Search

The sugar apple (Annona squamosa) is valued for its taste, nutritional richness, and versatility, making it suitable for fresh consumption and medicinal use with significant commercial potential. Widely found in the tropical Americas and Asia's tropical or subtropical regions, it faces challenges in post-harvest ripeness assessment, predominantly reliant on manual inspection, leading to inefficiency and high labor costs. This paper explores the application of computer vision techniques in detecting ripeness levels of harvested sugar apples and proposes an improved deep learning model (ECD-DeepLabv3+) specifically designed for ripeness detection tasks. Firstly, the proposed model adopts a lightweight backbone (MobileNetV2), reducing complexity while maintaining performance through MobileNetV2′s unique design. Secondly, it incorporates the efficient channel attention (ECA) module to enhance focus on the input image and capture crucial feature information. Additionally, a Dense ASPP module is introduced, which enhances the model's perceptual ability and expands the receptive field by stacking feature maps processed with different dilation rates. Lastly, the proposed model emphasizes the spatial information of sugar apples at different ripeness levels by the coordinate attention (CA) module. Model performance is validated using a self-made dataset of harvested optical images categorized into three ripeness levels. The proposed model (ECD-DeepLabv3+) achieves values of 89.95% for MIoU, 94.58% for MPA, 96.60% for PA, and 94.61% for MF1, respectively. Compared to the original DeepLabv3+, it greatly reduces the number of model parameters (Params) and floating-point operations (Flops) by 89.20% and 69.09%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method could be directly applied to optical images obtained from the surface of the sugar apple, which provides a potential solution for the detection of post-harvest fruit ripeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to achieve bedrock geologic mapping in the overburden area using big data, distributed computing, and deep learning techniques. First, the satellite Bouguer gravity anomaly with a resolution of 2'x2' in the range of E66°E96°, N40°-N55° and 1:5000000 Asia-European geological map are used to design a dataset for bedrock prediction. Then, starting from the gravity anomaly formula in the spherical coordinate system, we deduce the non-linear functional between rock density ρ and rock mineral composition m, content p, buried depth h, diagenesis time t and other variables. We analyze the feasibility of using deep neural network to approximate the above nonlinear generalization. The problem of solving deep neural network parameters is transformed into a non-convex optimization problem. We give an iterative, gradient descentbased solution algorithm for the non-convex optimization problem. Utilizing neural architecture search (NAS) and human-designed approach, we propose a geological-geophysical mapping network (GGMNet). The dataset for the network consists of both gravity anomaly and a priori geological information. The network has fast convergence speed and stable iteration during the training process. It also has better performance than a single neural network search or human-designed architectures, with the mean pixel accuracy (MAP) = 63.1% and the frequency weighted intersection over union (FWIoU) = 42.88. Finally, the GGMNet is used to predict the rock distribution of the Junggar Basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addressing the generalization issue faced by data-driven methods in food origin traceability, especially when encountering diverse input variable sets, such as elemental contents (C, N, S), stable isotopes (C, N, S, H and O) and 43 elements measured under varying laboratory conditions. We introduce an innovative, versatile deep learning-based framework incorporating explainable analysis, adept at determining feature importance through learned neuron weights. Our proposed framework, validated using three rice sample batches from four Asian countries, totaling 354 instances, exhibited exceptional identification accuracy of up to 97%, surpassing traditional reference methods like decision tree and support vector machine. The adaptable methodological system accommodates various combinations of traceability indicators, facilitating seamless replication and extensive applicability. This groundbreaking solution effectively tackles generalization challenges arising from disparate variable sets across distinct data batches, paving the way for enhanced food origin traceability in real-world applications., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Worldwide websites publish enormous amounts of text, audio, and video content every day. This valuable information allows for the assessment of regional trends and general public opinion. Based on consumers' online behavioural habits, businesses are showing them their chosen ads. It is difficult to carefully analyse these raw data to find valuable trends, especially for a language with limited resources like Urdu. There have not been many studies or efforts to create language resources for the Urdu language and analyse people's sentiment, even though there are more than 169 million Urdu speakers in the world and a sizable amount of Urdu data is generated on various social media platforms every day. However, there has been relatively little research on sentiment analysis in Urdu. Researchers have primarily performed studies in English and Chinese. In response to this gap, we suggest an emotion analyser for Urdu, the primary language of Asia, in this research study. In this paper, we propose to assess sentiment in Urdu review texts by integrating a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model with a convolutional neural network (CNN). We contrast the CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, and CNN-LSTM models with the CNN-BiLSTM model. With an accuracy rate of 0.99 %, the CNN-BiLSTM model performed better than the other