Video Conferencing Technology for Distance Learning in Saudi Arabia: Current Problems, Feasible Solutions and Developing an Innovative Interactive Communication System based on Internet and wifi Technology for Communication Enhancement

Context: In Saudi Arabia, distance-learning plays a vital role in the female higher education system. This system is considered unique among all the world’s countries because, for religious reasons, intermixing of the genders is not allowed within most educational settings in Saudi society. This system is currently facing a problem with an overflow of female students in higher educational institutions as these institutions suffer from a lack of female faculty members. To resolve this problem, all universities in Saudi Arabia utilise synchronous distance learning technologies such as video and audio conferences technologies for the delivery of subjects by male faculty members to female students, as this is the only authorised way for male faculty to teach female students. Although this method has been used in Saudi Arabia continuously since 1970, no study has addressed the perceptions of female students, regarding the problems they face whilst studying, through such technologies or proposed any solution for these problems. Aim: The purpose of this study is to identify the perceptions of female students at King Saud University regarding the difficulties and barriers they encounter in the distance learning classrooms that use video conferencing technology. This study also proposes feasible solutions for the most common problems. It has developed an innovative interactive communication system, CommEasy, based on the internet and Wi-Fi technologies for handheld devices and uses this system to enhance communication and participation in distance learning. Method: The research questions are answered by applying a mixture of quantitative and qualitative approaches that have been selected according to the nature of the research. A case study research design was chosen to address all the research questions related to KSU. Identifying the perceptions of female students about the problems they encounter in distance learning classrooms was gathered through a questionnaire with five main parts: classroom physical design, classroom physical features, technical support, communication and participation with male instructors and classroom management. Each part used a number of questions to measure the students' perceptions and the students were asked to respond to each question using a five-point Likert scale. Proposing feasible solutions for the problems reported by students required using a mixture of methods, such as observations, structured interviews and surveys. An incremental software development approach was used to develop the CommEasy tool that was used in this thesis and the quasi-experimental method was used to evaluate this tool in the actual learning environment. Results: The results of the thesis presented the perceptions of students towards the components of the distance-learning classrooms and showed all the satisfactory and unsatisfactory components. It produced a list of strategies for effective designing of the distance-learning classroom that uses video conference technology, produced a new physical design for the distance-learning classrooms that used video conference technologies, provided a set of feasible solutions for the problems identified and finally, showed that the CommEasy system has a positive impact, in supporting communication in the distance-learning classroom, leading to an increased level of student participation with instructors, as well as solving most of the problems students were faced with in this regard. Conclusions: in summary, the outcome of this thesis should provide both researchers and decision makers with an insight into the problems facing students in distance-learning, as well as providing them with feasible solutions for these problems. This thesis will serve as a basis for further research in this field to be conducted in Saudi Arabia

Classification using semantic feature and machine learning: Land-use case application

Land cover classification has interested recent works especially for deforestation, urban are monitoring and agricultural land use. Traditional classification approaches have limited accuracy especially for non-heterogeneous land cover. Thus, using machine may improve the classification accuracy. The presented paper deals with the land-use scene recognition on very high-resolution remote sensing imagery. We proposed a new framework based on semantic features, handcrafted features and machine learning classifiers decisions. The method starts by semantic feature extraction using a convolutional neural network. Handcraft features are also extracted based on color and multi-resolution characteristics. Then, the classification stage is processed by three learning machine algorithms. The final classification result performed by majority vote algorithm. The idea behind is to take advantages from semantic features and handcrafted features. The second scope is to use the decision fusion to enhance the classification result. Experimentation results show that the proposed method provides good accuracy and trustable tool for land use image identification

Blind Wavelet-Based Image Watermarking

In this chapter, the watermarking technique is blind; blind watermarking does not need any of the original images or any information about it to recover watermark. In this technique the watermark is inserted into the high frequencies. Three-level wavelet transform is applied to the image, and the size of the watermark is equal to the size of the detailed sub-band. Significant coefficients are used to embed the watermark. The proposed technique depends on quantization. The proposed watermarking technique generates images with less degradation

