Outdoor node localization using random neural networks for large-scale urban IoT LoRa networks

Accurate localization for wireless sensor end devices is critical, particularly for Internet of Things (IoT) location-based applications such as remote healthcare, where there is a need for quick response to emergency or maintenance services. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are widely known for outdoor localization services; however, high-power consumption and hardware cost become a significant hindrance to dense wireless sensor networks in large-scale urban areas. Therefore, wireless technologies such as Long-Range Wide-Area Networks (LoRaWAN) are being investigated in different location-aware IoT applications due to having more advantages with low-cost, long-range, and low-power characteristics. Furthermore, various localization methods, including fingerprint localization techniques, are present in the literature but with different limitations. This study uses LoRaWAN Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) values to predict the unknown X and Y position coordinates on a publicly available LoRaWAN dataset for Antwerp in Belgium using Random Neural Networks (RNN). The proposed localization system achieves an improved high-level accuracy for outdoor dense urban areas and outperforms the present conventional LoRa-based localization systems in other work, with a minimum mean localization error of 0.29 m

Energy Disaggregation Using Elastic Matching Algorithms

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)In this article an energy disaggregation architecture using elastic matching algorithms is presented. The architecture uses a database of reference energy consumption signatures and compares them with incoming energy consumption frames using template matching. In contrast to machine learning-based approaches which require significant amount of data to train a model, elastic matching-based approaches do not have a model training process but perform recognition using template matching. Five different elastic matching algorithms were evaluated across different datasets and the experimental results showed that the minimum variance matching algorithm outperforms all other evaluated matching algorithms. The best performing minimum variance matching algorithm improved the energy disaggregation accuracy by 2.7% when compared to the baseline dynamic time warping algorithm.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Teacher Perceptions on Virtual Reality Escape Rooms for STEM Education

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is a meta-discipline employing active, problem-centric approaches such as game-based learning. STEM competencies are an essential part of the educational response to the transformations caused by the fourth industrial revolution, spearheaded by the convergence of multiple exponential technologies. Teachers' attitude is a critical success factor for any technology-enhanced learning innovation. This study explored in-service teachers' views on the use of a digital educational escape room in virtual reality. Forty-one (n = 41) K-12 educators participated in a mixed research study involving a validated survey questionnaire instrument and an online debriefing session in the context of a teacher training program. The key findings revealed that such alternative instructional solutions can potentially enhance the cognitive benefits and learning outcomes, but further highlighted the shortcomings that instructional designers should consider while integrating them in contexts different than the intended. In line with this effort, more systematic professional development actions are recommended to encourage the development of additional teacher-led interventions

Sentiment Analysis of Teachers Using Social Information in Educational Platform Environments

© 2020 World Scientific Publishing Company. Electronic version of an article published as International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Vol. 29, No. 02, 2040004 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218213020400047.Learners’ opinions constitute an important source of information that can be useful to teachers and educational instructors in order to improve learning procedures and training activities. By analyzing learners’ actions and extracting data related to their learning behavior, educators can specify proper learning approaches to stimulate learners’ interest and contribute to constructive monitoring of learning progress during the course or to improve future courses. Learners-generated content and their feedback and comments can provide indicative information about the educational procedures that they attended and the training activities that they participated in. Educational systems must possess mechanisms to analyze learners’ comments and automatically specify their opinions and attitude towards the courses and the learning activities that are offered to them. This paper describes a Greek language sentiment analysis system that analyzes texts written in Greek language and generates feature vectors which together with classification algorithms give us the opportunity to classify Greek texts based on the personal opinion and the degree of satisfaction expressed. The sentiment analysis module has been integrated into the hybrid educational systems of the Greek school network that offers life-long learning courses. The module offers a wide range of possibilities to lecturers, policymakers and educational institutes that participate in the training procedure and offers life-long learning courses, to understand how their learners perceive learning activities and specify what aspects of the learning activities they liked and disliked. The experimental study show quite interesting results regarding the performance of the sentiment analysis methodology and the specification of users’ opinions and satisfaction. The feature analysis demonstrates interesting findings regarding the characteristics that provide indicative information for opinion analysis and embeddings combined with deep learning approaches yield satisfactory results.Peer reviewe