models in an initial investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, several mutations have occurred in the genetic sequence of the virus, resulting in emerging different variants of concern. These variants vary in transmissibility, severity of infections, and mortality rate. Designing models that are capable of predicting the future behavior of these variants in the societies can help decision makers and the healthcare system to design efficient health policies, and to be prepared with the sufficient medical devices and an adequate number of personnel to fight against this virus and the similar ones. Among variants of COVID-19, Alpha and Delta variants differ noticeably in the virus structures. In this paper, we study these variants in the geographical regions with different size, population densities, and social life styles. These regions include the country of Iran, the continent of Asia, and the whole world. We propose four deep learning models based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and examine their predictive power in forecasting the number of infections and deaths for the next three, next five, and next seven days in each variant. These models include Encoder Decoder LSTM (ED-LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), Convolutional LSTM (Conv-LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Performance of these models in predictions are evaluated using the root mean square error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percentage error. Then, the Friedman test is applied to find the leading model for predictions in all conditions. The results show that ED-LSTM is generally the leading model for predicting the number of infections and deaths for both variants of Alpha and Delta, with the ability to forecast long time intervals ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explored the potential of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted learning using ChatGPT in an engineering course at a university in South-east Asia. The study investigated the benefits and challenges that students may encounter when utilising ChatGPT-3.5 as a learning tool. This research developed an AI-assisted learning flow that empowers learners and lecturers to integrate ChatGPT into their teaching and learning processes. The flow was subsequently used to validate and assess a variety of exercises, tutorial tasks and assessment-like questions for the course under study. Introducing a self-rating system allowed the study to facilitate users in assessing the generative responses. The findings indicate that ChatGPT has significant potential to assist students; however, there is a necessity for training and offering guidance to students on effective interactions with ChatGPT. The study contributes to the evidence of the potential of AI-assisted learning and identifies areas for future research in refining the use of AI tools to better support students' educational journey. Implications for practice or policy • Educators and administrators could review the usage of ChatGPT in an engineering technology course and study the implications of generative AI tools in higher education. • Academics could adapt and modify the proposed AI-assisted learning flow in this paper to suit their classroom. • Students can review and adopt the proposed AI-assisted learning flow in this paper for their studies. • Researchers could follow up on the application of ChatGPT in teaching and learning: teaching quality and student experience, academic integrity and assessment design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper enters the ongoing volatility forecasting debate by examining the ability of a wide range of Machine Learning methods (ML), and specifically Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models. The ANN models are compared against traditional econometric models for ten Asian markets using daily data for the time period from 12 September 1994 to 05 March 2018. The empirical results indicate that ML algorithms, across the range of countries, can better approximate dependencies compared to traditional benchmark models. Notably, the predictive performance of such deep learning models is superior perhaps due to its ability in capturing long-range dependencies. For example, the Neuro Fuzzy models of ANFIS and CANFIS, which outperform the EGARCH model, are more flexible in modelling both asymmetry and long memory properties. This offers new insights for Asian markets. In addition to standard statistics forecast metrics, we also consider risk management measures including the value-at-risk (VaR) average failure rate, the Kupiec LR test, the Christoffersen independence test, the expected shortfall (ES) and the dynamic quantile test. The study concludes that ML algorithms provide improving volatility forecasts in the stock markets of Asia and suggest that this may be a fruitful approach for risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most common histological types of esophageal cancers. It can seriously affect public health, particularly in Eastern Asia. Early diagnosis and effective therapy of ESCC can significantly help improve patient prognoses. The visualization of intrapapillary capillary loops (IPCLs) under magnification endoscopy (ME) can greatly support the identification of ESCC occurrences by endoscopists. This paper proposes an artificial-intelligence-assisted endoscopic diagnosis approach using deep learning for localizing and identifying IPCLs to diagnose early-stage ESCC. An improved Faster region-based convolutional network (R-CNN) with a polarized self-attention (PSA)-HRNetV2p backbone was employed to automatically detect IPCLs in ME images. In our study, 2887 ME with blue laser imaging (ME-BLI) images of 246 patients and 493 ME with narrow-band imaging (ME-NBI) images of 81 patients were collected from multiple hospitals and used to train and test our detection model. The ME-NBI images were used as the external testing set to verify the generalizability of the model. The experimental evaluation revealed