A new feature extraction approach based on non linear source separation

A new feature extraction approach is proposed in this paper to improve the classification performance in remotely sensed data. The proposed method is based on a primary sources subset (PSS) obtained by nonlinear transform that provides lower space for land pattern recognition. First, the underlying sources are approximated using multilayer neural networks. Given that, Bayesian inferences update unknown sources’ knowledge and model parameters with information’s data. Then, a source dimension minimizing technique is adopted to provide more efficient land cover description. The support vector machine (SVM) scheme is developed by using feature extraction. The experimental results on real multispectral imagery demonstrates that the proposed approach ensures efficient feature extraction by using several descriptors for texture identification and multiscale analysis. In a pixel based approach, the reduced PSS space improved the overall classification accuracy by 13% and reaches 82%. Using texture and multi resolution descriptors, the overall accuracy is 75.87% for the original observations, while using the reduced source space the overall accuracy reaches 81.67% when using jointly wavelet and Gabor transform and 86.67% when using Gabor transform. Thus, the source space enhanced the feature extraction process and allow more land use discrimination than the multispectral observations

Deep Learning and Uniform LBP Histograms for Position Recognition of Elderly People with Privacy Preservation

For the elderly population, falls are a vital health problem especially in the current context of home care for COVID-19 patients. Given the saturation of health structures, patients are quarantined, in order to prevent the spread of the disease. Therefore, it is highly desirable to have a dedicated monitoring system to adequately improve their independent living and significantly reduce assistance costs. A fall event is considered as a specific and brutal change of pose. Thus, human poses should be first identified in order to detect abnormal events. Prompted by the great results achieved by the deep neural networks, we proposed a new architecture for image classification based on local binary pattern (LBP) histograms for feature extraction. These features were then saved, instead of saving the whole image in the series of identified poses. We aimed to preserve privacy, which is highly recommended in health informatics. The novelty of this study lies in the recognition of individuals’ positions in video images avoiding the convolution neural networks (CNNs) exorbitant computational cost and Minimizing the number of necessary inputs when learning a recognition model. The obtained numerical results of our approach application are very promising compared to the results of using other complex architectures like the deep CNNs

A Novel Optimization for GPU Mining Using Overclocking and Undervolting

Cryptography and associated technologies have existed for a long time. This field is advancing at a remarkable speed. Since the inception of its initial application, blockchain has come a long way. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency based on blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). The most well-known cryptocurrency for everyday use is Bitcoin, which debuted in 2008. Its success ushered in a digital revolution, and it currently provides security, decentralization, and a reliable data transport and storage mechanism to various industries and companies. Governments and developing enterprises seeking a competitive edge have expressed interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies due to the rapid growth of this recent technology. For computer experts and individuals looking for a method to supplement their income, cryptocurrency mining has become a big source of anxiety. Mining is a way of resolving mathematical problems based on the processing capacity and speed of the computers employed to solve them in return for the digital currency incentives. Herein, we have illustrated benefits of utilizing GPUs (graphical processing units) for cryptocurrency mining and compare two methods, namely overclocking and undervolting, which are the superior techniques when it comes to GPU optimization. The techniques we have used in this paper will not only help the miners to gain profits while mining cryptocurrency but also solve a major flaw; in order to mitigate the energy and resources that are consumed by the mining hardware, we have designed the mining hardware to simultaneously run longer and consume much less electricity. We have also compared our techniques with other popular techniques that are already in existence with respect to GPU mining.publishedVersio