A smartwater metering deployment based on the fog computing paradigm

In this paper, we look into smart water metering infrastructures that enable continuous, on-demand and bidirectional data exchange between metering devices, water flow equipment, utilities and end-users. We focus on the design, development and deployment of such infrastructures as part of larger, smart city, infrastructures. Until now, such critical smart city infrastructures have been developed following a cloud-centric paradigm where all the data are collected and processed centrally using cloud services to create real business value. Cloud-centric approaches need to address several performance issues at all levels of the network, as massive metering datasets are transferred to distant machine clouds while respecting issues like security and data privacy. Our solution uses the fog computing paradigm to provide a system where the computational resources already available throughout the network infrastructure are utilized to facilitate greatly the analysis of fine-grained water consumption data collected by the smart meters, thus significantly reducing the overall load to network and cloud resources. Details of the system's design are presented along with a pilot deployment in a real-world environment. The performance of the system is evaluated in terms of network utilization and computational performance. Our findings indicate that the fog computing paradigm can be applied to a smart grid deployment to reduce effectively the data volume exchanged between the different layers of the architecture and provide better overall computational, security and privacy capabilities to the system

PyDTS: A Python Toolkit for Deep Learning Time Series Modelling

© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Abstract In this article, the topic of time series modelling is discussed. It highlights the criticality of analysing and forecasting time series data across various sectors, identifying five primary application areas: denoising, forecasting, nonlinear transient modelling, anomaly detection, and degradation modelling. It further outlines the mathematical frameworks employed in a time series modelling task, categorizing them into statistical, linear algebra, and machine- or deep-learning-based approaches, with each category serving distinct dimensions and complexities of time series problems. Additionally, the article reviews the extensive literature on time series modelling, covering statistical processes, state space representations, and machine and deep learning applications in various fields. The unique contribution of this work lies in its presentation of a Python-based toolkit for time series modelling (PyDTS) that integrates popular methodologies and offers practical examples and benchmarking across diverse datasets.Peer reviewe

Cognitive IoT-based e-Learning System : enabling context-aware remote schooling during the pandemic

Abstract: (e 2019–2020 coronavirus pandemic had far-reaching consequences beyond the spread of the disease and efforts to cure it. Today, it is obvious that the pandemic devastated key sectors ranging from health to economy, culture, and education. As far as education is concerned, one direct result of the spread of the pandemic was the resort to suspending traditional in-person classroom courses and relying on remote learning and homeschooling instead, by exploiting e-learning technologies, but many challenges are faced by these technologies. Most of these challenges are centered around the efficiency of these delivery methods, interactivity, and knowledge testing. (ese issues raise the need to develop an advanced smart educational system that assists home-schooled students, provides teachers with a range of smart new tools, and enable a dynamic and interactive e-learning experience. Technologies like the Internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), including cognitive models and contextawareness, can be a driving force in the future of e-learning, opening many opportunities to overcome the limitation of the existing remote learning systems and provide an efficient reliable augmented learning experience. Furthermore, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), introduced in education as a way for asynchronous learning, can be a second driving force of future synchronous learning. (e teacher and students can see each other in a virtual class even if they are geographically spread in a city, a country, or the globe. (e main goal of this work is to design and provide a model supporting intelligent teaching assisting and engaging e-learning activity. (is paper presents a new model, ViRICTA, an intelligent system, proposing an end-to-end solution with a stack technology integrating the Internet of things and artificial intelligence. (e designed system aims to enable a valuable learning experience, providing an efficient, interactive, and proactive context-aware learning smart services

Cognitive IoT-Based e-Learning System: Enabling Context-Aware Remote Schooling during the Pandemic

Abstract: Please refer to full text to view abstrac