that the proposed method achieved a recall of 79.25%, precision of 75.54%, F1-score of 0.764 and mean average precision (mAP) of 74.95%. Our method outperformed other existing approaches in our evaluation. It can effectively improve the accuracy of ESCC detection and provide a useful adjunct to the assessment of early-stage ESCC for endoscopists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem definition: Restaurant review platforms, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, routinely receive large numbers of photos in their review submissions. These photos provide significant value for users who seek to compare restaurants. In this context, the choice of cover images (i.e., representative photos of the restaurants) can greatly influence the level of user engagement on the platform. Unfortunately, selecting these images can be time consuming and often requires human intervention. At the same time, it is challenging to develop a systematic approach to assess the effectiveness of the selected images. Methodology/results: In this paper, we collaborate with a large review platform in Asia to investigate this problem. We discuss two image selection approaches, namely crowd-based and artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems. The AI-based system we use learns complex latent image features, which are further enhanced by transfer learning to overcome the scarcity of labeled data. We collaborate with the platform to deploy our AI-based system through a randomized field experiment to carefully compare both systems. We find that the AI-based system outperforms the crowd-based counterpart and boosts user engagement by 12.43%–16.05% on average. We then conduct empirical analyses on observational data to identify the underlying mechanisms that drive the superior performance of the AI-based system. Managerial implications: Finally, we infer from our findings that the AI-based system outperforms the crowd-based system for restaurants with (i) a longer tenure on the platform, (ii) a limited number of user-generated photos, (iii) a lower star rating, and (iv) lower user engagement during the crowd-based system. Funding: The authors acknowledge financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [Grant 430-2020-00106]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2021.0531. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advancements in AI, driven by big data technologies, have reshaped various industries, with a strong focus on data-driven approaches. This has resulted in remarkable progress in fields like computer vision, e-commerce, cybersecurity, and healthcare, primarily fueled by the integration of machine learning and deep learning models. Notably, the intersection of oncology and computer science has given rise to Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems, offering vital tools to aid medical professionals in tumor detection, classification, recurrence tracking, and prognosis prediction. Breast cancer, a significant global health concern, is particularly prevalent in Asia due to diverse factors like lifestyle, genetics, environmental exposures, and healthcare accessibility. Early detection through mammography screening is critical, but the accuracy of mammograms can vary due to factors like breast composition and tumor characteristics, leading to potential misdiagnoses. To address this, an innovative CAD system leveraging deep learning and computer vision techniques was introduced. This system enhances breast cancer diagnosis by independently identifying and categorizing breast lesions, segmenting mass lesions, and classifying them based on pathology. Thorough validation using the Curated Breast Imaging Subset of Digital Database for Screening Mammography (CBIS-DDSM) demonstrated the CAD system's exceptional performance, with a 99% success rate in detecting and classifying breast masses. While the accuracy of detection is 98.5%, when segmenting breast masses into separate groups for examination, the method's performance was approximately 95.39%. Upon completing all the analysis, the system's classification phase yielded an overall accuracy of 99.16% for classification. The potential for this integrated framework to outperform current deep learning techniques is proposed, despite potential challenges related to the high number of trainable parameters. Ultimately, this recommended framework offers valuable support to researchers and physicians in breast cancer diagnosis by harnessing cutting-edge AI and image processing technologies, extending recent advances in deep learning to the medical domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of uninterpreted ancient documents exist in Asia, which record a large amount of information about the politics, economy, and culture. Since the beginning of oracle bone inscription, characters have been developing and evolving, and the forms of ancient documents have also been changing. As a large amount of information is preserved in ancient documents, the interpretation and collation of ancient documents are of great importance. However, due to the age, many ancient documents are moth-eaten, stained, damaged, and other problems. And most ancient documents are written in a style that is no longer in use, leaving few experts able to interpret them. This paper from oracle bone inscription, ancient hand-written character, rubbings three diferent types of ancient documents, introduces the recognition technology of assisted ancient documents re-organization including image processing, deep learning, and data analysis and deep learning combined method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a data-driven approach, the performance of deep learning models depends largely on the quantity and quality of the training data sets, which greatly limits the application of deep learning to tasks with small data sets. Unfortunately, sometimes we need to use limited small data sets to complete our tasks, such as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data denoising. However, using a small data