Predicting the usability of mobile applications using AI tools: The rise of large user interface models, opportunities, and challenges

This article proposes the so-called large user interface models (LUIMs) to enable the generation of user interfaces and prediction of usability using artificial intelligence in the context of mobile applications. To this end, we synergized an integrated framework for the effective testing of the usability of mobile applications following a selective review of the most influential models of mobile usability testing. Next, we identified and analysed 13 recent AI tools that generate user interfaces for mobile apps, and systematically tested these tools to identify their AI capabilities. Our striking findings demonstrate that current generative UI tools fail to address mobile usability attributes, such as efficiency, learnability, effectiveness, satisfaction, and memorability. Our large UI models' architecture proposes to leverage the capabilities of large language models, large vision models, and large code models to overcome the challenges of AI-driven UI/UX design and front-end implementations. This fascinating UI eco-system must be augmented with sufficient UI data and multi-sensory input regarding user behaviour to train the models. We anticipate LUIMs to create ample opportunities, like expedited frontend software development, enhanced personalised user experience, and wider accessibility of smart technologies. However, the research challenges hindering the UI generation and usability prediction of mobile apps include the seamless integration of complex generative AI models, semantic understanding of non-uniform visual designs, scarcity of UX datasets, and modelling of realistic user interactions.</p

Solid Waste Generation and Disposal Using Machine Learning Approaches: A Survey of Solutions and Challenges

We present a survey of machine learning works that attempt to organize the process flow of waste management in smart cities. Unlike past reviews, we focused on the waste generation and disposal phases in which citizens, households, and municipalities try to eliminate their solid waste by applying intelligent computational models. To this end, we synthesized and reviewed 42 articles published between 2010 and 2021. We retrieved the selected studies from six major academic research databases. Next, we deployed a comprehensive data extraction strategy focusing on the objectives of studies, trends of ML adoption, waste datasets, dependent and independent variables, and AI-ML-DL predictive models of waste generation. Our analysis revealed that most studies estimated waste material classification, amount of generated waste per area, and waste filling levels per location. Demographic data and images of waste type and fill levels are used as features to train the predictive models. Although various studies have widely deployed artificial neural networks (ANN) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify waste, other techniques, such as gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT), have also been utilized. Critical challenges hindering the prediction of solid waste generation and disposal include the scarcity of real-time time series waste datasets, the lack of performance benchmarking tests of the proposed models, the reliability of the analytics models, and the long-term forecasting of waste generation. Our survey concludes with the implications and limitations of the selected models to inspire further research efforts.</p