Malware Detection in Internet of Things (IoT) Devices Using Deep Learning

Internet of Things (IoT) devices usage is increasing exponentially with the spread of the internet. With the increasing capacity of data on IoT devices, these devices are becoming venerable to malware attacks; therefore, malware detection becomes an important issue in IoT devices. An effective, reliable, and time-efficient mechanism is required for the identification of sophisticated malware. Researchers have proposed multiple methods for malware detection in recent years, however, accurate detection remains a challenge. We propose a deep learning-based ensemble classification method for the detection of malware in IoT devices. It uses a three steps approach; in the first step, data is preprocessed using scaling, normalization, and de-noising, whereas in the second step, features are selected and one hot encoding is applied followed by the ensemble classifier based on CNN and LSTM outputs for detection of malware. We have compared results with the state-of-the-art methods and our proposed method outperforms the existing methods on standard datasets with an average accuracy of 99.5%.publishedVersio

Effectively Predicting the Presence of Coronary Heart Disease Using Machine Learning Classifiers

Coronary heart disease is one of the major causes of deaths around the globe. Predicating a heart disease is one of the most challenging tasks in the field of clinical data analysis. Machine learning (ML) is useful in diagnostic assistance in terms of decision making and prediction on the basis of the data produced by healthcare sector globally. We have also perceived ML techniques employed in the medical field of disease prediction. In this regard, numerous research studies have been shown on heart disease prediction using an ML classifier. In this paper, we used eleven ML classifiers to identify key features, which improved the predictability of heart disease. To introduce the prediction model, various feature combinations and well-known classification algorithms were used. We achieved 95% accuracy with gradient boosted trees and multilayer perceptron in the heart disease prediction model. The Random Forest gives a better performance level in heart disease prediction, with an accuracy level of 96%.publishedVersio

Urban Crowd Detection Using SOM, DBSCAN and LBSN Data Entropy: A Twitter Experiment in New York and Madrid

The surfer and the physical location are two important concepts associated with each other in the social network-based localization service. This work consists of studying urban behavior based on location-based social networks (LBSN) data; we focus especially on the detection of abnormal events. The proposed crowd detection system uses the geolocated social network provided by the Twitter application programming interface (API) to automatically detect the abnormal events. The methodology we propose consists of using an unsupervised competitive learning algorithm (self-organizing map (SOM)) and a density-based clustering method (density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBCSAN)) to identify and detect crowds. The second stage is to build the entropy model to determine whether the detected crowds fit into the daily pattern with reference to a spatio-temporal entropy model, or whether they should be considered as evidence that something unusual occurs in the city because of their number, size, location and time of day. To detect an abnormal event in the city, it is sufficient to determine the real entropy model and to compare it with the reference model. For the normal day, the reference model is constructed offline for each time interval. The obtained results confirm the effectiveness of our method used in the first stage (SOM and DBSCAN stage) to detect and identify clusters dynamically, and imitating human activity. These findings also clearly confirm the detection of special days in New York City (NYC), which proves the performance of our proposed model

Deep-Learning-Based Feature Extraction Approach for Significant Wave Height Prediction in SAR Mode Altimeter Data

Predicting sea wave parameters such as significant wave height (SWH) has recently been identified as a critical requirement for maritime security and economy. Earth observation satellite missions have resulted in a massive rise in marine data volume and dimensionality. Deep learning technologies have proven their capabilities to process large amounts of data, draw useful insights, and assist in environmental decision making. In this study, a new deep-learning-based hybrid feature selection approach is proposed for SWH prediction using satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mode altimeter data. The introduced approach integrates the power of autoencoder deep neural networks in mapping input features into representative latent-space features with the feature selection power of the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm to create significant features from altimeter observations. Several hybrid feature sets were generated using the proposed approach and utilized for modeling SWH using Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and Neural Network Regression (NNR). SAR mode altimeter data from the Sentinel-3A mission calibrated by in situ buoy data was used for training and evaluating the SWH models. The significance of the autoencoder-based feature sets in improving the prediction performance of SWH models is investigated against original, traditionally selected, and hybrid features. The autoencoder–PCA hybrid feature set generated by the proposed approach recorded the lowest average RMSE values of 0.11069 for GPR models, which outperforms the state-of-the-art results. The findings of this study reveal the superiority of the autoencoder deep learning network in generating latent features that aid in improving the prediction performance of SWH models over traditional feature extraction methods