set to train the network may cause overfitting, resulting in poor network generalization. To solve this problem, we propose an approach based on the combination of a generative adversarial network and a deep convolutional neural network. First, we used a small noise data set to train a generative adversarial network to generate synthetic noise samples, and then used these synthetic noise samples to augment the noise data set. Next, we used the augmented noise data set and the signal data set obtained through forward modelling to construct a synthetic training set. Finally, a denoising network based on a convolutional neural network was trained on the constructed synthetic training set. Experimental results show that the augmented data set can effectively improve the denoising performance and generalization ability of the network, and the denoising network trained on the augmented data set can more effectively reduce various kinds of noise in the DAS data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Accurate diagnosis and early treatment are essential in the fight against lymphatic cancer. The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of medical imaging shows great potential, but the diagnostic accuracy of lymphoma is unclear. This study was done to systematically review and meta-analyse researches concerning the diagnostic performance of AI in detecting lymphoma using medical imaging for the first time. Methods: Searches were conducted in Medline, Embase, IEEE and Cochrane up to December 2023. Data extraction and assessment of the included study quality were independently conducted by two investigators. Studies that reported the diagnostic performance of an AI model/s for the early detection of lymphoma using medical imaging were included in the systemic review. We extracted the binary diagnostic accuracy data to obtain the outcomes of interest: sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), and Area Under the Curve (AUC). The study was registered with the PROSPERO, CRD42022383386. Results: Thirty studies were included in the systematic review, sixteen of which were meta-analyzed with a pooled sensitivity of 87% (95%CI 83–91%), specificity of 94% (92–96%), and AUC of 97% (95–98%). Satisfactory diagnostic performance was observed in subgroup analyses based on algorithms types (machine learning versus deep learning, and whether transfer learning was applied), sample size (≤ 200 or > 200), clinicians versus AI models and geographical distribution of institutions (Asia versus non-Asia). Conclusions: Even if possible overestimation and further studies with a better standards for application of AI algorithms in lymphoma detection are needed, we suggest the AI may be useful in lymphoma diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the lakes located in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are important carriers of water resources in Asia, dynamic changes to these lakes intuitively reflect the climate and water resource variations of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. To address the insufficient performance of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in learning the spatial relationship between long-distance continuous pixels, this study proposes a water recognition model for lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau based on U-Net and ViTenc-UNet. This method uses Vision Transformer (ViT) to replace the continuous Convolutional Neural Network layer in the encoder of the U-Net model, which can more accurately identify and extract the continuous spatial relationship of lake water bodies. A Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) mechanism was added to the decoder of the model enabling the spatial information and spectral information characteristics of the water bodies to be more completely preserved. The experimental results show that the ViTenc-UNet model can complete the task of lake water recognition on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau more efficiently, and the Overall Accuracy, Intersection over Union, Recall, Precision, and F1 score of the classification results for lake water bodies reached 99.04%, 98.68%, 99.08%, 98.59%, and 98.75%, which were, respectively, 4.16%, 6.20% 5.34%, 4.80%, and 5.34% higher than the original U-Net model. Compared to FCN, the DeepLabv3+, TransUNet, and Swin-Unet models also have different degrees of advantages. This model innovatively introduces ViT and CBAM into the water extraction task of lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, showing excellent water classification performance of these lake bodies. This method has certain classification advantages and will provide an important scientific reference for the accurate real-time monitoring of important water resources on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rice is a plant with rounded hollow articulated culms, flat, well-attached leaf blades, and terminal spikes. Its cultivation and consumption shape the culture, diet, and economy of different groups, especially in Asia. However, farmers suffer great financial losses each year due to rice disease. Therefore, the identification and classification of rice diseases are very important. Prompt, timely, and accurate disease diagnosis prevents product loss and improves crop quality. This study focuses on the classification of whether rice paddy leaf is normal or has a disease (one of the following: bacterial leaf blight (BLB), bacterial leaf streaks (BLS), bacterial panicle blight (BPB): heart, downy mildew, hispa, and rice tungro disease (RTD)) using deep learning-based algorithms such as EfficientNet-b0, MobileNet-v2, and Places365-GoogLeNet. The best model for this simulation was found to be EfficientNet-b0 with an average accuracy of 97.74%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quasi-periodic signals in the earth system could be the predictability source for sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) climate prediction because of the connections among the lead-lag time of those