheuristic algorithm is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the right accessories for installing the dental implant is a vital element that impacts the sustainability and the reliability of the dental prosthesis when the medical case of a patient is not comprehensive. Dentists need to identify the implant manufacturer from the x-ray image to determine further treatment procedures. Identifying the manufacturer is a high-pressure task under the scaling volume of patients pending in the queue for treatment. To reduce the burden on the doctors, a dental implant identification system is built based on a new proposed thinner VGG model with an on-demand client-server structure. We propose a thinner version of VGG16 called TVGG by reducing the number of neurons in the dense layers to improve the system's performance and gain advantages from the limited texture and patterns in the dental radiography images. The outcome of the proposed system is compared with the original pre-trained VGG16 to verify the usability of the proposed system., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Guo, Tsai, Xue, Wu, Van, Kaluarachchi, Dang and Chintha.)

Smart Environment (SE) focuses on the initiatives for healthy living, where ecological issues and biodiversity play a vital role in the environment and sustainability. To manage the knowledge on ecology and biodiversity and preserve the ecosystem and biodiversity simultaneously, it is necessary to align the data entities in different ecology and biodiversity ontologies. Since the problem of Ecology and Biodiversity Ontology Alignment (EBOA) is a large-scale optimization problem with sparse solutions, finding high-quality EBOA is an open challenge. Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) is a state-of-the-art technique in the ontology aligning domain, and this study further proposes an Adaptive Compact EA (ACEA) to address the problem of EBOA, which uses semantic reasoning to reduce searching space and adaptively guides searching direction to improve the algorithm's performance. In addition, we formally model the problem of EBOA as a discrete optimization problem, which maximizes the alignment's completeness and correctness through determining an optimal entity corresponding set. After that, a hybrid entity similarity measure is presented to distinguish the heterogeneous data entities, and an ACEA-based aligning technique is proposed. The experiment uses the famous Biodiversity and Ecology track to test ACEA's performance, and the experimental results show that ACEA-based aligning technique statistically outperforms other EA-based and state-of-the-art aligning techniques., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Xue and Tsai.)