signals. The Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a typical quasi-periodic signal, which is the dominant S2S variability in the tropics. Besides, significantly periodic features in terms of both intensity and location are identified in 10–40 days for the concurrent variation of the subtropical and polar jet streams over Asia in this study. So far, those signals contribute less and are not fully applied to the S2S prediction. The deep learning (DL) approach, especially the long-short term memory (LSTM) networks, has the ability to take advantage of the information at the previous time to improve the prediction after then. This study presents the application of the DL in the postprocessing of S2S prediction using quasi-periodic signals predicted by the operational model to improve the prediction of minimum 2-m air temperature over Asia. With the help of deep learning, it finds the best weights for the ensemble predictions, and the quasi-periodic signals in the atmosphere can further benefit the S2S operational prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast cancer develops when cells in the breast expand and divide uncontrollably, resulting in a lump of tissue known as a tumor. This lump of tissue is called a tumor. After skin cancer, breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women. It is more common in women over the age of 50. Men may also acquire breast cancer, albeit it is uncommon. Each year, approximately 2,600 men in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer, accounting for less than 1% of all cases. Transgender women are more likely than cisgender men to acquire breast cancer. Additionally, transgender males are less likely than cisgender women to acquire breast cancer. Breast cancer is more common in women over the age of 50, although it can affect anyone at any age. Early detection of a breast tumor may significantly lower the risk of developing breast cancer. A public dataset of breast tumor features was used instead to build models for identifying breast tumors through machine learning and deep learning. Prediction models were built using logistic regression (LR), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), voting classifier (VC), support vector machine (SVM), and a proprietary convolutional neural network (CNN). These models were used to find critical prognostic indicators linked to breast cancer. The proposed network performs far better, with an average accuracy of 99%. This study has six types of models: LR, RF, SVM, VC, DT, and a custom CNN model. They all had 96% to 99% accuracy in this study. CNN, LR, RF, SVM, VC, and DT achieved 99%, 96%, 98%, 97%, 97%, and 96% F1 score, respectively. There were many machine learning algorithms used in this study that were very accurate, which means that these techniques could be used as alternative prognostic tools in breast tumor detection studies in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing land-use following deforestation is vital for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. In this paper, for the first time, we assess the potential of spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal deep learning methods for large-scale classification of land-use following tropical deforestation using dense satellite time series over six years on the pan-tropical scale (incl. Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Based on an extensive reference database of six forest to land-use conversion types, we find that the spatio-temporal models achieved a substantially higher F1-score accuracies than models that account only for spatial or temporal patterns. Although all models performed better when the scope of the problem was limited to a single continent, the spatial models were more competitive than the temporal ones in this setting. These results suggest that the spatial patterns of land-use within a continent share more commonalities than the temporal patterns and the spatial patterns across continents. This work explores the feasibility of extending and complementing previous efforts for characterizing follow-up land-use after deforestation at a small-scale via human visual interpretation of high resolution RGB imagery. It supports the usage of fast and automated large-scale land-use classification and showcases the value of deep learning methods combined with spatio-temporal satellite data to effectively address the complex tasks of identifying land-use following deforestation in a scalable and cost effective manner. • We classify land-use following deforestation at continental and pan-tropical scales. • Using reference data we test six different spatio-temporal deep learning methods. • Continental models performed better compared to the pan-tropical model. • Pan-tropical spatio-temporal models performed better than spatial or temporal ones • Our results suggest higher spatial than temporal homogeneity at the continental level [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between outward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the performance of Chinese enterprises. Using firm‐level panel data over the period 2008–2014, we introduce a taxonomy of outward FDI that accounts for the decision to invest abroad and the location of foreign affiliates. Through different specifications, we show systematic differences in performance between FDI starters and non‐starters two years before and two years after the first investment by the starters. This fact points to the existence of strong ex‐ante and ex‐post effects of Chinese outward FDI. On one hand, we provide evidence – so far not present in the literature – that the best performing Chinese firms self‐select into outward FDI. On the other hand, controlling for endogeneity through propensity score matching (PSM) techniques, we detect significant learning effects from outward FDI to firm‐level performance. Interestingly, these effects are heterogeneous with respect to destination, with deeper learning for Chinese enterprises investing in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]